The Life And Deaths Of Christopher Lee

Final Curtains

The Life And Deaths
Of Christopher Lee
Directed by Jon Spira
UK 2024
Canal Cat Films
UK Premiere FrightFest 2024 screening

I’ve been following Jon Spira on Twitter for well over a decade... I even made a small contribution to some of his crowd funded books (which I promise I will get around to reading) but I never watched any of his films until now. I figured, if I didn’t like them and posted a review, he’d probably hate me.

That being said, it’s almost a time honoured tradition for me and my friend to attend a FrightFest screening which is a documentary about something which may be considered to be connected to Hammer horror films and so, The Life And Deaths Of Christopher Lee seemed to fit the bill. I somewhat reluctantly bought tickets and... well... I have to say I was quite pleasantly surprised in that this is easily one of the best documentary films I’ve seen in many a year (possibly the best and certainly the best I’ve seen at FrightFest).

Why? Well because it’s so well written and moves along at a fair lick. And my one small criticism, which I’ll get to in a while, is absolutely no fault of the film makers at all. That’s my personal baggage. Let me set the scene for why this documentary is so well put together by describing the opening minutes...

The animated opening credits show a wonderful cartoon, as they roll, of Sir Christopher Lee walking on from each side of the screen and being killed in some manner... arrow shot, cannon, bomb etc. All the while, just off to the left of shot, nicely lit and silhouetted so you can’t yet see it properly, is a figurine which I at first thought was one of those horrible bobble heads, of Christopher Lee. And then, on the right we see actor Peter Serafinowicz practicing his impression of the voice of Lee. And then the light comes up and we see it’s a pretty great looking marionette puppet of Christopher Lee, who then proceeds to narrate the whole story of his life. It’s ingenious and works really well.

One of the talking head interviewees of the film is, of course, the great horror scholar and sometimes actor Jonathan Rigby (who I’ve mentioned on this blog numerous times) and he knew Lee quite well. So he was, according to the director in his Q & A session at the end of the movie, on hand to help vet Spira's script and ensure that things Lee wouldn’t say or which were tonally off for the actor were not included in the running narrative and, yeah, there’s nobody I could think of who would be better suited to know about such things.

The film takes us quickly through Lee’s long family lineage and speeds us to his school days, his life in the airforce... with brief mention of his stint as a nazi hunter, I’ll get to that... and onto his choice and easyish access into the world of acting. It, of course, tells of his later distaste of being associated with such things as Dracula and talks also about many of his films, including obvious ones like The Wicker Man (Lee’s favourite performance, I believe) and The Man With The Golden Gun, playing one of his cousin Ian Fleming’s characters on the big screen. It even mentions the colossal flop that was Spielberg’s 1941.

The film also takes you through his triumph of singing heavy metal concept albums and, in some very nice clips, his friendship with Peter Cushing. And it’s all assisted with some wonderful interviewees, such as the aforementioned Rigby and people such as Caroline Munro, Joe Dante, Peter Jackson and, in a very funny turn, John Landis. Not to mention a few revealing clips of the man himself and various animated segments in different styles by different artists (including Dave McKean).

And I can’t say enough good things about this. I can only hope this gets a Blu Ray release at some point soon... this is a must have purchase for me but I’m not doing that horrible streaming stuff. And my one, very small, problem with it (other than the fact that I could easily have watched another hour) is that it doesn’t reveal any details about Lee’s days as a nazi hunter during (and I think also after) the Second World War. But, it turns out that this is because, since it was confidential information, Lee would never talk about what went on to anybody. In fact, John Landis tells a very funny story (among many) about his attempts to get the information out of Lee whenever he saw him.

So, yeah, a shame it’s not there but the information is not up for grabs and the way Spira and crew handle the lack of data here is, at least, brilliantly done and shot through with humour (like the rest of the documentary). So, yeah, I had an absolutely marvellous time with his new film The Life And Deaths Of Christopher Lee and would urge all fans of the great man to see this one as soon as possible. A fitting tribute and one, I hope, he would have approved of.

Boutique - To Preserve And Collect

Label Legacy

Boutique -
To Preserve And Collect
Directed by Ryan Bruce Levey
USA/Canada 2024
Orama Filmworks
World Premiere FrightFest 2024 screening

I’ve never really understood the collector mentality myself but, I do buy an awful lot of Blu Rays (enough to keep me busy well into retirement before I get a chance to watch them) from various US Boutique labels (and more than a few of our own, home grown boutique labels here in the UK too), so it was a no brainer for me to make this movie the third of my four choices at this year’s FrightFest.

Boutique - To Preserve And Collect starts off with a look at the birth of the home video boom of the 1980s (although, curiously, the earlier bootlace cinema boom is not covered in this documentary) and how things developed over time with a special emphasis on the preservation of film. So we have stalwarts of the industry such as Severin Films co-founder David Gregory and Vinegar Syndrome co-founder Joe Rubin alongside many of their contemporaries, talking about how they started (there’s even an appearance from the great Kier-La Janisse and people like Samm Deighan).

Often this involves booting and then selling VHS cassettes to their friends for cash including the age old misdemeanour of filming cinema screenings and then putting them on tape. It was almost heart warming to hear one of the many talking heads in this picture explaining that the early films you purchased might have people standing up in front of the screen and walking across the picture... something that I remember happening more than a few times on the odd pirate copy during the 1980s and, actually, something I’ve seen happen when certain cinema films on ‘certain internet channels’ have somehow not managed to get their own HD transfer of a modern film (yeah, I know it’s charming but, I don’t watch pirates unless they’re full HD these days... I’m obviously a snob in this regard).

And, of course, the irony is not lost that a lot of these people who started off this way are now saving the films and preserving them for future generations... in admittedly high priced Blu Ray editions but, that’s the way it is and, when you think about the amount of work which goes into finding, scanning and restoring these lost treasures (some of which, it’s very clear, would not have been expected to have been brought back from the dead) well... maybe those are not such high price tags after all. When the director went on stage for the Q and A at this premiere screening, he was very respectful of the customers who buy these things, I think... making the point that without the likes of people like me and our willingness to buy and explore films we’ve never heard of before, then the funding to rescue these disappearing treasures would not be there.

A couple of criticisms because, as you know, even with a great movie like this, I like to throw in a few things. So number one, the music is almost constant. It’s obviously needle dropped from a music library (I believe) and it does play over a lot of the talking heads. Sometimes this works okay but, on occasion it’s maybe just a little distracting and mixed just a little too high (remember, bass notes and percussion can sometimes be overwhelming at the wrong levels) but, to be fair, the director did mention it was a little ‘hot’ in some places and that he was going to fix it.

My only other criticism is that this was not quite, yet, the documentary I would personally have wanted. It would have been nice to see a project such as The Sensual World Of Black Emanuelle or All The Haunts Be Ours followed and taken through from initial meetings, tracking down scannable prints, combining different sources and scanning etc through to the finished product. That being said, though, this documentary does nod to those projects and there’s enough here to make it an important talking point... especially when it comes to the rescue and restoration of films which the likes of Criterion and Scorcese, perhaps, would not consider trying to rescue alongside the other great work they are already doing themselves in the world of film preservation.

So, yeah, Ryan Bruce Levey’s documentary Boutique - To Preserve And Collect is definitely one for the fans of those wonderful Blu Ray releases from the likes of Severin, Vinegar Syndrome, Altered Innocence, Criterion, Arrow, Second Sight and all the others I don’t have room to mention. If that’s your thing, one can only hope a Blu Ray release (alongside some hopefully fabulous extras) will be coming along at some point soon.

Shelby Oaks

Paranormal Legacy

Shelby Oaks
Directed by Chris Stuckmann
USA 2024
Paper Street Pictures
UK Premiere FrightFest 2024 screening

I’m just going to preface this review with the simple statement that I thought this was a great horror movie. It’s also made on a shoestring budget on crowdfunded money (although it looks like Mike Flanagan picked it up) and those films have to be applauded when possible. The reason I’m saying this up front is because of something both the great Alan Jones and also the director, Chris Stuckmann, said before the film started (Stuckmann really wanted to be here for this screening but he and his family are recovering from flu so, sadly he recorded an introduction instead). Which was this... they both asked any social media commenters or reviewers to not discuss any of the secrets of the film... especially since it’s not getting any kind of release until next year.

