In Memoriam - Brian Michael Cox

Temporary Blog Hiatus 

 

Brian Michael Cox

 16 August 1942 - 29th October 2025

 

 Due to the death of my father, this blog will not be updated for a month, possibly two. It is not my intention to permanently close the blog and all the reviews will still be open to be read as usual. My hope is to continue to once more post new content sometime around the Christmas period or just after. As always, I am grateful to my many readers but I need a break to properly honour my pop during this difficult time.

Parapsycho

Remote Control

Parapsycho - 
Spektrum der Angst
West Germany/Austria 1975
Directed by Peter Patzak
Cinerama Filmgesellschaft MBH 

Warning: Big spoilers projected into your head.

Parapsycho - Spektrum der Angst is a bit of an unusual film. The DVD copy I have of this is in a 4:3 aspect ratio but I can’t tell whether this was actually originally made for television in its countries of origin, whether it’s an open matte transfer of a cinematic release or, as someone has suggested, due to the experimental nature of the film. The shots do seem pretty well composed for the frame though and, on that last statement, it’s not that experimental, it seems to me.

The film is one of those horror anthology films which used to be so popular at the tail end of the 1960s and early 1970s and starts out with all the titles and cast for each of the three segments being typed out on a teletype machine. It then goes on to say something about various paranormal aspects before leading into the next segment. The three segments are, as far as I could make out (the subtitling wasn’t 100% thought through), Reinkarnation, Metempsychose and Telepathie Hypnose.

The first film tells of a man who is trying to get home to his wife and child after a long journey from work but, on the way, he gets a longing to visit a chateau which he sees a picture of and then he stumbles across it by the side of the road. So he goes in to investigate and is mistaken for someone who wants to hire the chateau as a holiday retreat. Then a character played by the great Marisa Mell turns up and seems to somehow know the man (who is now suffering from some kind of amnesia)... she makes love to him but when he discovers she has the dead body of her freshly murdered husband in her car, he does a runner back to his wife and kids. He then discovers, the next day, that the woman has been dead for 35 years and that, quite possibly, he was also her accomplice and may also be a dead, wandering spirit who he and other people have mistaken for a living person. Possibly. The score in this section is all variations and riffs on a Beethoven piece (the name of which escapes me) and, to be honest, it doesn’t really help the visual content or feel of the the film. 

The second segment tells of a medical professor/pathologist played by William Berger, who is having an affair. His wife realises this and when she, he and their daughter are in the car, she starts speeding and drives it off the road trying to kill everyone... but she only succeeds in killing herself. After a while, though, the daughter starts seeing her mother and is taken to a mental hospital. Then Berger’s affair woman somehow sets a psychic link up with the daughter by overdosing on the same pills she is having for treatment, then kills herself by slashing her wrists. Then, however, Berger’s daughter is taken over by the spirit of his girlfriend and flings herself into her dad’s bed. Later, when the girlfriend is cut up during an autopsy, the daughter feels all of the cuts and evisceration of the process on the dead woman and dies herself from the shock. This one is interesting because real autopsy footage is used and inserted into that particular scene.

The third film sees a somewhat disturbed, evil guy played by Mathieu Carrière using sketches of a woman to psychically kidnap her when she’s supposed to be on her honeymoon with her new husband. His previous psychic mannequin woman has killed herself by jumping off a balcony. He sexes up his new acquisition by just running his hands over her naked body, which gives her an uncontrollable and powerful orgasm... yeah, don’t we all do this at some point? ‘-) and it’s hinted that the man is sexually impotent himself. He keeps her captive until she is rescued by an unlikely person... the guy’s mother. When he finds she has been freed from his apartment, he’s already onto the next girl, so he just uses the power of his mind to make honeymoon gal jump out of a window to her death also. Yep, evil definitely trumps good on this last segment, for sure. Innocents are killed... evil prospers, seems to be the underlying message of this last part. 

The film itself has a fairly low key atmosphere and there are some nice shot set ups on occasion. For instance, in the first segment, the man drives his car towards the camera with light bouncing off the windshield, obscuring his features and, when he parks at a point in close up, the camera moves around to frame the windshield in the middle of the screen. Where the guy’s head is, the reflection of a tree branch overhangs and the shadow of it in the windscreen means that only his face is visible against the rest of it. So, yeah, stuff like this is pretty well thought out, it seemed to me. 

The odd thing is that there is sex and nudity in each segment... in the first one it feels pretty shoehorned into the plot (although I’m really not complaining about a naked Marisa Mell, to be honest) and it seems almost to be part of the brief, so to speak, that all the women in the movie expose their bodies. Again, I’ve not got a problem with it but it did seem a little like overkill here at times. 

Although it’s firmly entrenched in the portmanteau horror movie style, to be honest it made me think more of a series of episodes of a British TV show such as Tales Of The Unexpected or Hammer House Of Horror (reviewed here) rather than anything put together for a cinema release. It just seems to have that kind of homespun quality about it, like the cast and crew are all doing their best trying to make something compelling for a fairly small budget and having to make do and mend. It doesn’t detract from it too much but it did feel like a somewhat diminished form of the art to me, as I was watching it... despite having some nice frame designs and some unusual pieces of interior design on the sets. 

And that’s me done with Parapsycho - Spektrum der Angst... I’m glad I saw it (relatively cheaply) and I think people who revel in things like the old BBC seasonal Winter ghost stories and entertainments of that ilk might find themselves occupied by it. I can’t say I’d especially recommend it to many of the people I know, though.

Anno Dracula

Ripping Yarns

Anno Dracula
by Kim Newman
Titan Books
ISBN: 9781803361864
Signed 30th Anniversary Edition
including new Anno Dracula short, 
The Chances Of Anything 
Coming From Mars

Warning: A kind of spoiler... but not really.

So it’s been about 30 years since I last read Kim Newman’s masterwork Anno Dracula. I only read it the once but it became one of my favourite books, being one of the first I’d read where various literary and real life characters collide in a fictional confection of some substance. A year or two after, remember that this was in the days before the internet really took hold and people couldn’t find out about things like new release books unless they saw them in a bookshop, I stumbled on a second-hand hardback copy of his sequel, The Bloody Red Baron. A year or two later, again, while holidaying in Llandudno, I discovered in a remaindered bookshop his third and, for a good long while ‘final’, Anno Dracula tome - a new hardback copy of Dracula Cha Cha Cha. They were all brilliant and all told tales, set in a different decade, of an alternative history of the world after Dracula had in fact ‘won’ at the end of Bram Stoker’s novel, seduced and married Queen Victoria and created a London... and world... where vampires and ‘warms’* lived in a dubious harmony. 

