Megalopolis

On The Fritz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Well

Went the day…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afraid

 

AIA Eye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elric Of Melniboné - The Elric Saga Volume 1

Rune Messiah

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Substance

A Woman Of...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hundreds Of Beavers

Beaver Pitch

Hundreds Of Beavers
USA 2022
Directed by Mike Cheslik
FilmHub

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Running Scared - Insider Tales From The House Of Hammer

Running ‘til
They’re Hammered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blink Twice

Me Two

Blink Twice
Directed by Zoë Kravitz
USA/Mexico 2024
MGM/Warner Brothers
UK cinema release print

Wow.

Blink Twice is the directorial debut of Zoë Kravitz (daughter of pop star Lenny Kravitz and actress Lisa Bonet), who also co-write the screenplay under the original working title Pussy Island... a name which she was intending to be the release title until it was eventually shot down... not a bad thing actually because that title might have been a bit of a spoiler. And talking of spoilers, I am going to do my best here to write this review without spoilers as best I can because, you should really go in blind to the plot details, as I did. But one spoiler about this specific review however is... when I say wow it’s because, well, this is one impressive directorial debut, for sure. And I don’t remember the director as an actress in the many films she’s appeared in other than, she played an impressive Catwoman in The Batman (reviewed here) and also voiced the same character in The Lego Batman Movie ( reviewed here).

Okay, so Kravitz does not star in the film herself. The main protagonist, Frida, played by Naomi Ackie, is having a hard time to pay the rent but she is obsessed with famous billionaire Slater King (played by Channing Tatum, who also is one of the producers of the movie) , who has publicly apologised for some unspecified abusive behaviour and has been out of the public eye for a while, going to an island he has bought to relax with his friends while one of his pals looks after the successful King Foundation. Frida and her roommate Jess, played by Alia Shawkat, accidentally hook up with King and are invited to go with him and his entourage to his private island for some decadent partying.

They agree and meet various other guests like Sarah (played magnificently by Adria Arjona) and, frankly, among the rest of the cast it’s a veritable who’s who, with no offence intended, of stars of yesteryear who somehow seem to have disappeared from the cinema goers radar for a while, it seems to me. These include an adult Haley Joel Osment (remember him... he sees dead people), Christian Slater, Kyle MacLachlan and the great Geena Davis. And, over the course of the endless partying, fuelled by a mixture of drugs and alcohol, things start getting a bit deja vu for Frida and some of the other guests. Put it this way, the audience will notice that one of the guests has gone missing before Frida does. And... that’s really as much as I want to say about the plot of the film... continuing my attempt to write this thing with no spoilers (because it’s the kind of film that really deserves no spoilers, if doable).

Okay, let’s talk about the impressive debut of Zoë Kravitz then. Now, I may be talking out of turn here but, the approach to filming this is not, I think, something which might be taught at a film school, I suspect. In some ways I might be justified in saying you can tell this is someone’s first film because of what it doesn’t do as much as what it does. But in this case, I don’t mean that in a negative way at all. Here’s what I mean...

Okay, so in my previous review on the blog for a new film called Starve Acre (reviewed by me here) I noted that, sometimes, the director would start off a scene focusing on a detail rather than give the audience the expected establishing shot that ninety nine out of ten directors would go for. Well Zoë Kravitz does that in spades in this movie, starting out with people in their headspace and then sometimes withholding any kind of establishing shot for a while.

The opening shot, for instance, of some kind of reptile (possibly a snake, actually, in hindsight) is held for a long time for no apparent reason... except you’ll find out exactly why we got that particular shot near the end of the movie. The film is bright, colourful and, when it breaks the accepted rules of film (or should that be expectations) by doing this kind of thing... it absolutely gets away with it and it all works well. Nothing here is done by accident and it makes me feel that Zoë Kravitz must be, already, a master of her craft. I remember when my best friend (sadly no longer with us) and I got out of a screening of Woody Allen’s masterpiece (of his many masterpieces) Shadows And Fog at the Lumiere cinema in London (also no longer with us) back in the early 1990s... he basically said, “... that’s just Woody Allen flexing his muscles. He walks all over the other directors out there...” and, at the time, I had to agree with him. Well, the way Kravitz and her crew pull you in with the shot design, cinematography and editing here to make, not only a great piece of art but also a very relevant and still timely film about a serious issue, makes me think the same of her. She’s just flexing her artistic muscles here... except it’s her debut as a director, people!