Which is a perfectly reasonable request except... I can’t for the life of me figure out what the secrets of the film were supposed to be. It all follows a logical story progression with no real surprises. I mean, it doesn’t exactly telegraph itself like many movies do but it is fulfilling all the directions implied in its set up so... to avoid giving any spoilers here (I even changed my review title in case my silly pun gave away too much), I’m just going to cover the basic set up in terms of the story content of this thing. So, yeah, we’ll see how short this review turns out then, I guess.

Okay, so Shelby Oaks starts with some ‘found footage’ style horror of a group of four people, missing presumed deceased, who do a ghost hunt style YouTube channel (at the dawn of YouTube)... speculating on what happened to them and using footage from the one recovered camera (of two) used. One of the four is Riley (played by Sarah Durn). This is interpolated with documentary footage from 12 years later, with Riley’s sister Mia (played by Camille Sullivan) who is still trying to find out what happened to her sibling. This takes maybe ten minutes or so and then something genuinely unexpected happens, triggering the opening titles. Then the film, while still using excerpts of found footage, is filmed in the more traditional, third person narrative style, as Mia (half abandoned by her husband who sees her obsession tearing their marriage apart), tries to uncover just what happened when Riley and her group, the Paranoid Paranormals, went to investigate the abandoned town of Shelby Oaks.

And it’s genuinely terrifying. Or rather, the suspense and tension within most shots is absolutely, almost unbearably suspenseful. I mean, this is how you do atmosphere in a horror movie folks.. right here. The majority of the film is just Mia solo, figuring things out and driving out to follow up leads (for some reason always at night, to honour the unwritten horror trope of... ‘you never turn on the lights’) and so, the silent film making style works perfectly with the story. Not that this film is silent by a long chalk. As many people will realise, the sound design and scoring are very much contributing factors to a good horror movie and that’s certainly true of this production. The eerie, twig snapping, bump in the sonic distance modus operandi coupled with a highly anxiety inducing score from James Burkholder and The Newton Brothers (please release this on CD) absolutely ratchets everything up to eleven and works really well with the visuals to get under your skin.

And then there’s the acting... Camille Sullivan really helps carry this movie and she’s never less than believable the whole way through. And, even though Mia does, again in time honoured fashion, put herself in situations she shouldn’t, she’s also written and performed as someone who is working out things as she goes along and logically asking the right questions of herself in her investigations. And Sullivan really helps sell this character and her motivations all the way through the picture, allowing the film to get under your skin in the best way possible.

Oh, and about that ending (which I am not going to describe in any way)... yeah, as I said, you may not be completely surprised by the denouement of the film but, at the same time, it’s the perfect destination for where this story is going so, it doesn’t really matter how surprised you are by things (and you may well be... I’m sure you’re not all as jaded as me), because the ending does everything it needs to do, commenting on the characters and their ultimate fate.

So that’s me done with Shelby Oaks, a really good horror yarn and an absolutely ‘brilliant in every way’ debut feature from Stuckmann. I hope this one gets a mainstream release over here in the UK because I think people of a certain age are going to leave the cinema talking about it... which is a good thing.

Test Screening

 

Screen And
Screen Again

Test Screening
Directed by Clark Baker
USA 2024
Parallax Ventures
World Premiere FrightFest 2024 screening

Okay, so this year marks the 25th anniversary of one of London’s most beloved film festivals, FrightFest and, my first screening this year (of four... I can’t really afford a weekend pass and don’t understand the complicated booking process involved with those anyway) is Clark Baker’s Test Screening which, well it looked to be right up my street when I read the programme guide synopsis but, I have to say I was a little underwhelmed with it, to be honest.

One of the reasons I thought I’d be into this one is because it uses a preview screening at a cinema as its delivery method of the horror content into the story. And if that sounds like a typically 1980s horror movie kind of plot, well that’s fine because the film is set in 1982 which, as most genre enthusiasts will tell you, was a really good year for movie releases at the cinema. Some of which flopped on their original releases but have now paid dividends (and had sequels ands reboots) as they finally reached their audiences in the ensuing decade. So, yeah, great genre movies such as John Carpenter’s The Thing (reviewed by me here) and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (reviewed by me here) all get more than one shout out and so, in terms of running the checklist, it’s the perfect movie for people of my age and a little older. However, one of the bigger influences on this (I suspect) put the dampeners on it for me... along with some other things.

So Test Screening tells the story of four friends played by Chloë Kerwin, Drew Scheid, Rain Spencer and Johnny Berchtold, three of whom go to the test screening of a new movie in their home town. A town which has been cut off from the rest of the world by the government, via the only bridge in and out of it, under the guise of road repairs. Now, Kerwin’s character Penny, who is in love with Spencer’s character Mia, doesn’t go because her priest father won’t let her attend an unrated movie they know nothing about. But the others go... and like the rest of the people there, fall under the thrall of some bizarre test signals which changes their DNA and turns them into far sinister beings... apart from Drew Scheid’s Reels (the local projectionist), who has an epileptic fit triggered by the screening and survives the experience unaffected by ‘the sinister wave’. Before long, the town is being taken over almost body-snatcher style and it’s up to Penny and Reels to try and find a solution to the problem or, you know, even just escape from both the results of this experiment and the government agents who are running it.

And... it’s got a strong first half an hour, I reckon. One of the things that surprised me about it is that it takes itself very seriously and so the various characters and their families are really well built up as believable entities. It’s very slow paced in this way and it certainly takes time to do the things a lot of other films wouldn’t. Penny is especially well drawn and I have to say that Chloë Kerwin’s performance is easily the best thing about this movie. Well, that and the pulsing, electronic scoring which is deliberately evocative of those early John Carpenter films.

Alas, once things do start happening it falls quite quickly into the ‘seen it all before and can easily predict the final shot of the movie’ category. Now, sometimes that kind of element can be done quite well and works in spite of the familiarity with the content but, in this case for me (and possibly some other people... I’ve not seen this many walk outs at a FrightFest screening before), it just got fairly dull after what was an especially good set up. I think the problem for me was that this film was so obviously influenced by Brian Yuzna’s 1989 movie Society, which I saw back in the day and found equally dull and unoriginal (perhaps because it wasn’t on the level of the gloopy horror paperbacks we were all reading in the 70s and 80s) and so this particular influence really didn’t hit the mark for me. And, yeah, that final shot/reveal at the end of the movie is surely something any genre fan will be able to predict before it happens so... not such a great denouement either, I reckon.

That being said, Test Screening is well acted by pretty much everyone in it and it’s competently and professionally put together. It could easily play well with a bunch of similar horrors on a themed all nighter, I think.. and hold its head up high doing so. I suspect it’s just me (and possibly some walk out people) who found it a little on the dull side and  had a slightly harder time with it. So it wil be interesting to see if this gets a cinema release (and physical media release, for that matter) at some point soon. I hope it does well because the director can obviously handle himself well.

My 2600th Blog - The Global Gap

The Global Gap

My 2600th Blog

Long term readers to this blog will know that I mark every 100 posts with a small article, piece of art or, as of late, full blown rant about an aspect of the film industry or other pop cultural phenomenom. And so, on the occasion of my 2600th blog post, I think it’s time to turn my gaze onto the, once much embraced but now sadly tolerated, dependence on the global marketplace for basic physical media purchases and the short sighted reasons behind the increase in importing said items for myself and others in the UK (and quite possibly the US, I suspect).

Okay, let me remind you of the fairytale era known as the dawn of the DVD age, when the serious cinephile and casual viewer alike would own a multiregion DVD player easily bought from the local Tesco (we knew from the internet which players could be hacked with a few numbers typed into the remote... just as we all do today with our cheap, multizone Blu Ray players). The reasons for doing this were many and here are a few I remember...

The first being specific to the UK... most of the films and TV shows etc were just not available in a UK version (unless you wanted to wait 6 or 8 years down the line until popular taste in this country caught up with you... oh, look, gialli are now popular in the UK after I had to buy them all from the US decades ago) and, even if they were, many of them would be harmed/cut/molested by the UK censors, so you would need to get it from another country in order to get a real version of the film anyway (this, sadly, is in some cases still true... I’m looking at you Aquaman... and films of your ilk).