When Newman started writing new Anno Dracula books, not all that long ago, I decided to buy the new annotated editions with the extras and go through all of them again. But I was stalled until the announcement of his new 30th anniversary edition, signed by the author in hardback with red sprayed page edges and attached cloth bookmark. I certainly couldn’t resist and bought all the Anno Dracula tomes I could find.

This one hooks the reader in straight away. It’s not really a spoiler to say that it deals with Jack The Ripper’s reign of terror in London and that, from the very first chapter, the reader is made aware of the identity of The Ripper... so stop reading now if you really don’t want to know but, honestly, it’s not a whodunnit, so it’s revealed straight away. Revealed, as it happens, in a ‘cover version’ of a famous, fictional murder by Jack The Ripper, that of Lulu Schön in Wedekind’s Pandoras Box (more famously remembered these days as the role which made Louise Brooks a household name... I saw Joanne Whalley play the part on stage in the 1990s and she also did a good job with it). In this alternate riff on the final scene of that play, Lulu is a vampire prostitute and Jack The Ripper, known at this point as Silver Knife, because he is cutting up vampire girls and you can’t do any damage without silver, kills her and goes back to his sanatorium. For it is revealed straight away that this is what has become of Bram Stoker’s character Jack Seward.

The rest of the book is about Charles Beauregard of the famed Diogenes Club (from Sherlock Holmes, the club still being run by brother Mycroft), given the task of finding the killer as Jack takes out his real life victims one by one... as his way of getting back at Dracula for what he did. Aiding him are the Si Fan, lead by Fu Manchu and his daughter from Limehouse and, the long lived ‘captured at 16 year old’ vampire heroine of this and a few of the other Anno Dracula novels, Geneviève Dieudonné. Not to be confused with Kim Newman’s other vampire character of the same description written under a pen name, also called Geneviève Dieudonné, from his Warhammer books (yeah, it gets kinda confusing). 

And it’s great stuff which, despite the number of references to other literary characters and events, is very much its own story... and an extremely well written one at that. As writer Neil Gaiman says in his introduction to this new, deluxe edition (honestly, who’d have thought it would come to a deluxe edition... nobody had heard of it when I first read it and it seemed to almost flounder in obscurity), the window dressing never gets in the way of the story. 

But such brilliant window dressing. Lots of the usual suspects turned up either named as such... like Dr. Jekyll, Mr, Hyde, Dr. Moreau, Colonel Sebastian Moran (accomplice of one Professor Moriarty, if you remember your Conan Doyle), Varney The Vampire and even, Count Orlok, the iconic ‘bootleg Dracula’ from the 1922 movie Nosferatu, who is put in charge of the Tower Of London after certain events take place in this book. Those who aren’t actually named are certainly alluded to, perhaps due to copyright restrictions... so there will be no doubt just who you are reading about when it comes to characters like Dr. Fu Manchu, for example or, in one wonderful moment where the costume and speech of a character makes the reference quite clear, a temporally displaced version of Carl Kolchak. 

There’s also some interesting characters from real life, too numerous to mention but a special shout out to Florence Stoker (husband of Bram... who has himself been sent to the notorious English concentration camp Devil’s Dyke, along with such anti-vampire factions as Sherlock Holmes) and also to John Merrick, The Elephant Man and his own part in the novel’s finale. 

The descriptions of the lifestyle and feeding rituals of the various vampire characters are well done, especially when Charles’ fiance is ‘turned’ and the politics of the piece, witnessed by such people on the street as vampire Inspector Lestrade, are actually quite chilling and do, it seems to me, reflect politics in ‘not so Great anymore Britain’ even more now than they did when the novel was first published, three decades ago. 

However, it’s also filled with a lot of humour and jokes, as you can probably tell from my vague descriptions, not least of which when an armadillo turns up in Dracula’s Buckingham Palace near the end of the novel, mirroring the armadillo seen briefly near the start of Universal’s 1931 version of Dracula (that completely popped me out of the novel and got me chuckling, I can tell you). Also, the great thing about re-reading this 30 years on is... I get more of the references now. Such as Genevieve being pursued by an elder, hopping vampire from the movie Mr. Vampire (a film I still have yet to see but, my understanding is I will become acquainted with it soon, probably before this review goes up even).** 

And, it has to be said, it’s got an absolutely brilliant ending (which has completely thrown me into confusion as I just started reading Mr. Newman’s relatively new comic book sequel to the tale in terms of setting... more on that when that review goes up and I may have more clarity by the end of it) and it’s followed by the author’s annotations on certain ‘spot the reference’ antics throughout the novel (although, as he admits himself, certainly not all of them). 

As if this wasn’t enough, this edition also includes a new story set in 1899... The Chances Of Anything Coming From Mars. This is told first person by the vampire version of Colonel Sebastian Moran and deals with he and various other characters, such as Professor Challenger, as they go to deal with... as you might expect from the title... the arrival of a martian fleet in Woking. In this alternate version of H. G. Wells The War Of The Worlds, the martians certainly don’t die from the common cold as they do in the original novel, but I won’t spoil the twists and turns of this one here. But, once again there are various misplaced pop culture references such as, during a description of speculations about the martians, ones which look like “pygmies wearing roman helmets”... so yeah, Marvin The Martian from the old Warner Brothers cartoons finally gets a look in too. And there’s also an excellent gag which is a literary equivalent of the comically timed ‘excised scenes’ from Grindhouse put into effect. Really wonderful stuff.

As is the whole darned book, which I’ve rattled on about enough for now, I think. Anno Dracula is still one of my favourite novels and an absolutely brilliant read. Definitely give this new edition a go if you’ve not read it before and keep an eye out on the blog in the, relatively, near future as I read and re-read myself through the entire series. 

*Warm blooded, non-vampires.

**That dates when I wrote this somewhat... my review of Mr. Vampire can be found here. 

One Night In The Tropics

Third Base

One Night In The Tropics
USA 1940 Directed by A. Edward Sutherland
Universal/Shout Factory Blu Ray Zone A

Just before directing The Invisible Woman (reviewed here) in the same year, A. Edward Sutherland directed Allan Jones as one of the two leading men, along with Robert Cummings, in comedy vehicle One Night In The Tropics. Jones was, of course, a famous opera singer (and father of later singing sensation Jack Jones) who is perhaps best remembered for both his acting and singing as lead romantic support in two films made five and three years before this, namely the first two non-Paramount films that the Marx Brothers made for MGM under their new contract with Irvin Thalberg... A Night At The Opera and A Day At The Races. 

In this one, Jones and Cummings play friends Jim and Steve. Steve is supposed to be married on Saturday to the lovely Cynthia Merrick (played by Nancy Kelly) but Steve’s girlfriend Mickey, played by Peggy Moran (who genre fans may best remember as the female lead in the excellent sequel The Mummy’s Hand from the same year - one of eleven movies she starred in that year alone and reviewed here) is also on the scene. So Jim, who works for an insurance agency and, as played by Jones, is the confident one of the two, invents a Love Insurance Contract for Steve, guaranteeing he’ll marry Cynthia by 2pm the following Saturday, or his insurance company has to pay out a million dollars. 