And not only that, although a lot of the elements of the story come as absolutely no surprise... for instance, the arc of Geena Davis’ character panned out exactly as I thought it would... it genuinely doesn’t always do what you think it’s going to do in a lot of other ways... often technically with the way it’s shot, as discussed above but, also with the paths Kravitz chooses to reach her final destination. And that includes a crazy ending which, I have to admit, I totally didn’t think she’d go with and, while it’s not quite what I would have expected, it’s a bold choice so... power to her.

Not only that but the effective score by Chanda Dancy (sadly not available on CD) and even the various needle drop songs, work really well with the film and lift the visuals they are accompanying. As does the sound design, which really focuses on the state of mind of the lead protagonist as much as anything else, it seems to me.

And that’s me just about done on the very cool Blink Twice. No idea in the film is really that original... she even steals a nice visual gag from an early scene in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie in an early moment here (review coming soon) but, that specific gag aside, Kravitz goes up to eleven on everything in the movie and, quite surprisingly, it all works very well. Hopefully this one will get a Blu Ray release soon so I can study it a little better. Worth seeing at the cinema if you can catch it at your local, for sure.

Starve Acre

Bunroaming

Starve Acre
UK 2023 (2024 releaase)
Directed by Daniel Kokotajlo
BFI/BBC Film

Warning: Tried to talk around the spoilers but they may have crept in regardless.

Starve Acre is a new folk horror movie from director Daniel Kokotajlo. Now, I’m not as enamoured of the folk horror sub-genre as I perhaps should be, mainly because it’s often quite clumsily rendered. I think what a good folk horror film should do is bring in a slow, haunting strangeness for the first half of the movie, steeped in locale specific folklore, before stepping up the pacing and leaning into the fantasy element, which would then start building for the last half of the movie. And so I’m very pleased to say this is exactly what Kokotajlo does with this tale and it works really well, conjuring up a nicely unsettling film with a couple of worrisome beats near the start which set up the strangeness of the rest of the story as it unfolds.

Now, I have to be honest here... I didn’t realise this was set in the 1970s (I had to look it up, too) until I finally twigged nobody was using a mobile phone in the picture so it might be set in the past. I think I’m kinda period blind to anything taking place after about 1930 because fashion styles all look pretty much what I’d be wearing after that date, to be honest. It’s also set in Yorkshire which, I also had to look up to find out what accent the main lead and many other characters are speaking in. I’m also assuming Starve Acre is the place where they all live because, no real mention is made of the title in the dialogue anywhere, that I heard.

Anyway, the film concerns Richard (played by the great Matt Smith with said Yorkshire accent) and his wife Juliette (played by the brilliant Morfydd Clark from Saint Maud, reviewed by me here) who have, two years prior to events portrayed here, moved back into the area where Richard’s father raised him (in somewhat unusual and traumatising ways, it transpires). They have a young son and, you can tell right from the opening that he’s not quite right because, at a local gathering/activity, he pokes out a donkey’s eye. This obviously worries the parents who want to put him into psychological evaluation but, it’s not long after this that something else significant happens and a few seconds of just a black frame denotes a timescale shift of... some months after this specific incident.

Juliette’s sister Harrie, played by Erin Richards, comes to stay with them for a bit as Juliette is suffering from depression... as is Richard, who buries himself in his archeological work revolving around the people who used to live in the area years ago and their use/worship of a once powerful oak tree which had some significance to them, the roots of which Richard thinks he may have found in he earth near to where they live (he has been given a year’s leave from the local university at which he teaches, due to an earlier incident). When a non-human skeleton of... some description (spoilers, I suspect) which he has dug up begins to regenerate organs, things start to take a turn for the strange and uncanny, leaning into the folk horror more as Richard and Juliette come under the spell of whatever is going on and Harrie is discovering that not all the locals who live in the neighbourhood are necessarily what they seem (another important ingredient of folk horror, I reckon).