Another reason was availability of new titles. I could often get them on a nice Region 1 DVD way before a film had gotten a cinema release in the UK and, if it’s one I knew I was going to like, why bother waiting all those months (sometimes a year) to get a version from my own shores which, as it happens, might have been cut anyway. I remember sitting in a UK cinema watching Josie And The Pussycats for the umpteenth time (if you know the brilliance of this movie then well done... an absolute classic ripe for rediscovery or, even a basic acknowledgement) even though the US DVD was had arrived through my letterbox that very morning.

And then, coupled with this and the dollar being so low against the pound (in those days), even with the import/postage fees you would still be paying only half of what you would be paying for the barely adequate UK release months later. And there were also shops in London which were doing a roaring trade in US Region DVDs at the time... if you knew where to look (I can remember at least four of them).

As the decades passed, things levelled out a bit. Especially by the dawn of the age of the Blu Ray (and I’ve not gotten into 4K UHD and will resist that route for as long as possible).

The biggest problem these days is the postage which, with the pound having had a reversal of fortune against the yankee dollar, means you will often be paying as much as the value of the goods again (if not double) on top of the purchase price. However, in what is technically a new golden age of physical media (as directors and producers try to get the best physical release of their films on the shelves to be remembered by, before low quality streaming versions are the only other reference point), it is still sadly necessary to get stuff from boutique labels abroad, since there are no equivalent versions in the UK (or sometimes they are coming out a year or two later than the US version). So beautiful editions like Severin’s Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection, All The Haunts Be Ours, House Of Psychotic Women, The Sensual World Of Black Emanuelle or Vinegar Syndrome’s Forgotten Gialli series of boxed editions, to name just a few, are only available to the British consumer by throwing our grappling hooks farther afield than this small minded country’s boundaries, in terms of what the studios... and the censors... want us to have available over here.

So, yeah, you take a hit because it’s the only way to get certain stuff.

That being said, it’s all gone horribly wrong of late... because new, Hollywood first run films are not getting physical releases over here (and often in their home country in the US) due to streaming rights issues. And talking of the evil of the streamers... there are films on these ‘stations’ which don’t even make it to a cinema release when they should do, let alone a physical companion. I’m looking at films like Beverly Hills Cop - Axel F, for example... reviewed here.

I was in a venue I won’t name the other day, somewhere related to a certain form of entertainment where I and a friend had popped into the accompanying café to get something to eat. I was served my hot chocolate and cake by a person who, it turned out, was one of the big physical media buyers for a set of stores and dealt with the various companies who put out blu rays and DVDs. Well, not anymore because there were horror stories to be told, it turns out. I don’t know if, as I was told, Sony have now decided to stop physical media for UK release but, if true, then things are only going to get grimmer for people who, you know, actually like the art of film and want to see it treated with respect. In a time when HMV were only just recently telling everyone that their physical media movie sales were growing...he told me that all of the conversations with the companies at the moment were about streaming rights. Nobody was interested in pursuing physical media and, even when he proved a point to one company by getting them to release a physical edition of a certain set of films in the UK (a direct port over of a US edition) which promptly sold out... he just couldn’t get said company to realise (or perhaps, to quote Clark Gable, “give a damn”) that there is actually a buoyant market for Blu Rays and even DVDs still out there.

It’s something which the boutique Blu Ray labels such as the likes of Severin, Vinegar Syndrome, Criterion, Arrow, Melusine, 88 Films, Imprint, Indicator, Umbrella and various others have known for years... but for the big studios I’m guessing the attitude is... ‘that’s not enough quick return money for me to bother investing the time to reap that particular reward.’ So, yeah, when it comes down to it... here he was instead filling my cup and saucer and making sure I knew where the serviettes were. It’s absolutely crazy.

And so it comes to pass. I’m shocked at how hard it’s getting to get the newer, recent films on physical versions not so long after their initial release (either cinematically or on a selfish and uncaring streaming service). Over the last year, four of the releases I’d originally just assumed I could grab in domestic or even US releases have caused me a lot of stress and, it has to be said, three times the amount of money to buy. But I’d still rather do that than stream these things (for however long company X decides to make them available for) and, some of them were for gifts...

So... Glass Onion I had to procure as an Asian bootleg Blu Ray (which, I have to say, is absolutely amazing quality, as good as any commercial Blu Ray transfer I’ve ever seen). Ditto for Mr. Monk’s Last Case... which I suspect still hasn’t even aired on television over here yet. Reality (reviewed here) which I was hoping to get for a Birthday deadline didn’t make it (although it’s still on the way), because I had to get a German edition (English language, at least) imported and, yeah, it keeps getting delayed. And again, I was completely shocked to see that one extremely successful independent horror film from much earlier this year, Late Night With The Devil (reviewed here) has not had any kind of physical release in either the UK or US and I’ve had to set things into motion to get it shipped over to me from foreign shores in a ridiculously expensive edition (thanks to the wonderful geezah in Fopp who informed me that, as far as he knew, no UK distributor had stepped in to buy it). And don’t get me started on Godzilla Minus One (reviewed here) which I am, at presently, patiently waiting to get a UK release, even though a much lesser but later film, the US made Godzilla X Kong - The New Empire (reviewed here) is already on UK Blu Ray (I’m just not wanting to purchase my modern films out of their release order thanks very much... if I show my family the latter first then their desire to bother with the far superior Japanese movie will certainly deteriorate, for sure).

And so here I am again... lamenting the absolute lack of respect of the cinematic art form from certain companies and now spending way more money and time researching alternative ways of getting films which, quite frankly, I should be able to pick up for a quarter of the price just by walking down to my local high street store and seeing what is on the shelf.

Anyway, rant over. If you’ve made it this far then, thanks for reading my 2600th blog post and if you have any other stories of ‘the violation of physical media’ then please post a comment below (I have to clear the comments once submitted at the moment because of crazy Russian blog spamming but, yeah, I will read and then publish every genuine one for sure... whether I agree with it or not). And, as always, thanks for wandering onto here and taking a look. It’s always much appreciated.

The Doll Of Satan

Giallo Dolly

The Doll Of Satan
aka La bambola di Satana
Italy 1969 Directed by Ferruccio Casapinta
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: This one has satanic spoilers.

The Doll Of Satan has kinda been sold, at least in the UK market, as some kind of horror exploitation film but, it really isn’t. It’s a actually a giallo and while certainly not really anywhere near the best of them, it’s actually quite good and doesn’t deserve the reputation it seems to have garnered over the years of being, well, truly terrible. It’s not, actually... it’s good fun. Probably the producers who commissioned the project didn’t think so, since this was director Casapinta’s only film - reports from the on set shenanigans would indicate that he didn’t know what he was doing and, for the most part, his assistant director took over the bulk of those duties on set.

And I’ve seen a fair amount of gialli over the years but this one, a first time watch for me, was certainly a lot more ridiculous than some of the others I’ve seen and, for the genre, that really is saying something. However, there’s a certain quality to it that is almost unique to this film in that it’s almost glossing over it’s own story, in a way. A very simplistic story where leading lady Erna Schurer plays Elisabeth who, accompanied by her fiance Jack (played by Roland Carey... who looks a little like Adam West, it has to be said), pitch up at her uncle’s castle after his death. Once there, various of her uncle’s advisors try and get her to sell the castle.

They do this by bringing a supernatural element into the story by drugging her and making her hallucinate scenes with some kind of phantom and subjecting her to, frankly unrealistic looking tortures in the castle dungeons, which are meant to be ghostly visions of a haunted ancestry come to plague her unless she leaves and sells. So, yeah, the whole horror element in this via the supernatural shilly shallying is actually just man made stuff and, like such gialli as All The Colours Of The Dark or even the opening of Argento’s Deep Red (reviewed here), once shorn of these trapping as the end of the picture, it pulls the film firmly back into the giallo camp, for sure.

Now, there are signs, sadly, that the reports about the incompetence of the director are made good. Some flash cut opening shots are used to illustrate the death of the uncle, presumably to make up for the lack of ample footage and the title sequence is not particularly stunning on this one... like a load of stills which would be used for lobby cards being montaged together in a static manner while the, fairly interesting and driven score plays out over it. There are also some stylistic mis-steps in it too. For instance, when Carol, played by Lucia Bomez, is stripped down to the lingerie, there is a cheesy and constantly repeated howling of a dog in the background, which is almost added as a commentary on Ms Bomez’ sexuality than anything else (it doesn’t help that it’s exactly the same sound sample over and over).