Shenanigans and complications ensue as the two friends try to keep the wedding going when, by the end, it’s clear that Steve wants to be with Mickey, while Jim and Cynthia have also fallen for each other. And, as you would expect from a film shot in 1940, the template for the film and the style of dialogue is very 1930s screwball comedy here. Alas, it’s also hindered with some terrible songs by the likes of, if you can believe the film’s actual credits, rather than their absence on the IMDB for this film, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein. These are... definitely not songs these two musical giants will be remembered for, that much I can tell you.  

The real stars of the show though, and the reason I found myself watching it, are the two supporting actors who are making their movie debut here as a comedy duo. You see, this film kicks off Shout Factory’s beautiful, 28 film Blu Ray set of Abbot And Costello - The Universal Collection and Bud Abbott & Lou Costello here work for a local night club owner played by William Frawley. 

And it’s a likeable enough film with a typically convoluted plot which is, apparently, based on a novel by Earl Der Biggers... who will always be known best for writing the six Charlie Chan novels which kickstarted various film cycles and TV shows (live action and animated) for his famous fictional detective. But, as I said, the real stars of the show, who were being given a kind of try out here, were Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Now, the two were already known for their radio show by this point so it’s nice that, when the two first turn up on screen doing one of several of their routines interwoven around the plot, you hear their voices only for 30 seconds or so, before the camera moves to a shot where they are both on screen. 

They start off their first romp with a typical ‘Abbott cons Lou out of money’ routine... you know the kind of thing, “Give me two tens for a five” with Lou half catching on and then doing himself out of even more money. And their most famous routine also makes its film debut with them... apparently the first thing they shot, although it comes maybe half way through the movie as cut together... the immortal “Who’s On First” routine about the baseball players. And it’s nice seeing this and other routines in early stages and, you can figure out just how they developed in later years when these sketches were repeated in movies or in TV (and I would assume they all came from the radio and stand-up first). 

It’s also interesting to see the way things don’t quite work around them perfectly, technically in the movie. I mean, there are a fair few instances (especially with other actors) where the long shot takes and mid-shot takes don’t quite match but trying to get around any continuity issues also means that certain things happen, or in this case don’t, which gives a little unneeded theatricality to proceedings. Such as when the boys do an extended routine at a hot dog stand with neither of them actually getting to eat any of their hot dogs... just waving them around and repeatedly almost taking a bite... the sausage lengths wouldn’t change between cuts.

The movie was, it would be safe to say, a resounding failure at the box office but Abbott and Costello were popular enough on the back of this film that the studio offered tham a two picture contract in a more prominent role with an option to extend and the rest, as they say, is history. It’s perhaps a little telling that this film, when re-released in cinemas at the tail end of the 1940s, was cut down quite a bit so, proportionately, the Abbott and Costello material was more foregrounded against the rest of the film. 

And that’s that, I think, for One Night In The Tropics... despite my dad moaning that we had to watch the songs rather than skip them I actually found the picture charming and quite sparkly, with Alan Jones playing a much less naive character than he did when he was supporting The Marx Brothers. My aim is to watch all the other movies in this set with my dad* so, yeah, watch out for more reviews soon. 

*That sadly might not now happen. 
More on that at some point in the future. 

Death Line

Obstructing The Doors 
Causes Delay And 
Can Be Dangerous

Death Line
aka Raw Meat
UK/USA 1972 
Directed by Gary Sherman 
Network Blu Ray Zone B
 
Death Line is a film I’ve been meaning to catch up to for years. It used to get shown a lot on TV when I was a kid in the 1970s and it was one of those films which got talked about in the playground the next day at school... although I was never allowed to stay up late and watch it back in those days. 

If you like looking at London locations from the 1970s then you’re in for a treat... the whole film takes place around the Russell Square, Holborn and Aldwych areas, primarily in Russell Square underground where the main protagonists, college couple Alex (David Ladd) and Pat (Sharon Gurney) stumble on a man who they think might be dying, on the stairs leading off the platform, after the last train has gone through. When they fetch a policeman, the man is gone but, because the man’s identity is known to be a big shot at Whitehall, the local police in the form of Inspector Calhoun (played by Donald Pleasence) and his assistant, Sergeant Rogers (played by Norman Rossington) investigate. The police get nowhere but, eventually, catch up to the college kids when Pat is kidnapped by... what lies beneath... and Alex goes down into the warren of old tube construction tunnels to look for her. 

What actually lies beneath is the last surviving descendant of a group of people abandoned and left unrescued when the tunnels for a station that was never completed, in the 1800s, collapsed. A lone surviving cannibal feeding off stray tube passengers, who gets along in grunts and gestures with his woman (who is short lived in the film and dies before the next in line can born, prompting him to capture another female to mate with). He also has the plague (as did all the descendants of the survivors trapped in the air pockets below) and looks as grotesque as his mutilated victims. Later, in scenes where he is terrorising Pat (in such a way that you also have to feel sorry for the savage too), he uses the only piece of language he has picked up over the years, repetitively, in the hopes he can be understood... “Miiind the doors!”.

And it’s actually a little gem of a horror film, it has to be said (although technically more of a thriller, I reckon). Although there are a couple of scenes of brutal violence (such as when a station cleaner gets his broom pushed through his torso) its the grim looking sets filled with half mutilated and disease ridden bodies, beautifully captured with slow moving camera (often lasting for many minutes), that are quite striking and seem as strong, probably stronger, than even the Italian zombie movies which were to come out half a decade later. Which is why, I’m sure, it was such a big hit with the kiddies in the school playground the next day, after it had various TV screenings. It’s actually quite hard stuff... in fact, the US version which screened for AIP under the title Raw Meat, had some of the gorier scenes trimmed before it got into their cinemas at the time. 

The acting is pretty great in this too. Donald Pleasence is like I’ve never seen him before and certainly demonstrates his range. Playing a very unsympathetic Inspector who is pretty nasty to everyone he comes in contact with but, not so much that he can’t take his long suffering sergeant to the local for a binge drinking session (a scene where both he and Rossington were ad libbing the whole lot, they really got drunk for the occasion). There’s also a cameo scene starring Christopher Lee as an MI5 man. He and Pleasence are never in the same shot until Lee sits down on a sofa, due to the contrast in heights between the shorter Pleasence and Lee’s much taller frame. 

All in all, Death Line is a pretty entertaining slice of UK terror (not sure how much input the US contingent had) and the, now sadly defunct, Network Blu Ray release also includes on its print, the original X Certification card from the time... which was nice to see again after so many decades. But, yeah, if you like interesting and somewhat slow burn thrillers then it’s worth your time if you can see it and can get an uncut UK version. I’m glad to have finally seen this thing after all these years. 