And it’s an absolutely fine film. It’s suitably creepy and there are some nice shots of the landscape, which is often filmed in ways you wouldn’t expect, with close ups of details (on the interior shots as well, such as concentrating on the hand of an actress first, before giving any kind of establishing shot). The camerawork does feel like it’s very voyeuristic a lot of the time. Like a lurking, perhaps menacing presence is watching all that transpires in a fly on the wall kind of way.  

The actors are all terrific, of course. Matt Smith seems to be playing it very differently from many of his signature roles and somehow manages to nullify any baggage from other movies or TV performances he might have been carrying... you totally believe in this man drowning in his own despair. Ditto for the brilliant Morfydd Clark, who goes from giving up on the world to the confident, feminine Earth power she needs to be for the sinister enchantment of the film to be able to work effectively. And as for Erin Richards, well, she doesn’t have quite as much chance to shine in the spotlight as the other two but she certainly does a great job... in particular and without giving anything away, the last ten seconds or so you see of her character is absolutely unsettling and a brilliant physical performance. I can’t say anymore for fear of spoiling the ending of the movie.

And all this, coupled with Matthew Herbert’s folksy terror scoring means that Starve Acre is a wonderful viewing experience and absolutely something that the great Severin Films in the US should be considering including when they get around to putting together the inevitable All The Haunts Be Ours Volume 3 box set in a couple of years time (I suspect). This one is up there with the best of these kinds of movies and it’s always great to see something made by film-makers who absolutely understand the power of the sub genre and know how to deliver. Also... and excuse me for being cryptic but spoilers need to be jumped on here... it doesn’t quite go the full Monty Python And The Holy Grail, but it comes pretty close. I absolutely loved this one.

Bootlace Cinema

Lace With The Devil

Bootlace Cinema
by Mark Williams
Treefrog publications
ISBN 9798333275219

Subtitled Collecting Horror, Science Fiction & Exploitation Movies on Super 8, Mark Williams’ new book Bootlace Cinema starts off giving an overview of the phenomenon of buying and collecting Super 8 cut down/condensed versions of movies on the format in the UK, before the home video boom ushered in by VHS (and technically also by Betamax, I guess), effectively killed the phenomenon almost overnight. That is, as I learned from this tome, except in Germany, where home video Super 8 cut downs were an ongoing thing right up until 2003, with the last release in the format over there apparently being Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

The book starts off with a few essays detailing the rise and fall of the format and highlights the main players, such as they were, in terms of the companies putting out this stuff. So the likes of Castle Films/Universal 8, DVR Films, Derann Film Services, Fletcher Films, Mountain Films, Perry’s Movies, PM Films Limited, Ritz Films and Walton Films are all given their own mini section, giving some information about them, with some of them detailing the history of each company and, of course, a lot of the information throughout the book relies on the memory and expertise of the author... as this new tome appears to be the first of its kind in terms of covering this once popular secondary market for what were, in a way (and due to their mostly incomplete nature of the product into very condensed, short run time highlight reels), a high end piece of cinematic merchandise. This stuff is not forgotten by the people who used to buy this kind of thing though and, relatively recently, the art form of editing these things down into these bite sized (for the most part) reels has come back into vogue with Blu Ray purveyors such as British boutique label Indicator including these cut down versions in their extras on some of their releases.

After these opening sections the book starts proper with an alphabetical list of many of the films falling under the auspices of the book’s subtitle, each having their own entry comprising of (for the most part) a short summation of the movie, some interesting history of the film in question and the details of the various cut down versions of the film released into the ‘bootlace market’ at the time.

Now I’ve never gotten into this particular hobby myself (although I believe my dad has some old Hal Roach shorts in the loft) so I found this mostly fascinating in terms of the various versions of the films on offer and what shape they were in. I also found a parallel to the early days of DVD purchasing in that the US imports I used to get before a film even hit UK cinemas is similar to many of these cut down films being released before the film was even shown in the cinemas here... and in some cases with footage which was censored out in the UK by the BBFC as part of those condensed reels.