And quite apart from the fairly obvious solution to the story (you will find it hard not to guess the identity of the mystery villain of the piece within the first 20 mins) and it’s clumsy introduction of silly concepts, such as the local artist girl talking into a two way radio fairly early on and signalling to the audience that she’s an under cover cop, not to mention her prowling around the grounds of the castle at night with a geiger counter to tip the audience off that there is, indeed, valuable uranium in them thar hills... there’s also the fact that the story feels kinda jumpy. That is to say, the whole thing feels like its giving us just enough information in each scene to follow through onto the next, as if it’s just giving us the ‘highlights’ version. In fact, it almost felt at times that I was not looking at the film itself but as if somebody had been asked to do one of those photonovel style fumetti magazines of the original product rendered as captioned stills and then somebody had gone and reshot the movie from those to give a condensed, ‘this is all you need to know’ version of the story. So yes, while it does give us the highly stylised trapping of many others in the genre, it also gives us something which feels like the story content is kinda simplistic, stripped down and stylised too. Bizarrely, a few hours after I wrote this note to myself to remind me of this quality to the film, I found that the lead actress was well known as at the time for appearing in those very same photo magazines such as Killing (aka Kilink aka Satanik).

That being said... the film is very colourful in the costumes, lighting and decor (there are some spectacular coloured filter shots of the night sky scattered throughout the picture). And, whether you accept that certain scenes were shot with the input of the director or not, there are some striking compositional moments in the movie too. For instance, there’s a moment when Elisabeth and Jack go for a walk in the castle grounds at night. This starts off with a static shot which almost resembles a double gate fold LP or flyer. The opening shot features the thin, visible vertical strips of the wall at either side of a vertical slatted iron gate (so many verticals thrown onto the screen all at once). The gates slightly ajar so the two sets of gate verticals open onto a fifth sliver of a vertical in which two characters can be seen walking away from the camera in roughly the centre of the shot. Which looked great. There’s also a scene where Carol is seen pacing through the top two of the quarter quadrants of her bedroom window from outside. The camera tracking her in close up as she paces from one quarter to the other. It’s all quite interesting.

Nevertheless, the pared down, almost pop art story elements don’t hide the mystery from many a viewer, I should imagine. It even ends with a Scooby Doo-like unmasking, revealing the face you absolutely know is going to be there, along with the movie equivalent of the ‘Why, if it isn’t Mr...!’exclamation in said scene. So, accidental or not, in its execution it is at least consistent and honest in its approach.

Although I really enjoyed the soundtrack by Franco Potenza (alas, sadly still unavailable on CD) it really got on my nerves in a couple of scenes where drops of a drug are dripped into a drink and the music renders a small musical sting as each drop is released. Honestly, this really gives the technique of Mickey Mousing a bad name... if the technique wasn’t tarnished enough through over use over the years already. And talking about those dripping drugs, when Elisabeth accidentally drops her drink and smashes it, the story is fractured enough that the lack of drugs in her system do not stop her from decoding her nightly, traumatic, pseudo-supernatural (pseudo-natural?) visitations as anything which belongs to the realm of the living. Which is strange but I suspect, by this point, the editor was just assembling what he could to make some kind of sense of the master footage.

And yeah, I’ve probably said enough but, I have to admit, I really enjoyed the ‘leave your brain at the door, you won’t need it’ sensibilities of The Doll Of Satan and I suspect die hard giallo fans will not find it unrewarding. I’d certainly watch it again and think it would be a perfect movie to put on as a midway point in an all nighter screening of films from the genre, for sure. Glad they finally issued this one.

The Seed

Be Seeding You

The Seed
UK 2021
Directed by Sam Walker
Hardman Pictures

Warning: Some spoilerage occurs.

Okay, so this might be a short review because I’m really torn as to how I feel about The Seed, truth be told. This is definitely a modern day B-movie and it feels like something Norman J. Warren might have directed back in the 1970s, in that it’s low budget and contained in a very small set of environments and with a very small cast (six in total, although it’s only the three leads acting alongside a special effect for the most part). It wears a few influences on its sleeve and so the film feels a little like an amalgam of movies the director may (or may not) have seen and been swayed by at some point, it has to be said.

And usually that’s enough to get me hooked and on board with a movie. After all, it’s nicely lensed with some bright colours and some nice use of vertical and horizontal architectural details, used to split the frame up into nice compositions, for some of the scenes. But it just wasn’t enough to pull it up and make it a great movie I could recommend to my friends. I think one of the reasons for this is because the film may be too reminiscent of the plots and budgets of a bygone era of cheap horror cinema but, it’s shot from a very contemporary viewpoint and so any nostalgia value, which is part and parcel of what makes those movies great to watch now, is not in evidence. Of course, if I was watching this thirty years from now and picking up on the ‘classic 2020s feel of the film’, I’d probably fall in love with this one but, yeah, something just feels off about it. Another reason I had trouble with this is because of the three lead protagonist/antagonists in the film, played by Lucy Martin, Chelsea Edge and Sophie Vavasseur... who were mostly unlikeable.

Now there’s nothing wrong with the actresses, they’re all fine. It’s more about the characters and how they’re written. The film takes place in the Mojave desert and as it sets us up with shots of the exteriors and interiors of the house before any humans are even seen, we can hear the girls in voice over on the soundtrack long before we see them, as various static shots of the house which plays host to 95% of the movie are set up to give the audience some idea of the layout (it’s actually a little like the house which features in Revenge, which I reviewed here). The three girls are staying at one of their father’s luxury houses in the middle of nowhere, to have a break from city life and watch a meteor shower which is due to fall from the sky that night. The trouble is, they’re all pretty much airheads in terms of the way their characters are written and it’s like each one is just a little more stupid than the next.

Also, one of them who is a model, has a vlog so she’s constantly recording on her phone (until the ‘meteor shower’ knocks out all the cell phones) and it’s pretty much a thinly disguised plot element to fill the audience in on what’s happening and shorthand the dynamics of the characters. But they did not have my sympathy throughout the film and, when a little Gamera-looking alien turns up and they try to get rid of it before, eventually, in the case of two of the girls, it takes over their minds and violates their bodies... I honestly didn’t care whether this little alien succeeded in putting stage one of his world conquering plans into action or not.

The film starts to get vaguely sexual in a modern Hollywood way, in terms of not actually showing much flesh while almost harkening back, stylistically, to something like The Man Who Fell To Earth in these particular sequences, where something that looks like a mixture of red intestines and canvass merges and covers the girls in a writhy, sexual way, impregnating them with... yeah, you guessed it... ‘its seed’, with lots of little embryos waiting to burst forth after a very short labour. It feels quite surreal in these sections (and, talking of the surreal, when the creature is swaddled in clothes, it certainly recalls the baby from Eraserhead and, I would guess that’s quite deliberate) and, it’s competently done but, yeah, the film seems a little like a one trick pony and, after a while and one hallucinatory (in the aliens’ sex head space) dream sequence too far... it’s just a little repetitive by a point in the movie where I couldn’t care less if any of the human characters lived or died in this.

So, yeah, I was unimpressed with the film as something either surprising or at least engaging on a story level... but I was impressed with how the whole thing had been put together and, although it’s obviously low budget, The Seed doesn’t ever really look cheap and it certainly puts its ideas up on the screen in an easily translatable and competent manner. Looking at the IMDB, I discovered that this is the writer/director’s first feature length movie and, honestly, this shows a huge amount of potential and I believe, if this guy is allowed to make more movies, he’ll find his voice and really start delivering a notable body of work. It just doesn’t feel like he’s quite there yet and, I just hope this film doesn’t do badly and that he gets to work on some more stuff. For all its post-modernistic referencing, it does feel like its trying to be somewhat original in its direction, even if it doesn’t always get there. So yeah, I wouldn’t mind seeing some more of this director’s work in the future.