Jesse Stone - Night Passage

 

The Stone Collector

Jesse Stone - Night Passage
USA 2006 Directed by Robert Harmon 
Sony Pictures TV Blu Ray Zone 1

So, although it’s the second of the nine (to date) Jesse Stone TV movies made, Night Passage is actually a prequel to the previous story (which had apparently been based on the fourth of Robert B. Parker’s Jesse Stone novels). Which throws up an anomaly of sorts because, although Polly Shannon is back as his girlfriend who got killed in Stone Cold (reviewed here), she starts up with him here but also temporarily finishes with him. But I don’t believe this actress is back for any of the other installments so, I’m guessing either the second and third books were not adapted later or, maybe the actress was just not available and she was either replaced or written out, is my guess. But at the moment, I don’t know how these two got back on track so... maybe I’ll never find out (well... I guess maybe I could read the books at some point but, since the writer’s various series’ are all a part of a shared world, I’d feel obligated to read everything he’s written and I already have too many books on hold). 

Anyway, Tom Selleck once again stars as Jesse Stone but, as I said, it’s a prequel so, we start with him and his dog making the long drive to Paradise, Massachusetts, fleeing his ex-wife and former police job, to go on an interview for a job as the police chief there. Which he gets but, his suspicions are instantly aroused because, he was a little drunk for the interview and he doesn’t understand why they hired him. It soon becomes clear, after the murder of the previous post owner, that Hasty Hathaway, the guy who practically runs the town and who hired him (played by Saul Rubinek) is involved with some dirty dealings and, quite possibly, just wanted a man who would look the other way and hide from life as the police chief. But this is not who Jesse is and he brings his own brand of hard work and justice to the town... naturally.

The tone is quite grim in places (there’s a heartbreaking scene with Jesse's dog, who has liver disease) and, again, Selleck plays Stone as someone of mostly few words and he does a lot of his acting with his face and expressions. These TV films obviously embrace what I like to think of as ‘interior cinema’, where the various characters (and by extension the actors portraying them) are allowed to wander around in silence with their thoughts. 

And, once again, Selleck is surrounded by a team of actors who are all very good and his character bounces off of them quite well. I mean, I liked who I was supposed to like and I hated the main villain so, yeah, everyone is doing their job really well. Especially a character played by Viola Davis, who I only know for her roles in the former incarnation of the DC cinematic universe... she makes a good support for Selleck’s cop here. Again, I don’t think she’s in that many so... I’m expecting more death in this series of movies before long. 

There’s also some nice cinematography. The director really knows his way around on these and there are some nice shots, such as the lead villain (played by Stephen Baldwin) sitting in his car stalking Jesse, the coffee he’s drinking perfectly reflected in each of the lenses of his sunglasses. Little things like that really go a long way and make me feel like I’m in safe hands with this series (I think this director helmed at least seven of these nine movies). 

Now, there is no real mystery in this again and I guess that’s just Parker’s style of writing these things. I mean, this is a hard boiled cop story rather than a whodunnit, for sure. You know who all the villains are pretty much right from the first ten minutes and it’s more a case of waiting to see how Jess catches onto the facts rather than trying to identify who the lead suspects are. It’s probably better this way as it makes them less predictable, for sure. And, yeah, okay... I really enjoyed Night Passage. My dad was right, I do like these and I’m looking forward to taking a look at the next one in the series soon.

Mon Oncle

The Man From Oncle

Mon Oncle
France/Italy 1958
Directed by Jacques Tati
Studio Canal UK Blu Ray

Mon Oncle is the second of Jacques Tati’s films where he plays his beloved character Monsieur Hulot (uncredited, for some reason). It was made five years after Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (reviewed here) and he won Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards for his trouble. 

This time around we see Hulot living in an apartment of a maze like, multistory house (which was actually two houses put together) and, said house and his elabourate route to his apartment at the top is definitely something I’ve seen done before... or rather, after. Like I said in my review of the previous movie, these films were much loved and cast a very long shadow of influence on the film industry (globally, not just in France). I’m sure, for example, there’s a very similar sequence rendered in homage in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch (reviewed here). 

Most of the action, though, is split between the local environment... as Hulot collects his sister’s son from school and also takes walks around the neighbourhood with him... and at his brother-in-law’s high tech home, built by his company. The sister is played by Adrienne Servantie, her husband is played by Jean-Pierre Zola and their ‘always up to mischief’ son is played by Alain Bécourt. There’s also some action at the brother-in-law’s factory as he tries to employ Hulot to help him out. 

Like the first movie, there’s not too much dialogue and it’s a slow comedy of observations as Hulot and the local populace find themselves in various comical situations and eccentricities. There’s the road sweeper who talks so much to all and sundry that he never manages to move his pile of rubbish, for example. Or the wonderful moment when a dog is snarling at the toothy fish that Hulot has in his bag.

About those dogs... the movie begins and ends with a bunch of dogs, rummaging through the bins of the neighbourhood in the morning and, this is where the film also ends. And these dogs are prominent anchor points throughout the film, one of which is the dog owned by Hulot’s brother-in-law, 

Now, I have to say that, this one is another slow burn of a movie and, unlike Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, I didn’t quite warm to this one in the same way and so I prefer the first one. I have to say though that, like the first one, the film is extremely clever and has a lot of great visual gags. Such as the way Hulot has to angle the open window of his flat in just the right way every morning so that the reflection from the sun hits the canary in the building opposite to get it to sing. Or, when he’s trying to fix a problem caused by the kid (involving some decorative plant life) and he’s in the grounds of the high tech home at night, the two round windows at the top of the house become eyes that follow him around with the pupils made up of the husband and wife peering out into the night. 

Also, unlike Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, this film is shot in colour and there are some really nice colour combinations captured for the film, not least of which is the combination of hues found in the high tech home itself. The mise en scène is absolutely stunning in this and even if some of the comedy antics of the various characters don’t quite wash with you, the film at the very least looks great so, yeah, something for everyone, perhaps. 

In a way, this film reminded me a little of the Peter Sellars vehicle The Party (which my friend Kerry used to love so much) and, as I said in my previous review, the influence of Tati on Sellars, especially his work on the Inspector Clouseau films, seems pretty obvious (and I’m sure Rowan Atkinson and his Mr. Bean creation must also have been heavily influenced by Tati too). 

Okay, I think that’s me just about done with Mon Oncle. Unlike the first Hulot film (which I really have to watch again soon), this one felt a little flatter to me but I could still marvel at some of the clever, visual jokes and I can certainly see why this film captured the imagination in the way it did. I shall certainly be continuing with these films, for sure. 