I also, as it happens, picked up some interesting information about some films in general which had somehow managed to escape me before now (don’t ask me how). Such as the UK theatrical release of Buck Rogers In The 25th Century being cut for violence. Or the fact that, when he starred in The Omen, Gregory Peck took a huge cut in salary but opted instead for 10% of the film’s profits. The Omen was, of course, very successful indeed and so it actually ended up as being Peck’s highest paid role. I also didn’t know that, while David Cronenberg’s Shivers was passed as an uncut X certificate in the UK, it was actually banned in Hampshire, where the town’s council decided it was too much for the sensibilities of the locals.

I also found it interesting in terms of the extra work the UK collector would have to do if they wanted to get their product in a more palatable shape. Sometimes a few different condensed reels of a film would be released into the market and some of the companies had a rule in their contract with the films’ original distributors that each reel would be able to make sense as a self contained story... which meant some repeat footage to contextualise the rest of the contents. Which meant that many collectors would go to the trouble of splicing and re-editing their purchases together, to get a presentation closer to the original version of the film (even if a couple of reels combined would only come to about a half an hour).

And that’s me pretty much done on this, pretty much invaluable tome on the subject of Bootlace Cinema. With the annoying caveat that the writer seems to not know the difference between there, their and they’re... using the first spelling for all the many instances of the other two in the book also. Which, I confess, irritated me no end but certainly not enough to fail to recognise the hard work and the enlightening information which has gone into this feature presentation, so to speak. And if you’re on the fence about it, please know that the book is chock full of colour representations of the original Super 8 box artwork (including many of the German releases), along with various print adverts for these items so, for that reason alone, the book is more than worth the price of admission.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Every Which
Way But Juice

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Directed by Tim Burton
USA 2024
Warner Brothers
UK cinema release print

Warning: Spoilers about the fate of Jeffrey Jones’ character from the first movie here.

Well this was a pleasant surprise.

Back in 1988 I went to my local cinema (which was two minutes around the corner at the time... it’s now a Tesco) and saw Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (kinda fuming then that it wasn’t spelled Betelgeuse as in real life). It was the first movie I saw by Burton and I liked it fine. When Michael Keaton, who starred as Beetlejuice, was announced to be cast as Batman in Burton’s next film and there was a huge backlash against that decision, I was pretty sure both he and Burton could pull it off and, yeah, they really did.

The next time I saw Beetlejuice would have been a couple of years later when it came out as a sell through VHS cassette tape (yeah, sell thru, as it was known back in the day) and, yeah, I think that was about it for me and that film... I saw it only twice and not again, since I kinda stopped being enamoured with the cinematic mystique of Tim Burton. He’s made some fantastic films... Batman Returns, Sleepy Hollow, Planet Of The Apes etc but, as creative as he is, I do find him a bit hit and miss these days. So, it’s perhaps no surprise that I didn’t relish the idea of, 36 years later, seeing his new sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (a title destined to give computer grammar checkers an annoying wake up call the world over). I thought it would be kinda dull and I really wasn’t looking forward to it at all. I thought it would be a good one to review for the blog though so, yeah, I figured I could get it out of the way for good in the first weekend. So I dragged myself along to it, and...

I’m happy to say that, well, Tim Burton really is on form with this movie. As are the returning actors/characters Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice, Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz and Catherine O'Hara as Delia Deetz (all of whom are really impressive here and look almost as young as they were the first time around). Along with some nice visual and musical references to the first movie, we also have a bunch of actors who are new to the franchise, who are all also excellent, including Jenny Ortega as Lydia’s daughter Astrid, Willem Dafoe, Monica Bellucci, Arthur Conti and even Danny DeVito in a small role.

And it’s wonderful. Once again Danny Elfman gives us a score reminiscent of the old one and utilising some of the same themes (although, alas, my favourite piece of leitmotif from the first film is, for some reason, sadly absent from the score this time around). However, once again the people at Watertower Records have not made the score available on CD at time of release (because why should they give people the actual music in proper physical form rather than just a garbage sounding streaming experience instead, eh?).