So, that’s me very done with The Seed but I would maybe urge people to take a look at it, especially those who aren’t usually watching sci-fi/horror genre crossovers because, I suspect, those less initiated into the various tropes may get a lot more out of it than those more accustomed to the genre. The film certainly wasn’t dull, though and, yeah, some people will probably like this one a lot more than I did, for sure.

Fire And Bones

In Fire Straits

Fire And Bones
by Kathy Reichs
Simon And Schuster
ISBN 9781398531178

Okay, another one of my very brisk reviews, this time for what has shifted from being my second ritual Christmas read to, over the last few years, my number one August holiday read. I always start the latest of Kathy Reichs’ Temperance Brennan novels on the first day of my holidays, which usually coincides to roughly when they’re published each year.

This latest adventure for the forensic bones lady is entitled Fire And Bones and involves Tempe being brought in as a side effect of a favour she does for her daughter. Her daughter’s ‘loaded’ best friend is a would be reporter and podcaster who interviews a reluctant Tempe for a new case involving arson. The result being that the people in Washington where a fire killed four people want, as a result of watching that interview, Tempe to help out with her expertise in bodies recovered from said fire.

The other side effect of this is that Tempe gains a new ally and, possibly, a new semi-regular character for the series, I hope... as she ends up staying with the lady who interviewed her in her... well it’s pretty much a mansion.

But with a second fire occurring and other fishy things happening, it’s a case of no arson around when Tempe gets on the case.

So this one, without trying to put in any spoilers, leads back to a long standing feud which started during prohibition between some bootleggers and other unsavoury characters of the time. And aided by her new friend, plus her own ingenuity, Tempe seems to be a little ahead of the police at most turns of the investigation on this one. Once again, though, this puts her very much in harms way.

Now, in terms of the mystery, it’s a bit of a jigsaw of suspects and interested parties and, though I didn’t see part of the solution, certainly the follow up attack after all has supposedly been put to bed, didn’t surprise me in the least. There’s a character who is introduced about a third of the way into the novel who I realised, as soon as I found out that character’s profession, was probably involved (or would be) in the various incidents which come to light. So, yeah, the story does telegraph itself to a certain extent, it has to be said.

That doesn’t matter too much to me though, because once again it hurtles along at a fair lick and is never not entertaining and thrilling. There’s a reason I read these at the start of my holidays... they relax me and I know I’m going to tear through it quickly, setting up the tone for my time away from the office. And once again, Reichs doesn’t disappoint.

Now a couple of things of note... the writer seems to be relying less on the hard cliffhanger/foreshadowing allusion at the end of each chapter as she so often has in the past. I mean, there are a couple of last liners in a more familiar style here such as... “We both knew I’d never make that call. We were both wrong.” but, for the most part, the last lines of each chapter are not promising (and often they used to deliver, so I’m not knocking the practice at all) some kind of hard revelation in the chapter to come. Truth be told, I kinda missed them though. I mean, the novel doesn’t suffer from it in any way, it has to be said but, it’s just the kind of writing I’m used to reading from her.

The other thing I should mention in terms of the story is that Andrew Ryan, Tempe’s long suffering boyfriend, spends most of the book away and unmentioned, for reasons I won’t go into here. But I did miss the banter between the two. Obviously, there’s a little of it here but, yeah, it definitely felt like Reichs was trying to change the way she writes these things somewhat... at least that’s what it felt like to me.

One last thing... and the hobgoblin of little minds like mine, perhaps... is the basic brush with the metatextual that rears its head in the text. In once sentence, Reichs... talking as Tempe, the books are always told from a first person point of view... mentioned that someone in the story binge watched all 12 seasons of Bones on television. Now Bones, of course, is a kind of TV universe of a slightly different version of Temperance Brennan, based on her earlier years and perhaps a little more on the writer herself. But these books, which are stories which I can’t help but feel are grounded in a certain reality, are now suggesting that in the world of Temperance Brennan, there’s a TV show top lining a character called Temperance Brennan, from a different viewpoint, so to speak. Which doesn’t quite sit right with me for some reason but, hey, it’s a nice reference either way.

And that’s me about finished with Fire And Bones, I think. If you’re already an avid reader of Kathy Reichs and love this character as much as me then you really can’t go wrong picking this one up. They’re bright, breezy and informative so, you know, if modern thrillers are your thing, give this (and the series in general) a go. Can’t wait for the next one.

A L I E N Romulus

Holm On The Range

A  L  I  E  N  Romulus
Directed by Fede Alvarez
USA/UK/Canada/Hungary/New Zealand
2024  20th Century Fox
UK cinema release print

Warning: There are things people need to be starting a conversation about so, yeah, there are huge spoilers in here. Don’t read if you don’t want to know.

Okay, before I start with this somewhat problematic review, I’ll preface it by saying that Alien Romulus is the best Alien movie since the fourth in the series, Alien Resurrection (and certainly blows away the last two terrible movies). It’s entertaining and feels like it’s part of the Alien franchise but also has a level of suspense which is up there with the best of them. So, before I cover the plot set up and then get into the pros and cons, I want you to understand that I had a, mostly, pretty good time with this ethically unsound film. But, as I said in the spoiler warning, there’s a bigger conversation to be had.

Okay, so the set up is that the film starts off with a ship picking up a certain piece of ‘Alien’ debris from the floating, exploded remains of the Nostromo, which Ripley destroyed near the end of the original Alien (how it got in that piece of debris, though, I have no idea... she was well clear of the Nostromo by the time she did that) and, a few months or more have moved on since this opening scene, is my guess but, the movie properly takes place between Alien and Aliens (yeah, their will be reviews of those movies coming to the blog at some point, when I get around to taking the Blu Ray set out of shrink wrap and revisiting them one day). So this film really is set some 20 years after the first movie... and many decades before the second one (so, sometime while Ellen Ripley is sleeping away in hypersleep).  

The film features a group of ‘young adults’ being exploited on a Weyland-Yutani colony on some planet when some of them get wind that an abandoned space station, comprising of two halves (the titular Romulus, where the action mostly takes place and Remus), is about 36 hours away from burning up in their planet’s atmosphere. Everybody wants to get off the colony and Weyland-Yutani are pulling a Catch 22 on anyone who reaches their years of servitude in their mines, upping the number of years when they get to their agreed target).

So, with the help of Rain (played by Cailee Spaeny... who I’ve seen in a few things and is a pretty good actress) and her android Andy (or synthetic human, if you like, played by David Jonsson), they stage a heist on the apparently deserted space station to try and steal the hypersleep chambers on board so they can get to a more welcoming and functioning colony.  And of course, things happen when they get up there as the station was the ship where the dead xenomorph and other things ended up and... yeah... experiments have been done. Everyone on the station is actually dead and its full of face huggers and big aliens alike. Also, something happens to up the ante because the ship shifts a couple of degrees and there’s now less than an hour before the craft burns up in the atmosphere. So the film becomes a race against time... and some other, added biological complications... while what’s left of our raggedy band try to survive the running time as best they can.

Okay, so the good stuff first because, the other stuff is going to take me a while to sum up, I suspect.

The acting is brilliant. All the cast in this are great and with a special mention for the phenomenal talent that is David Jonsson, who plays not one but two very different iterations of the same synthetic human (that’s not a spoiler, you know what he is right from the start). I won’t give away why but, yeah, he does an amazing job throughout this movie, it has to be said.

And the film looks a lot like the first two movies, somehow mixing outdated looking ‘future speculation’ technology from the first two films with modern day expectations to a degree that it does, at this moment in time at any rate, seem to seamlessly blend in with those first few earlier outings in the franchise. And Benjamin Wallfisch’s score (sadly unavailable as a proper CD at time of writing) is suitably sedate and sinister in a not dissimilar vein to what Jerry Goldsmith and, to an extent, James Horner were doing in the first two films.

Plus, it’s chock ful of suspense and ‘oh no, I can’t believe you just did that’ moments. And the full size aliens are felt rather than seen a lot of the time... only really overly used in an Aliens inspired shootout in zero gravity towards the end of the film. So this stuff is all pitch perfect and there are some lovely call backs to the other films such as sound samples, computer screen displays and even one of those nodding/drinking ducks I like so much which were prominent in the original movie. Now to the big spoilers... you were warned...