Fantastic Voyage

Carry On Up 
The Artery

Fantastic Voyage
Directed by Richard Fleischer
USA 1966
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers swarming in to protect the organism.

It’s been a fair few decades now since I last revisited the film Fantastic Voyage but, I thought I’d give it another look in the Blu Ray era, to see how much better the film would look in this format. Well, it turns out it looks pretty good still, which I would expect from a film as visually rich and well designed as this one.

The film starts off very strongly with a pre-credits sequence which includes a truly great shot of a TWA jet coming in for a landing at night... and also a car crash and minor gun battle. Then there’s a wonderful title sequence where various sound effects relating to the medical machinery around a scientist being kept in a coma, acts as a backdrop to the titles and a graphic of a stop watch countdown. 

The plot to this one is very simple but also almost cyclic when you find out the reason of the mission the main characters have to go on. Basically, actor Stephen Boyd is recruited to join up with a team of scientists and a submarine pilot, played by Donald Pleasence, William Redfield, Arthur Kennedy and Raquel Welch (in her first proper staring role after two years of TV bit parts and two films away from the film which, in the same year, would catapult her to international fame and truly put her on the map, Hammer’s One Million Years BC, partially due to the publivity campaign). The top two big wigs where Boyd shows up are played by Edmond O'Brien and Arthur O'Connell (who I best remember in the Marilyn Monroe movie Bus Stop, although I haven’t seen it in well over thirty years... need to catch up with that one again too, I reckon).

Basically, the scientist who is so important has a blood clot on the brain and the only way it can be operated on is from inside the human body. Luckily, he’s taken to the Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces and it’s here that a submarine, along with its occupants, will be shrunk down to a very small size and injected into the guy’s blood stream, so the crew can make their way into the brain and operate on the clot with a laser gun. Boyd’s special agent is there to help out and also act out as security because, it’s strongly believed that one of the crew is a saboteur who wants to end the scientist’s life. Why? Because the scientist has discovered the way to keep things miniaturised for longer than an hour but he was attacked by foreign foes before he had the opportunity to pass that knowledge on. The script does everything it can to point the finger at Arthur Kennedy, the surgeon, being the traitor but, any film fan will probably twig the true ‘bad guy in medical science clothing’ from the get go.

And so the crew are injected into the man’s bloodstream in a tale including a number of set pieces where things go wrong - they end up going through the heart (while the people monitoring from the outside stop the patient’s heart for no longer than sixty seconds... can the Proteus, their nuclear sub, make it through in time?), a scene where they have to go through the inner ear and somebody outside drops a pair of scissors (sending the crew inside the body flying all over the place) and the memorable moment when Raquel Welch, in her skin tight diving suit, is attacked by antibodies in the immune system and the rest of the crew have to try and pull them off her before she is suffocated to death. 

It’s a great film with some truly interesting and, at the time, cutting edge special effects with some beautiful colours. Even the scenes outside the body look stunning, with Fleischer using lots of vertical and horizontals to split up the compositions (including a big cage of criss crosses which can be artificially opened and closed in front of the camera to push the patterns in the visuals).There’s also a wonderful shot near the start where Boyd is asked to stay in his car and the floor opens up and the car descends to the underground headquarters where the ‘operation’ will be performed. It’s shot in such a way that the perspective of the angle combined with the car going down makes it look like the car is shrinking... which is, of course, a really nice bit of foreshadowing of just what is going to happen to the submarine and its occupants later in the story. 

The score is kinda interesting too... there’s no music at all for almost the first forty minutes of the film (including no score over the credits... apparently the first American film to do that) and when the sub is injected into the blood stream for the final hour (which is more or less shot in real time because that’s when everyone will start to grow to normal size again), the music immediately comes in, courtesy of Leonard Rosenman’s 12 tone serial score, one of the first movies to employ the technique. In fact, the first film to ever use that style was by the same composer for the 1955 psychological film The Cobweb.

The novelisation duty of this one was given to acclaimed science fiction writer Isaac Asimov but he found so many flaws with the science in the movie, that he spent a lot of time rewriting it and getting it all right before he handed it in. Because of some of the difficulties in production (some of which may have been rewrites when Asimov informed the studio), he still managed to get the novelisation into shops before the release of the film. 

And that’s really all I’ve got to say about Fantastic Voyage other than, many people such as James Cameron have tried, and failed, to get a remake going for any length of time... which is a shame because a modern remake would probably be a good idea for this one. As it is, though, the film is deserving of its reputation as a classic and it even inspired a sixties cartoon series sequel, which I used to watch as repeats in the early seventies. A great film and certainly worth upgrading to Blu Ray, for sure. 

Jesse Stone - Stone Cold

Two Birds

Jesse Stone - Stone Cold
USA 2005 Directed by Robert Harmon 
Sony Pictures TV Blu Ray Zone 1

Warning: Some spoilers.

Stone Cold is the first of the nine Jesse Stone TV movies made over the space of around about a decade, starring Tom Selleck in the title role and adapted from the books by Robert P. Parker. My dad has always liked these things when they have been randomly caught on television by him and so I bought him a Blu Ray set of the movies, Jesse Stone - The Complete Collection, for his birthday a couple of years ago. 

Now this is a first time watch for me and, while this is technically the first episode, the producers (and I think Selleck is one of them) have decided to go for the fourth book in the series first. Which means, the next one I’ll see, is actually a prequel to this one and, I’m guessing, gives the series some wild continuity issues... in much the same way that Saltzman and Broccoli gave themselves continuity issues when they decided to film Dr. No as the first of the James Bond books for the big screen. Because, I would guess that at least one of the regular characters who gets killed off here will presumably be back in the next episode. It’s also a mite problematic in that these books are set in the same ‘universe’, so to speak, as Parker’s Spenser books and share some of the same characters. Which means that the same characters here are not played by the same actors and actresses they are in the many Spenser adaptations. So, yeah, not seen any of those so I’m going to ignore it and not make comments about those issues here either. Let’s just get into it. 

So the majority of these movies are directed by Robert Harmon (who you may remember shot a popular movie called The Hitcher, with Rutger Hauer, many decades ago). And this first movie has Selleck’s Jesse Stone already set up as the police chief of Paradise in Massachusetts  (which is apparently a parody of a real place called Marblehead, for those of you who like your geography). And it’s pretty good actually... shot well while Selleck and pretty much most of the people in this do a really good job. Stone is a full on ‘laconic cop’ in the best vein of a 1940s film noir and he brings the glamour and know how of his former, failed version of the job in a big city, to the local police who have a murder on their hands. 

Now, this has two things going on. One is the rape of a girl in the local high school and the other is a string of motiveless serial killings. The two stories rub against each other but only come together in an unexpected way, fleetingly when one set of characters is used as bate, at the end of the story. But this is not a whodunnit and so, for instance, the crazy husband and wife serial killing team, who have no motive and just like doing what they’re doing, are known to the audience right from the start. As they kind of are to Jesse, who believes in his hunches... he just needs to find evidence or some other way of putting these two down. 