And, just like most of Burton’s work, it’s wonderfully inventive both on a visual and conceptual level. Lighting the fuse of a chalk drawing bomb to open a portal to the afterlife was a nicely executed idea. And I think people are going to like the Soul Train sequences too.

There’s also a treat for Italian genre fans because, when we get to see the back story of the person who turned into Beetlejuice, it goes full on Black and White, subtitles and does its best to resemble an early Mario Bava or Riccardo Freda movie. And Bava also gets a nice name check here too, since Lydia mentions she saw a Bava all nighter at the cinema when she was nine months pregnant with Astrid, including her father’s favourite Bava Kill, Baby Kill (review eventually coming when I revisit that one on Blu Ray).

Then there’s the elephant in the room. Lydia’s father is in this but, Burton’s regular actor Jeffrey Jones doesn’t play him, now that he’s a registered sex offender (young boys apparently) and has been somewhat cancelled. Instead, although he’s in this all the way through, his photo appears and he gets half eaten by a shark early on in the film... his plane crash and adventures at sea depicted as an animated story. For the rest of the film, as he wanders through the afterlife, the top half of his body is missing (when he speaks, blood spurts from his windpipe), the rest presumably still in the shark. I’m thinking he maybe got paid something for the use of his likeness here, though.

But, look, I wasn’t expecting much from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and was so surprised by just how good a movie it is. As I said earlier, Burton is back on form for sure and it’s a really impressive return from him and the cast in this one. I absolutely will be buying this when it comes out on Blu Ray (hopefully before Christmas) and I’ll probably reacquaint myself with the original around the same time. This one’s definitely worth seeing at the cinema so, if you liked the first one, make sure you don’t miss out on it.

The Last Voyage Of The Demeter

Please Demeter

The Last Voyage Of The Demeter
USA/UK/Canada/India/Germany/
Italy/Sweden/Switzerland/Malta 2023
Directed by André Øvredal
Universal/Amblin

Warning: Slight spoilers nipping at your neck.

The Last Voyage Of The Demeter, directed by André Øvredal who gave us Troll Hunter (reviewed by me here) and The Autopsy Of Jane Doe (reviewed here), is a film I’ve been wanting to see on these shores for a while now. It was due for a cinema release in the UK last year (as it got everywhere else, it would seem) but Lionsgate, who were to be the distributors over here, suddenly pulled it and themselves out of the UK market altogether at that time (is what I’ve read but I’m sure I’ve seen their logo on stuff since then). So it never got a general release over here... not at the cinema nor on physical media (and I suspect not on streaming yet, either). So I just got fed up waiting and took a route to see it which, to be fair, was available to me even a month or so before the film was originally due to be released... I just wanted to see it at a cinema at the time. But, don’t worry, I will be giving some money back to the company at some point soon because I will definitely be shipping over a US Blu Ray of this one pretty sharpish (when I can afford the exorbitant postage that country charges these days).

Okay, so if you don’t recognise the reference in the title... well it’s more than spelled out in the opening of the film but, basically, this is a take on the events that happened from the captain’s log of the Demeter, on its journey taking 50 boxes of soil from Transylvania to where it washed up as a wreck at Whitby in Yorkshire. As told via a brief section of logs in Chapter 7 of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Now, the film is well made and well acted by the likes of Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi and genre star Liam Cunningham as the Captain of the Demeter. That being said, if you’re a Dracula purist, then you should be forewarned that, although the start and end point are pretty much the same... the film does take some liberties with the events as described in Stoker’s original novel. So, yeah... don’t expect a verbatim adaptation of those paragraphs within the chapter. They... sort of match up.

That out of the way... when did a screen version of the Dracula story (even a small part of it such as this) ever match up to the original Stoker very well anyway (not very often, truth be told)? So, it’s a good addition to the body of cinematic Dracula tales over the years and, as it happens, one of the more competent and entertaining ones. The writers on this one have managed to populate the story with some likeable characters you will absolutely care about when confronted with peril and, it’s a quite likeable horror romp, to be sure. There are even a few jump scares thrown into the mix.