Yes, there’s an alien/human hybrid in this movie. But it is kinda terrifying this time and works a heck of a lot better than the one they came up with in the fourth film in the series (which looked more like a Casper The Friendly Ghost Alien and was the one bad thing about that entry). It retains some H. R. Gigerish details on an essentially humanoid frame and, yeah, it’s relatively effective (in the lighting they use... I suspect it looks awful in broad daylight but these kind of movies are always about smoke and mirrors anyway and it works effectively here).

Okay, lets look at the bad stuff then.

Those call backs to the other movies are not subtle (which half works some of the time) but some of them are waaay too much. Certain lines and even paragraphs of dialogue associated with other actors in the franchise seem like they’ve just been pasted into the mouths of the characters here, to the extent that it feels like those actors are stepping out of character just to get the call backs in. You will definitely know them when you see/hear them and some of this stuff was just popping me out of the movie... because that’s what it seemed the characters kept doing. Popping out of the movie to make a ‘cool reference’.

Also, ridiculously, some of those homages don’t go far enough. If you’re going to reference the long, voyeuristic shot of Ripley in vest and knickers getting into the space suit at the end of Alien, maybe hold the shot longer than a second... the whole point of the way that first one was shot in that scene seemed to be to enhance the sexuality of the actress to the audience gaze, so this small nod seems undercooked, for sure. Why have it at all?

And, by the way, future generations who decide to watch these movies in order of when the story takes place, are not going to get half of the references yet because they haven’t taken place so far in the order they are watching it in. They may well think, for instance, that Corporal Hicks’ gun tuition speech from Aliens is a call back to this movie, if they don’t pay attention to old timey release dates. It just doesn’t really work.

Then we have the other big problem with the movie... which has a couple issues tied up in it.

So perhaps the biggest call back in the movie is the return of Ian Holm as an android from the same model series (and identical looking) as the android he played in the first movie, Ash. This one is called Rook, presumably to try and link it into Lance Hendrickson’s Bishop character from Aliens, Alien 3 and, kinda, Alien Vs Predator but... well let’s put it this way... it’s way much more than a cameo. The studio has resurrected this dead actor with the use of CGI and mimicry to give a new performance (albeit one which includes some dialogue from the first film) and he’s in several scenes and is a main plot point.

So two things about this because, his inclusion makes this movie morally reprehensible.

Firstly, it looks pretty bad. This CGI actor replacement rarely works well and this looks just as bad and fake as Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher did in Rogue One (reviewed here). It looks like someone’s just pasted the face on in Photoshop and it doesn’t quite match, looking really flat and useless.

Secondly, when Harold Ramis was brought back as a ghost for a few scenes in Ghostbusters Afterlife (reviewed here) everyone was accepting of this because the usage was respectful and, heck, everyone knows that in his lifetime, Ramis was trying to get another Ghostbusters sequel off the ground for decades so, he would have agreed to it. Ditto when a computer generated younger version of actress Sean Young was used for Blade Runner 2049 (reviewed here)... she was on board with it and had been in talks with the film makers. But, honestly, I don’t care how involved his family or estate were in this decision (or how much money they were compensated... if they were, I hope... that’s another can of worms), Holm may well have decided to not take part in this one. He may not have liked the script. He may well have thought it would diminish his classic performance in the first movie (which I feel it kinda does but, that’s just me). And, no, I don’t think Hollywood should be allowed to bring back dead actors as anything more than a fleeting glimpse, or cameo. The problem here is that it’s a whole performance of a major character and, not only that, it feels really flat and unreal.

And, bottom line, did we really need him to be here for yet another call back to previous elements of the franchise when another actor/character would have done just fine and the film is already overpacked with references anyway. Bringing back a dead actor to just fizz up your movie is a really low move in my opinion and I really hope Hollywood stops this terrible practice soon. It’s one thing to see a fleeting glimpse of George Reeves as Superman in The Flash (reviewed here) but it’s quite another to create a new performance. It just feels wrong to me and, frankly, should be outlawed.

But that’s me done with Alien Romulus, I think. Good effects (apart from the CGI Ian Holm, which just looks bad), great acting, some nice callbacks (too many) and, apart from the ethical issues, which may give you pause, a mostly great time at the movies.

Duel To The Death

Ninja Dead Men

Duel To The Death
aka Xian si jue
Hong Kong 1983
Directed by Siu-Tung Ching
Eureka Masters Of Cinema
Blu Ray Zone B

A quick shout out to an interesting movie from the early 1980s which has been put out recently (at time of first draft writing) by the Eureka Masters Of Cinema label. I wanted to have a look at another of those crazy Hong Kong wire-work martial arts films and Duel To The Death fit the bill.

The film starts off with an attempt, by a bunch of ninjas, to sneak into a Shaolin Martial Arts temple and make elaborate waxpaper copies (I think, not quite sure what I was looking at) of various instructional martial arts scrolls before being ousted by the monks there. They are referred to as magicians although this seems to be a slander perhaps rather than a literal translation. After all, not content to having the power to cloud men’s minds, they are gravity defying, sometimes teleporting ninjas who explode when captured or wounded. That being said, though, pretty much everyone in the film seems to have some kind of gravity defying power in them. One of the main protagonists, for example, is introduced going into action by remaining seated on the floor and then, keeping that pose as he flies a long distance backward and out of the building to join the battle.

Um, yeah... I’d be lying if I said that was the craziest thing in the film (as I shall further elabourate on soon) but there seems to be no logic dictating the ‘no basis in science whatsoever’ martial arts skills which were being done pretty much for the first time here (or at least it’s one of the earliest samples to take the wirework choreography to new and somewhat dizzying heights).

The plot of the film is that, every ten years, a challenger from a martial arts house in Japan comes to China to challenge a champion and whoever wins and kills the other has the glory of their country claiming the greater martial arts skills. But this is no film of easily black and white stereotypes... the Chinese and Japanese main protagonists may be wildly different in temperament, to some extent (the director often uses rich, striking colours for the Japanese character and more tranquil, peaceful colours for the Chinese guy) but they are both honourable men with merely a different attitude and understanding of the reasons behind their fight.

However, there’s more going on here, asides from a romantic interest for the Chinese hero. There is a lady who has a brilliant introduction as she avenges the death of a husband by having an old lady stand with her sword out... fresh over the corpse of her husband who has been murdered for putting on a Punch and Judy style puppet show which slurs the Japanese... and kills the two antagonists with one of them impaled on the outstretched sword of the old woman, who is seen to have at least a semblance of an honourable revenge on her husbands killers. The female martial artist who stood up for her is the daughter of the man running the Chinese house where the duel is to take place. What she doesn’t realise, along with both the Chinese and Japanese duellists, is that it’s all a set up by her father and the Japanese Shogun so the Japanese ninjas can kidnap all the martial arts masters who come to watch the duel... and much fighting and wire work shenanigans ensue as the daughter and the two duellist team up against the ninjas to stop the power play.

This involves some pretty stunning looking fights with lots of craziness such as an army of ninjas flying through the air on big kites... which is pretty mind blowing until you see them flying high in the air under their own power to transport palanquins carrying thier trapped victims later. There’s also a huge, giant ninja who lumbers up to one of the characters before he transforms into six regular sized ninjas. Perhaps the most eye catching moment is when one of the betraying villain’s head is parted from his shoulders and it is impaled through the ears on a branch of a tree... this does nothing to deter said head from carrying on his conversation with his noble foe before, you guessed it, his head explodes.

The film ends with the titular Duel To The Death at the insistence of the Japanese guy, who has learned nothing from his time dealing with the traitors of his own leaders... which leads to a spectacular fight where it’s implied by a timely freeze frame, after the Japanese guy has plunged a sword through his own foot to stop him from falling over, that both me are about to drop dead from the wounds inflicted upon them. Yeah, it’s nice I think that the film seems to champion the idea, from the Chinese side, of the pointlessness of fighting and eventually depicting a futile attempt where both practitioners die from their predetermined clash. A nice little message there for the viewer while simultaneously glorifying their actions in as spectacular a manner as possible, of course... the writers and director managing to have their cake and eat it in as visually pleasing and kinetic way possible.