Perhaps because of the lack of whodunnit structure, the film does telegraph itself somewhat. Jesse has an ex-wife he has partially fled from (I’m guessing I’ll know all I want to know about his back story when I watch the next one) but he has a higher up in the legal profession (if I caught her job right) as a girlfriend and also sexual overtures from another legal professional (which I’m assuming will develop over the course of these movies). And, what can I say... about halfway through I said to my dad, “She’s not going to survive the movie, is she?’ and, no sooner were these words out of my lips when, maybe thirty seconds later, one of the key characters was killed with two gunshots to her chest. So, yeah, the film is nothing if not predictable but, I guess that’s more to do with Robert B. Parker’s original novel (assuming it’s a true adaptation) and less to do with the way the screenplay is written. 

That being said, the characters and performances are all gold here (including a turn from a much younger version of Viola Davis than I’ve seen before) and I really had a good time with this. The dialogue is great and I felt like I cared about a lot of the characters... which is half the trick, I guess. The camerawork and editing is good too, with a kind of slick feel (boosted somewhat by Jeff Beal’s score) and I was reminded a little of the kind of things Michael Mann was making in the 1980s, to be honest, in terms of the feel of this thing.

So, yeah, that’s me done on Jesse Stone - Stone Cold and I’m looking forward to watching the rest of these things with my dad... who’s pleased to be watching them in Blu Ray quality, I suspect. So will report back on the ‘prequel’ episode soon enough, I think. 

Sherlock Holmes

Games Afoot

Sherlock Holmes
USA 1922 Directed by Albert Parker
Goldwyn Pictures Corporation
Kino Lorber Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Some spoilers.

Well this is an interesting one... first of all though, if you want to go looking for this on the IMDB then you need to look under the title Moriarty. I’ve no idea why because, it then states in brackets that Sherlock Holmes was the original title and I can find no reasons as to why it should be called after his famous literary nemesis on the IMDB. I mean, yeah, Moriarty is the lead villain here but... what’s going on with the IMDB lately anyway?*

Anyway, restoration on this film began in the 1970s from just a few found scraps and, over the decades, we finally got to here, which I had presumed was the full film. It’s not a bad restoration, considering what it could have looked like and all I will say about that is I’m glad I watched it on a shiny Blu Ray because I’m sure it would have looked far worse on a DVD edition (or VHS transfer for that matter). 

Now, there’s a warning that this is not quite Sherlock Holmes as you know him. It is the famous Sir Arthur Conan Doyle character, as portrayed by John Barrymore but, it’s actually based on a play of the same name by William Gillette. And, okay yes, there is a background element of romance in this version and, by the end of the picture, Holmes does indeed... ‘get the girl’. However, I really don’t think the portrayal is that far out and I think that, other than the character’s longing for love as a not too blatant sub plot, it’s actually quite a good screen version of the character, in all other respects. 

Now the film surprised me because the first part of the story takes place when Holmes and Dr. Watson (played here by the steadfast Roland Young, making his film debut) are both still attending college. Holmes, through Watson, becomes involved with the case of another student, a prince, who is accused by police of taking the ‘athletic funds’ of the college. It turns out to be notorious underworld criminal genius Moriarty and Holmes gets the prince off the hook and goes out of his way to meet the master criminal in a pretty classic verbal encounter between the two, where each shows they’re a match for the other. Years later, Holmes is firmly embedded in 221 Baker Street (okay, so they got the address slightly wrong but, there are some great location shots of what London used to look like at the time of filming... it was filmed in the US, London and Switzerland) as a consulting detective of some repute. When the prince from the first half is being blackmailed with letters regarding his affair with a lady from the early parts of the picture, Holmes takes the case (because he’s besotted by the lady in question’s sister, who is in peril) and once more he is matching wits with the machinations of Moriarty’s criminal network (depicted visually in the early parts of the picture as a web, with Moriarty as the spider at the centre).

And that’s all I'll say on the plot but I will say that this is the first film I think I’ve seen with John Barrymore (of a very long line of famous actors, all who seem to have had drink problems in their respective eras, right down to the modern member of the clan, of course, Drew Barrymore) and I can tell you I was very impressed with his naturalistic acting style here. It’s always about expression with silent movie acting but he’s actually quite subtle and  I really believed him as a person here, rather than just as a character in a movie. I think I’m going to have to seek out his famous portrayal of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde next, I guess. 

Also making his debut here is future movie star William Powell, far from when he was playing The Thin Man. Also, if you want to see what a young Hedda Hopper was like as an actress, rather than a lauded Hollywood gossip columnist, she also has a role here. So the film is of much interest to fans of the early talkie era of Hollywood too, for sure.

My one gripe is that, although Homes is depicted making his usual deductions and even goes full on deerstalker and pipe by the end of the movie, not to mention adopting a clever disguise at one point, there isn’t really an element of mystery to the proceedings. The audience is pretty much in on the crimes depicted every step of the way so nothing is left for the spectator to unravel along with Holmes. Also, no Mrs. Hall in this and, good, because Holmes’ Baker Street lodgings are burned to the ground by Moriarty at one point.

All in all though, apart from the somewhat dreadful organ score which has been written here to accompany the movie, I had a pretty good time with Sherlock Holmes and I think I’ll need to track down some of the other silent Holmes movies in time, if I can actually find any (my old bootlegs were in terrible shape, when I tried to watch them). Unfortunately, even after many years of trying to piece this one together, they reckon they’re still missing about 26 minutes but the film doesn’t really jump around any and, unless there’s some kind of miraculous discovery at some point (as there was with Metropolis a few years ago), then I think this is the longest version you’re going to be able to see. So if you’re looking to see this one at some point, this Kino Lorber edition is probably he best opportunity you’re going to get at present.

*Since I wrote this, I’ve found out that Moriarty was the British release title... why it should be called that on the IMDB, though, is anybody’s guess. 

The Devil Rides Out

Separating The Wheatley 
From The Chaff

The Devil Rides Out
UK 1967
Directed by Terence Fisher
Hammer/Shout Factory Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Retire comfortably to a chalk circle if you don’t want to be attacked by spoilers.

It’s been a while since I last revisited the jewel in Terence Fisher’s directorial crown, The Devil Rides Out and, probably even longer since I read Dennis Wheatley’s best selling 1934 novel of the same name. And when I say best selling... I mean best selling. I remember as a kid, growing up in the 1970s, long before Stephen King became a name on bookshop shelves. If you were looking for fiction (of pretty much any kind, horror or not) you would find the shelves of book sellers and newsagents stacked high with large quantities of Wheatley’s tomes (and this one and The Haunting Of Toby Jugg were in pretty much every shop in the country that dealt with popular reading material, if memory serves). Bizarrely, they seem all but extinct these days but certainly, back in the 1930s through to, maybe the very early 1980s, these were wherever you looked. 