And let’s not forget the look of the Dracula ‘creature’ in this. He’s quite obviously based on the Count Orlock variant version as seen in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu - A Symphony Of Horror in 1922 and various other iterations of the character taking that classic look over the years. Indeed there’s a remake of Nosferatu hitting screens again at the end of this year. And the creature here is realised very well. I was a little worried about how they were going to marry up the beast here with what Dracula was going on to do when he got to England but the epilogue of the story, so to speak, shows him blending into things quite nicely. However, unlike the original version of Nosferatu and the 1931 version of Dracula, there is no Renfield character in this iteration.

Now there are a few clichés thrown into the mix. For instance, as soon as you see there’s a ship’s dog, you just know he’s going to be one of the vampire’s first snacks. And sure enough, the dog along with all the livestock are slaughtered fairly early on in the picture (thus destroying the crew’s meat rations in the process). But, there is also a young kid in this too and, a big round of applause to the film makers for not doing the usual and having him spared the horror of the voyage. He actually comes to a very gruesome end at some point (yeah, that’s the spoiler folks... you were warned). To be fair, though, if you’ve read the novel you’ll know there are no survivors (even though there’s a big ‘well actually’ moment for the film... perhaps the producers wanted a sequel but... hmm... they’ll need to do a prequel too, to do it properly).

But, lots of nice shots, with a nice colour palette and lots of creaking sound effects, as the ship goes on its journey and various, diminishing crewmen are picked off one by one as they stand watch each night. Unfortunately, not all the laws of vampire mythology seem to hold sway here. Yes, sunlight burns and kills those poor souls that Dracula has started drinking and so he and the majority of his prey (those who are not having regular blood transfusions... it gets complicated, okay?) only come out when the sun is down. Having said that, though, cruciforms/crosses seem to have absolutely no effect on the creature at all. Similarly, the crew underestimate it all the way through by not being familiar with the various vampire laws and traditions, such as a modern cinematic audience is... so pretty much all of their time they believe shooting this creature will be their salvation.

But, any inconsistencies with the source material aside... I had a really good time with The Last Voyage Of The Demeter, it has to be said. I’m going up to the first day of the 2024 Frigthfest later today (at time of writing), where there is actually a lone, subtitled for hard of hearing print being shown as a ‘one off’ over the course of the five days (although I’ve not got a ticket to that one myself) so I’m hoping some nice stall holder has got a US Blu Ray of it in his merchandise stall, if I’m lucky.* Either way, this is one of the better of the current crop of vampire films being made these days and I’d thoroughly recommend this one to fans of that subgenre. Much fangs for this one.

*No such luck but a postage free copy from WOW HD arrived through my door a few days ago.

Stage Ghosts and Haunted Theatres

 

Blithe Spirits

Stage Ghosts and
Haunted Theatres
by Nick Bromley
LNP Books
ISBN: 9780957268319

One of my short but by no means bitter reviews of a lovely book I found while visiting one of my favourite ‘come and have a look’ shops. Now it has to be said that I rarely spend a penny when in Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop in Covent Garden (not even two pennies for a ‘coloured’ sheet*) but I am always interested in the kinds of little things they have in there, not to mention their famous toy theatres (which I loved as a kid... still have my one from the early 1970s hanging around somewhere, flat packed back up since its days of use). On my last visit there, though, in early January, I was charmed to discover, as a signed edition no less, Nick Bromley’s tome on Stage Ghosts And Haunted Theatres, which also includes a rocky, horrorly foreword by one Richard O’ Brien.

Now, I’ve always been a sucker for ghost stories and, though my days of attending the theatre are mostly behind me (I rarely go these days because of the utterly devastating price tag of even a single ticket), I used to go a lot as a kid in the 1970s (well, a couple or three times a year at any rate) and so, I have actually been, I believe, to pretty much all the theatres listed in the first half of this book, being as that section is mostly concerned with theatres found in the West End Of London. Whether I’ve seen ghosts while there is unknown to me but, since I do staunchly believe in ghosts (for reasons I won’t go into here) I’ve always assumed that most people, when they do see a ghost, do not even recognise one as such and so are usually none the wiser.