It’s also a nice film to look at, with the director using the verticals and diagonals of both man made and natural environments to help position the main players in compartmentalised sections of the screen and even, in one sequence, using large groups of people standing in lines at different angles in the composition to act in the same manner and delineate sections of the main frame. Another shot of both the fighting heroes standing at the edge of sand and sea is underpinned by a nice shot looking up at them from just a little way in front of them from their feet, with the sea washing over the top of the camera and creating a splash of water over the view (without, impressively, getting the lens wet... so an extra sheet of glass somewhere there, I suspect).

And, yeah, the music is quite nice too, I think.

Overall, I quite liked Duel To The Death and Eureka have done a splendid job with the transfers and various extras of interviews with some of the key film makers. I’d happily recommend it to martial arts movie enthusiasts but I have to say that I personally prefer the films of this style I’ve seen from the 1960s and 1970s than some of the 1980s ones I’ve seen. Still, good stuff and I’m appreciative of Eureka giving people the opportunity to see it.

The Last Of Us

Fungi To Be With

The Last Of Us
Canada/USA 2023
9 episodes Jan - March 2023

A quick, shout out of a review for The Last Of Us, a TV show based on a successful Playstation game of the same title. It’s not one I’ve played as I kinda stopped playing video games around the same time I started writing this blog (too much of a time suck). So I don’t know how faithful it is to the original storyline but I do know this new one includes a fungal infection that is the exact same one, as observed in ants, as was used in the original novel and movie of The Girl With All The Gifts (reviewed here and here). And it takes place in a similarly bleak, post-apocalytpic wasteland where small clumps of humans divided into various factions struggle to survive in the world which all went to hell 20 years prior.

Interestingly, the post apocalyptic work is set contemporary to when we’re watching as an audience so, yeah, the fungal-zombie apocalypse started twenty years prior to this. We see the first night where civilisation collapses in the very first episode and, I’d have to say the series starts off strongly at the very least. We meet main man Joel, played by Pedro Pascal, as he loses his daughter to violence that first night and this starts him off on the path to becoming an embittered smuggler in the post-apocalyptic world. Then, as part of a trade, he agrees to escort a tough, 14 year old girl across the country to find a resistance group hospital (like I said, despite everyone trying to survive, there are warring factions in the dregs of humanity left after the events in the first episode) to use her blood as a cure for mankind. Ellie, played absolutely brilliantly by Bella Ramsey, is immune to the fungal infection. That is to say, she is infected but shows no signs at all of infection... as she isn’t a lethal zombie-like creature trying to infect you within 12 hours of being infected herself. You’ll find out just why she’s immune in the pre-credits sequence of the last episode in season one.

Pascal is also very good with this and he plays a really cold and ruthless character who, suprise surprise, softens to Ellie and bonds with her before the end of season one. Bonding exercises include surviving the infected, surviving the ruthless leader of a rebel faction who is after them (played by the great Melanie Lynskey from Yellowjackets, reviewed here and here), various raider groups, ill health (when Ellie has to stitch up a bad knife wound on the barely conscious Joel and trade for penicillin, barely escaping from the ‘Christian Cannibals’ she makes the trade with) and various other gnarly events.

And, it’s okay I guess. It’s not hugely brilliant and I’m not too sure why it’s caught the popular imagination so much but, although it’s fairly clichéd and very predictable. it’s well made, well acted and is nice to look at. Some of my favourite moments are ‘nature against the wreckage of humanity’ shots... such as a frog jumping on the keys of a piano in a half destroyed hotel or a bunch of giraffes between wrecked tower blocks. So there are some poetic moments and it’s things like this that kept me watching.

Another positive is that there are few episodes which aren’t self contained. I think there were two where things were left on cliff hangers to resolve in the next one but it’s more like a 1970s TV show in terms of just having a central mission with a new adventure each week. Most of the episodes crosscut between a character in the early days of the fungi-zombie pandemic and the present day which, is an okay way to do it but it gets a bit overworked by the end of the show... although there’s a lovely episode which tells Ellie’s back story and shows just what... or rather who... she lost to the virus herself.

And that’s me done on this one. The Last Of Us is a well put together show and has a lot of entertainment value and some good acting from the leads. The mushroom people (as I like to call them) are not particularly credible, it seemed to me, so I did find it hard to get too worried about them, once I’d finally seen one. All in all, it’s a better show than most of the ones that, say, Disney are putting out these days (yeah, I’m talking about their Star Wars and Marvel shows) and I’d certainly watch a second series... which I’m assuming will be based on the sequel game. Not the best of modern TV shows but certainly not the worst either.

House Of Tolerance

Brothelly Love

House Of Tolerance
aka House Of Pleasures
aka L'Apollonide
(Souvenirs de la maison close)
France 2011 Directed by Bertrand Bonello
Universal DVD Region 2

House Of Tolerance is a movie about a bunch of sex workers in a brothel in Paris at the turn of the century. The film is presented as a series of episodes of the daily cummings and goings of the girls at the establishment, named L’Apollonide and it’s actually a very well put together film.

Each of a large number of characters, maybe ten girls, is touched upon and, there’s no real story arc as much as a group of incidents that play out which, ultimately, forces the house to close its doors with many of the girls not easily finding employment elsewhere, due to the pressure from the landlord to pay more to the establishment. We have a small first section, involving one of the main girls called Madeleine. She tells a client who she wants to marry about a dream she had the night before about him proposing and then coming inside her, the force of his love filling her up to the point where she starts crying thick tears of his semen from her eyes. It’s an evocative image and, while this remains in the dream for now, there’s a scene near the end of the picture where the disfigured Madeleine (I’ll get to that in just a minute) is seen surrealistically crying tears of semen, rolling down her cheeks and over her unnaturally extended mouth... oh yeah, about that.

After he listens to her story, the client asks to tie her up and then, when she can’t do anything about it, he slits both sides of her mouth with a knife, causing a permanent wound reminiscent of the famous Black Dahlia killing. Well, I say Black Dahlia but the director has gone on to say that he was inspired by Conrad Viedt’s slash mouthed look in the 1928 film The Man Who Laughs and the pathos of Madeleine’s character and presence throughout the film... she’s kept on as the brothel’s cook, washer woman, seamstress etc...  is certainly reminiscent of that kind of character. However, since I’m pretty sure the unknown killer of Betty Short in the 1940s was probably inspired by the same thing, I’m gonna plump for the Dahlia here.

This first segment is titled on the screen as November 1899 - The Twilight Of The 19th Century but we quickly enter the other, much longer segment of the movie, March 1900 - The Dawn Of The 20th Century, shortly after our first glimpse of the facial mutilation (which is revisited a few times as the director seems to have a modus operandi of repeating parts of scenes over from different angles or with different details shared... and not just in the usual flashback style sequences, although they do happen too).

And it’s really interesting as we see the girls’ day to day with various incidents such as one girl being given a  champagne bath by a client, another forced to dress and act like a mechanical doll, another thrown into a geisha costume etc. Even Madeleine still gets in on the occasional action as one client in particular has a fetish about her facial mutilation (cue eventual orgy scene with a stripped and pampered Madelaine with a dwarf girl). We also see the problems and trials of the working girls’ lives as we see a periodical medical examination, one girl addicted to opium and another who contracts syphilis and eventually dies in the brothel. The metaphor towards the end of the movie where a petal falls from a flower is okay once but, not so hot when it’s repeated and pushed as the same metaphor a minute or so later, to be honest.

It’s well shot too. The director moves the camera very slowly, the only jarring edits being on the soundtrack when the score suddenly drops out on a cut on occasion (I’ll get to the music in a minute). So things will move very slowly in a voyeuristic manner as girls and clients move in and out of shot without the director necessarily following them.

He also likes splitting up the action and showing things simultaneously.

There are a few split sequences where either four different locations in each quarter of the screen or, in one case, a trio of them splitting the screen vertically... which sometimes show a girl moving out of one location and turning up in another a short time after. He also tends to like the use of vertical splits discovered by the camera as a natural part of single shot compositions too... which is nothing new but it does seem like he’s trying to experiment with ways of echoing his split screen shots in a more naturalistic (but of course, artificially manipulated) setting.

For example, a shot of a room taken from behind two big open doorways leading into the room means there is a vertical split created by their frames as a column in the middle of the space is used to delineate various clusters of actors. In this shot he then slowly moves the character through the right hand of the two openings, bringing the scenario together as the doorframes leave the picture. In another example of splitting the screen naturally, he has a girl undress in front of a client but, most of the back wall of the room they are in is comprised of flush strips of vertical mirrors, each reflecting the disrobing from slightly different angles within the same shot.