The Devil Rides Out was actually the second of 11 books that Wheatley wrote about the central character The Duke de Richleau (yes, fictional ancestor of that other famous Richleau). It was also the second film adaptation to feature him although, in the first one back in the 1930s, his character and name were changed somewhat. Only three of that series, this one included, had a basis in the occult as Wheatley was more known, at one time, for his pulpy adventure stories rather than his ‘few and far between’ occult adventures.

In this movie adaptation, which was pushed for by Christopher Lee (a friend of Wheatley’s) who plays The Duke de Richleau, he is joined by his three companions from those novels (making up the four modern musketeers in spirit, as I think they were originally pitched)... Rex (played by Leon Greene but dubbed by Patrick Allen), Simon (played by Patrick Mower) and Richard (played by Paul Eddington... best known, perhaps, for his stints on The Good Life and Yes, Minister). Other characters of interest are Nike Arrighi as Tanith, Sarah Lawson as Richard’s wife Marie and Charles Gray as devil worshipping satanist Mocata (obviously based on Aleister Crowley although, I very much suspect from an anecdote I read once by Wheatley about his meeting the man in question, that it’s based more on the sensationalist idea of Crowley than, perhaps, the personality of the man himself). 

And it’s a pretty good film. There are lots of elements missing such as the part of the plot dealing with the mummified penis talisman being sought to start a Second World War and using the Swastika, referring back to the days before it became a Nazi symbol, to deflect evil (it’s replaced by a common or garden variety Christian cross in the movie) but it’s actually a pretty good adaptation by another writing legend, Richard Matheson, who manages to extract and translate into film terms what was useful and yet still remain true to the spirit of the novel. 

Director Fisher does some nice things with vertical uprights and interior features, not to mention lighting to make very clean shot compositions to carry the action across. I especially like what he does with Patrick Mower’s shadow in one sequence, where it’s lit in such a way that it towers above him but, when his sense of power is taken from him by Mocata and he joins him once more as a complicit victim, he is suddenly lit from above and his shadow diminishes in size to something much smaller than him. 

Also, there’s a nice prominent colour palette of rich blues and pastel mauves in much of the picture, especially when something dark and devil worshippy comes up, later added to with some deep reds to warm everything up even more. 

Now, about those colours... I deliberately bought the US Shout Factory restoration of the film (the title of the film on the print is The Devil’s Bride, the original US title chosen for fear of people thinking this might be a Western) because I wanted one where the original special effects hadn’t been that tampered with (there was some revisionist style upgrading with CGI in various modern/recent versions of the film) and I was right to do so. However, the ‘other’ restoration by Studio Canal (a company name I’ve come to hate over the years for various reasons) is also included in the extras on this disc and, when I put it on to compare some scenes, I was horrified with the difference in the restoration. Some of the night scenes did not look very dark at all and, in terms of those beautiful rich colours I’d noticed... well... all I’m saying is the Studio Canal version (which I think is the only one available on Blu Ray over here in the UK, where the film was actually made) looks pretty washed out and mediocre in comparison to the main one featured here on the Shout Factory disc. I’m so glad I trusted my gut on this. 

Rounding out the extras on the Shout Factory edition are a ‘making of’ section, a talk about the movie by the always watchable Kim Newman and another one by the similarly worthwhile Jonathan Rigby (plus a couple of trailers where, on one of them, Leon Green’s voice isn’t completely dubbed out). 

And, yeah, The Devil Rides Out is, much like the novel on which it’s based, a fine romp of an entertainment and it even features a less than subtle but quite wonderful score by Hammer alumnus James Bernard... one of the few Hammer film scores which actually got a CD release for a short while (I put it on for a spin every now and again). If you are into films which take traditional (rather than strictly true life) devil rituals and weave them into fantastic tales of supernatural dread as a metaphor for good verus evil, with an absolutely top notch performance by Christopher Lee (playing the hero rather than the villain role he was often landed with) then this one should go right to the top of your list. It’s one of those films I come back to every 15 years or so and, yeah, I’m hoping this won’t be the last time I give it some play. 

True Detective Season 3

Misdementia

True Detective Season 3
HBO 2019
8 episodes

Warning: Some spoilers

Series 3 of True Detective is probably my least favourite of the three so far. The characters seemed, at first, less interesting and the case involving one dead child and one missing child seemed rather slight compared to the amount of stuff going on in the first two seasons. That being said, the characters in this one did grow on me over time and things were kept fairly watchable without it getting too dull so, yeah, I still enjoyed this one.

Like the first series (and the second, to a smaller extent), this one deals with multiple time zones as an account looking back by central protagonist Detective Wayne Hays, played by Mahersala Ali. He looks at the missing child problem from its original case in 1980, a return to the case after the main characters have gone their separate way and found each other again (as in the previous two seasons), set in 1990 and, then, a third period of him being an interviewee on this great unsolved case, contemporary to when this series was made and everyone is old. 

Well, his partner Detective Roland West, played brilliantly by Stephen Dorff is old. Hays’ girlfriend in the 80s and wife in the 90s, played by Carmen Ejogo, who wrote a best selling book about the unsolved case, has passed away and he is being partially cared for by his son, as he has something like the onset of dementia. The mother of the missing girl and father, played by Scoot McNairy, also come to nasty end in the 1990s.

Actually, as we see the detectives work the case and hold their own dark secret (which again feels like it’s the kind of thing James Ellroy would write), the most interesting aspect of this show is that, due to intrusions of dementia at unexpected moments, we realise from pretty early on that the narrative being spun is unreliable. 

Also, we have the ghostly hallucinations from the past of the modern day version of Wayne both scaring him but, also, in the end, helping him. Where it gets really interesting is the way the various directors start to show this manifestation. So the contemporary version of the character might stumble on a piece of his past playing out and watch it from a window or a door or some such… but then we’ll get a sense of the younger self picking up on that and turning to where the modern version of the character has been watching from… which presents as an almost supernatural manifestation but I think what it’s really doing is showing the audience how unreliable the modern memory of the scene in question is. Because we’re not seeing it like it played out, we’re seeing it as Wayne remembers it and then also the memory of Wayne picking up on himself watching, so to speak. 

Like the previous two series, the titles are nicely designed but rendered almost unwatchable owing to a terrible pop song playing on the soundtrack of each… I watched it once and then skipped it on the remaining episodes, just as I had in the first two shows. And it’s a short review I know but, that’s me pretty much played out on this third season of True Detective… I don’t have too much to say about this one other than a quick aside that I enjoyed seeing the newspaper headline concerning the two detectives in Season One (reviewed here). However, I am looking forward to starting on the fourth, supernatural infused season starring Jodie Foster very soon… which is the reason I started watching the show in the first place. You can be sure I’ll let you know how that one went at some point soon.