Now, the book is written in a much humorous and pacey manner by a man who, it turns out, has worked in many (perhaps even all) of the theatres listed in the book...even the many far astray from the confines of London and even England (Scotland, Ireland and Wales also get a look in)... as a stage manager or assistant stage manager or what have you. And as he’s worked in these establishments in various capacities over the years going back to the 1960s (and of course, the research behind the rogue spirits highlighted here go back many hundreds of years more) he has collected various tales, many of them first hand, from people who have had spectral encounters at these particular establishments.

Not only that, being as theatres are often haunted (whether you choose to believe that or not), there are also a fair few stories in here also which are first hand accounts of his own experiences at various venues too... so if anybody could claim to be an expert in such matters then it’s definitely Nick Bromley.

Now, it has to be said, the book is not all that scary in itself (although one or two tales actually were genuinely creepy in the first section of the book) but it’s never less than informative, always entertaining and, for the most part as histories are dug into and encounters described, often carrying the feeling of authenticity between its spectral clad pages. That being said, the story of the ghost pointing and running through a man left me feeling a little more cautious, for sure.

So, yeah, the book covers such famous venues as the Adelphi theatre, the Savoy, the Criterion, the Gielgud, the Lyceum, the Garrick, the Old Vic and, well, way more many theatres than you would care to shake an EMF meter at, I am sure. And in addition to the many tales of sightings and interactions with those passed on, benign or malevolent, I also learned of things which were of great interest, such as a striptease act conducted nightly in a transparent tank of water where two dolphins would assist a young lady in her aquatic disrobing.

Also, the writer has a nice way with words. For example... “But the veneer of sophistication as found on Shaftsbury Avenue was not quite so glossy in Gloucestershire.” And the occasional poke at the reader too, my favourite being, “Time to jump on a bus (or a cab if you bought the hardback edition)…”. And I am certainly grateful to be educated in such matters as the fact that the act of murdering one’s wife is called ‘uxoricide’, a word I’d not encountered before (but will do my best to remember, should the opportunity present itself, to use this term in writing of my own).

So, yeah, if you are a fan of those who tread the boards (or behind them) and, especially, of those who continue to tread the boards after they have met their final fate, then Nick Bromley’s Stage Ghosts and Haunted Theatres is certainly worth the price of admission and reminded me, lest I forget, that there are definitely, at the very least lingering shades of days gone by who, sometimes, when you’re not on guard, might turn up to haunt you... whether you realise it or not. 

*If you know what I'm talking about there then you must be as old as me.

The McPherson Tape

A Grey In The Life

The McPherson Tape
aka UFO Abduction
USA 1989 Directed by Dean Alioto
AGFA/101 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilers here.

I’m not sure how I feel about The McPherson Tape, which started off life as UFO Abduction... I’m still trying to figure out whether I actually liked it or not. Maybe by the end of writing this review I’ll have figured that out (although I’m not holding my breath on that count).

Very simply, it’s a found footage movie, allegedly the first ever (if you knock Cannibal Holocaust out of the running for, apparently, not really sticking with the found footage idea). So, yeah, this technically predates The Last Broadcast mockumentary by nine years and The Blair Witch Project by ten so, until some other movie comes to light, this is the first one and I guess it should be respected for that. Although, alas, it never really got a proper release at the time. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

Okay, so the film is found footage and, depending on your definition of horror, it possibly falls into that category too. It’s all shot in one take (although some deliberate jump cuts to slight time shifts were edited in later, by the looks of it) and concerns various members of the Van Heese family (or Van Hesse because, the end credits are really inconsistent with how the last names of all the characters are spelled) and it all takes place in a few hours one night as the family have a small, intimate 5th birthday party for the youngest daughter. The mothers of various couples are also present so we have three generations represented in this small gathering.

And then the power goes off (goodbye to anything but candle and torch light for the rest of the movie’s short running time... of just over an hour). When three of the guys, including a cameraman, go to investigate outside, they see a red flash in the sky and follow it over to a spaceship where they see three aliens (the grey, Zeta Reticulan kind most abductees describe). They are observed and so the guys make a run for it and return home but, they were followed and the rest of the evening becomes a waiting game of, mostly hysteria, as the family get divided and ‘taken’ by the three greys.