The ending, which includes a possible (or is it an opium dream?) come uppance for the man who mutilated Madeleine in a scene where the other girls lock him in a room with one of the other client’s small pet panther (I don’t think it’s an ocelot but I may be wrong) and also the wonderful moment where Madeleine cries tears of thick semen down her disfigured features... takes us on over a hundred years to the present day, where streetwalkers are plying their trade in the very same streets of Paris where the brothel stood (at least one of them played by one of the same actresses from the brothel).

My one real problem with the film was the use of music. The opening titles after a short sequence, which consists of a series of black and white photos of the girls in a montage, has a song on it which sounds like it came from the 1950s or some such. It’s totally out of period and completely manages to kill the mood, as it does when it and another out of place song appear on the soundtrack during a couple of scenes. Also, the scoring is sparse but quite odd and out of tone with the piece, I thought. It also feels badly spotted, like the director and composer couldn’t best decide which areas of the film should have music and which should be left unscored.. most of it is left without music which, given the inappropriate nature of some of the cues I was hearing, is perhaps for the better.

However, the music doesn’t ruin the movie and I’d have to say I had a really good time with House Of Tolerance. If this film had been made in the 1970s or 1980s it would probably have played the Lumiere cinema to much acclaim and for a number of weeks, I would bet. And, it has to be said, it does have the feel of a 1980s movie looking back to the past, I thought. Anyway, this film needs to be a little better known and appreciated, I think, so in regards to that I’ll just say that if you want to see a movie with lots of bosomy women walking around naked for a lot of the time, then this is one to take a look at.

Tales Of The Shadowmen 19 - Demi-Monde

What They Did
In The Shadows

Tales Of The Shadowmen
19 - Demi-Monde
edited by Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier
Black Coat Press
ISBN: 9781649321770

Just a very quick mini review of what is, alas, the penultimate collection of stories in the much loved Tales Of The Shadowmen series, Volume 19 (of 20), Demi-Monde.

For those unfamiliar with these collections or with any of my previous reviews of those in the series, the two editors Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier have created, for Black Coat Press, a series of collected stories all of which mix up famous genre characters of pulp literature and film (including lots of French pulp characters, of course, these are French collections translated into English) and written by various writers... some famous and some not.

Now, a quick note about the editors, both of whom, once again, have a written story each in this collection... I’ve known about these two for years since first spying Jean-Marc’s name on the original editions of the two volumes making up The Doctor Who Programme Guide in the early 1980s. I’d always assumed from their names that they were brothers but, it turns out (the clue came, less than subtly, in the Rick Lai introduction to this tome) that they are, in fact, husband and wife. So I assume a very happy and long marriage steeped in creating and organising genre concoctions.

As in pretty much any portmanteau of collected stories, the tales in here are a bit hit and miss (and all very differtent hits and misses to each individual reader, I’m sure) but this one has the usual mix of genre mash-ups and a fair bit of intrigue. The Brasher Bat by Tim Newton Adenrson which opens the volume, for example, tells of what happens when Billy Bunter’s cricket team are taken over by vampires and various future detectives and others, as schoolboys, are there to investigate.

Another very interesting tale by Matthew Dennion, The Worthiness of the Wielder had Dumas’ Milady DeWinter, in her usual nefarious manner, hiring the blade of Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane in order to stop D’Artagnan and Constance from finding various accoutrements once belonging to Thor, including his hammer Mjölnir... she's, of course, acting on the orders of Cardinal Richelieu... this was easily one of my favourite tales in the book.

Other genre interpenetrations include a bunch of Spaghetti Western characters, one teamed up with Josephine Balsamo of The Black Coats and another tale of The Phantom Angel teamed up with... Hopkirk (Deceased). Other attractions include a story where Jules Verne pits his wits against Professor Moriarty and a wonderful account where John Buchan’s Richard Hannay is teamed up with Arsene Lupin against the Germans during the First World War, that I found quite entertaining.

My favourite story in the tome was Matthew Baugh’s Hercules and Samson VS The Russian Vampire and the Zombies of Frankenstein... a title which is as partially accurate as the internationally marketed versions of the Mexican Lucahdore movies it’s inspired by and which features such characters as Maciste, Santo, Blue Demon, Mils Mascaras, The Bat Woman and even mention of Satanico Pandemonium... so this one was easily worth the ‘price of admission’ for me.

And that’s me done with, as I said, another short review of a book in this series. Tales Of The Shadowmen 19 - Demi-Monde is another fascinating and diverse read for those who are smitten by the legacy of international pulp fiction and it is with a bitter-sweet feeling that I look forward to the final, double sized tome in this well regarded series (which was, alas, also twice the price but I picked it up pretty quickly because, I fear, these books might now be an endangered species in terms of availability in the not so distant future).

Terror By Night

Murder On The
Scottish Express

Terror By Night
USA 1946 Directed by Roy William Neill
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some obvious spoilers here.

Terror By Night, the penultimate entry of Universal’s ongoing Sherlock Holmes series featuring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson, was also the last of the series to feature Dennis Hoey’s brilliant performance as the long suffering Inspector Lestrade and, he does seem to have more to do in this one in terms of the story. However, because almost the entirety of the story is set on a train, as it makes it’s long overnight journey from London to Scotland, Mary Gordon has no opportunity to make an appearance as Mrs. Hudson... although I believe she was back for the very last of the series.

This one concerns a jewel called The Star Of Rhodesia which, according to the narrator at the start, actually detailing its history direct to the audience for once (rather than being a surrogate section for something being explained to Holmes), has a violent history. But not much of one, really... it’s just an attention grabbing statement because the real violence surrounding the star happens over the course of the train journey, which comprises the running time of the movie here.

So, yeah, we have an undercover Inspector Lestrade (who isn’t undercover for long as Holmes and the audience are obviously onto his game right from the outset) plus Holmes and Watson escorting the current ‘old lady’ owner of the star back to Scotland as they expect another attempt will be made by thieves to abscond with it before the train reaches its destination. So it’s actually pretty similar in some ways to the setting of the last movie on board a moving vehicle... only this time the cruise ship is substituted for model railway stock shots of the train on its journey and the musical sections have been quickly abandoned.

Quite honestly, it’s not the best in the series and it goes through all the Agatha Christie style ‘questioning all the people aboard the carriage’ shenanigans you would expect, while the villain (the right hand man of the deceased Professor Moriarty), and his henchmen murder various people and make attempts on various other people’s lives in order to acquire the jewel, which Holmes has already switched with a fake version in an early part of the movie. It’s entertaining enough, though and does have some points of interest.

For instance, there’s a scene when Holmes and Lestrade are discussing the many suspects and, as they do so, a series of wipes catches up to each of the characters and what they are doing at this time (mostly sitting around in train compartments looking vaguely mysterious). Which is not in itself an unusual thing to do in a mystery movie but I believe it’s the first time that Roy William Neill has employed this technique in one of his Sherlock Holmes movies.

Another thing is that Lestrade does see some action himself, when a very sinister looking assassin knocks him unconscious and is then himself killed by his boss with a poison dart gun, his dead body slumped and left against Lestrade’s. However, when Lestrade is brought back to consciousness, he very quickly falls in with Holmes elabourate plan regarding a, not necessarily so surprising plot twist, towards the end of the movie and helps turn the tables on the main culprit and his gang of accomplices.

Thirdly, there’s actually a genuine action sequence in this movie, where Holmes is trying to fight off an assassin and finds himself locked out on the exterior of the train for a bit before he manages to smash his way back to safety... again, not what I’d expect to see in one of the movies in this series.

I’ve not much more to say on this one other than the story is, well, okay hardly original but it’s not a specific Arthur Conan Doyle story, although Terror By Night apparently has elements of The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, The Adventure of the Empty House, The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax  and The Sign of Four added into the mix. All in all though, while not a high point of the series, it’s all very entertaining and fast paced and Rathbone, Holmes and Hoey all do a wonderful job playing the roles we’ve come to love. Looking forward to revisiting the last in the series, which also bears the name of a later and, perhaps, much more famous Brian De Palma movie... at some point soon.