It’s kind of uneven. It starts off with a bit of text about Project Blue Book and then relies on a skeleton of a structure which the main actors can improvise around. And, the actors were very good and all very natural although, I have to say, some of the improvised dialogue didn’t really make it for me. However, the one advantage of this technique is that everything seems very real because of that improvisations and so, although I decided I didn’t really like most of the family, it does start to get unsettling as the film wears on. At which point I should probably qualify what I mean by that because the film really didn’t work in one specific way for me...

That way being... I didn’t find it scary but I really should have. Long term readers of this blog may remember I spent a good few years researching UFO encounters and alien abductions in my spare time, sifting through enough written ‘evidence’ and logical deduction to the point where I had to stop looking at the stuff... too many sleepless nights. Consequently, films dealing with this subject matter, especially when they feature the common ‘greys’, really tend to push my buttons hard and terrify me. Which is where this film let me down quite a bit. It just wasn’t in any way scary to me. That being said, because the acting is very naturalistic, I did find it a little disturbing... mostly because the family dynamic, where everyone is just acting hysterically and shouting at each other rather than rationally deciding on the most logical course, was winding me up quite a bit as various people had the worst ideas possible for trying to get through the situation. So, yeah, there’s that.

Now, the film cost something like $6,500 to bankroll... real microbudget stuff but, as I looked at the movie, I couldn’t even figure out where that money went, to be honest. But the air of realism in the actors improvising, well, almost against each other, is where the tension and interest in the film begins and ends for me. I guess, I did get something out of it... I just didn’t get any kind of terrifying experience out of this one.

Now, the film is fairly blurry and there’s a reason behind that. The film has been restored by the director from missing elements and brought to light by the team from The Bleeding Skull books and AGFA (American Genre Film Archives) and the Q&A session included as an extra on the Blu Ray is really kind of interesting and worth the price of the movie, in the end, to my mind.

Okay, so Dean Alioto made the film, UFO Abduction but couldn’t get it distributed. Then finally he got someone interested in putting it out but, before the film got a release, a warehouse fire destroyed the original master tape. So it never got a release (for almost thirty years). However, though the director didn’t realise this for around ten years after the fact, bootleg tapes of it started showing up on documentaries and so on about UFOs. A version without the front and end credits was being used and various ‘experts’ from the military and what have you were pretty convinced by the movie, thinking it was genuinely real ‘found footage’ of an abduction incident. And things started to snowball from there, with the director being accused of deliberately trying to hoax people at one point. Things continued from there and here we are today, able to see this thing on the best format possible. A format which really wasn’t designed to convey fuzzy, VHS quality playback but, hey, I’m still just grateful to have stuff like this rescued from slipping between the cracks.

The title, The McPherson Tape, is what it’s come to be known as from those UFO days... there are no McPhersons in this, although the director did do a bigger budget remake in 1998 entitled Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County which, is also sometimes known as The McPherson Tape to some and is often (including on the IMDB, if I’m not mistaken) confused with the original version of the film. But then again, UFO Abduction is also probably not the best title for the film since, you know, no UFOs are actually abducted either (Ha! I’m totes hilar!).

And that’s me kinda done on The McPherson Tape. I found it interesting rather than totally entertaining, it has to be said. The improv actors are all good and, if I was revisiting the genre of ‘found footage’ for anything then I would probably take another look at it. It’s certainly not nearly as interesting as a lot of the found footage phenomenon post-Blair Witch though... although it certainly sticks to its guns on what it is more than a couple I’ve seen in the last 6 months, which seemed to forget they were found footage at all in the occasional shot (thus invalidating their entire movie).

As for AGFA? Well, they’re a partner label to the US label Vinegar Syndrome and I’m sure they’re doing well in the US. I never took a punt on them before because of the crippling cost of postage for a film I might not like but, very recently, 101 FIlms in the UK have picked up some of their titles for release over here and this is one of the first four they released. I can’t see them doing that well in terms of sales on a small island like this but, fingers crossed for them because it means I can afford to pick up one or two of their releases on occasion, at far less expense. So I’m very much hoping that the relationship between the two distributors lasts for a while.