In The Line Of Duty IV

Klebb Sandwich

In The Line Of Duty IV
aka Royal Sister IV
aka Wong ga si je IV: Jik gik jing yan
Hong Kong 1989
Directed by Woo-Ping Yuen
Eureka Masters Of Cinema Blu Ray Zone B

Just a quick shout out of a review for what is known, mostly, as the fourth of the In The Line Of Duty films. Although, on the print used here for this new transfer from Eureka Masters Of Cinema, In The Line Of Duty IV is titled up Royal Sister IV. And, of course, there’s no real link in terms of characters between this entry in the so called series and the previous three, two of which aren’t even known as In The Line Of Duty films... see my reviews of Yes Madam (here), Royal Warriors (here) and In The Line Of Duty III (here). And as for the Royal Sister films... nope, can’t find any trace of those on the internet at all... so goodness knows what territory it got released under that title. 

Okay, so this is apparently a much loved entry into the ‘series’ but, for me, it’s possibly the least engaging of these films mentioned here. I’m guessing one of the reasons it’s well thought of today is that it’s one of the early films of future superstar Donnie Yen (who’s been in loads of popular films over the years... the last time I saw him in an American film it was as the blind swordsman in John Wick IV , reviewed here). He plays the imaginatively named Officer Donny Yan. Here he’s teamed up with a female cop played by Cynthia Khan, as Inspector Yeung Lai-Ching, who was in the previous movie as a character with a similar name. Together they are trying to bring down drug dealers and are trying to keep their key witness/suspect, played by Yat-Chor Yuen, alive. 

However, they don’t realise that one of the cops is one of the bad guys... who has been assigned to take over the case. He’s played by Michael Wong, playing the equally imaginatively named Officer Michael Wong. What the heck are you Hong Kong action movies playing at guys? It doesn’t take that long to think of a name for a character, surely? And, in an American bashing twist, the reason he’s the bad guy is because he’s secretly working for the CIA. And it turns out it’s the CIA who are doing all the drug deals, to fund money for their organisation to be able to have the superior criminal investigation force over countries like... well, like Hong Kong I guess (whether you regard it as its own country or not is your call). 

So it’s a curious film which is the usual mix of action and thankfully less of the broad comedy you often get in these things. Although, for my money, it’s nowhere near as slick and watchable as the previous movie, which I’ve reviewed under the title In The Line Of Duty III (see above for review link).

Now, the action sequences are okay and hold their own but are not as spectacular as many I’ve seen in these kinds of movies. But there are some set pieces of note, such as a fight between Cynthia Khan and some bad guys hanging onto a hijacked ambulance... and also one where she’s fighting a tough karate woman hanging from lift cables too. Yeah, she does a lot of hanging off things and kicking people in this movie, it has to be said. 

Other fight scenes of note are a sword fight between her and Michael Wong and a motorcycle fight with big, clunky weapons featuring Donnie Yen... err... Donny Yan. Yeah, whatever. 

This film also has what I assume is one of the most unintentionally funny fight scenes of this genre. Where Yen is facing off against a guy who keeps throwing up pre-contact moves and making silly noises, to the point that he looks and sounds like a mad, demented, organ grinders monkey. Honestly, I am not sure how these guys managed to keep a straight face for these scenes. 

Another interesting moment is the way in which Michael Wong dies. He has been killing people by means of a Rosa Klebb-like retractable poison syringe in his boot... so he’s definitely got to go. However, once he’s disarmed...um... dis-shoed, there follows a truly lengthy fight sequence between him and the others where he finally dies and, as he falls to his death, he tears down the American flag as he does so... the same flag which is used to cover his face in death. So, yeah, I think it would be true to say there’s definitely an anti-American subtext to this movie. Well, I mean, not even a subtext really.

At the end of the day, In The Line Of Duty IV is watchable hokum, but nowhere near as good as the previous film, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not sure how many more of these films Eureka Masters Of Cinema are going to release but, I suspect these first four are the key ones from the franchise. If Hong Kong action is your thing then, you may want to add this one to your watch list. 

Byleth

My Kettle Byleth Over

Byleth - The Demon Of Incest
aka Il demone dell'incesto
Italy 1972 Directed by Leopoldo Savona
Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Yeah... there will have to be spoilers here as there’s not much else to talk about.

I picked up Byleth - The Demon Of Incest at the London Film & Comic Con five years ago because I liked the cover and I like the company putting it out. Leopoldo Savona is probably best remembered for a fistful of Italian Westerns he made rather than this, relatively obscure movie from late in his very short directing career. I hesitate to call it a horror film because... well let’s look at that provocative title... 

It’s true the main protagonist, Lionello (played by Mark Damon) has, in his past, been cavorting regularly with his sister Barbara (played by Claudia Gravy) in a way which takes things far beyond the realm of brotherly love. However, the plot is just about a string of women who are murdered with a three pronged dagger, which looks more like a garden implement that anything else and the film is more concerned with both these murders and Lionello’s failing mental health than any acts of incest. It’s all just talked about and by the time Lionello is reunited with Barbara in his big estate, she has gotten married and is no longer available so... yeah, no incest on show here other than the odd token kiss and declaration of passion. Which is fine... I didn’t really want to see any anyway... but it’s a bit of a misleading title in that respect. And, also in the respect, that it mentions a demon called Byleth... and this is where we get the big spoilers folks so stay away if you really don’t want to know.

There are no real twists on the plot other than my brief outline above. However I’m pretty sure most people will twig this right after the opening sequence where a local prostitute is murdered by the three pronged instrument thing (let’s just make a name up and call it ‘the mark of Byleth’ shall we?)... an atmospheric moment which is totally shattered by the intrusion of the rather nice opening titles showing old, torture filled and demonic etchings while an upbeat score plays at odds with the subject of the movie... but it’s actually Lionello committing the murders himself. He thinks it’s Byleth the demon, who he even conjures up at one point with a spell, after he can’t perform adequately in his sexual duties with a nice red headed servant girl, to kill her. But, yeah, he’s the only one who ever hears the demon and even in the scene where Barbara’s new husband see the demon himself, he realises it’s just Lionello riding around in different make-up. 

So, yeah... no actual demon in it either... bit of a rubbish title if you ask me.

Okay... so there are a few nice moments in this such as a sequence near the end where Mark can see himself projected as Byleth in the mirrors of the house racing towards him but, honestly, even with a few gratuitous sex scenes thrown in for good measure in its very short running time, the film comes off as a little lame and about as impotent as Lionello’s ability to maintain his enthusiasm for any ladies who are not his sibling. 

I’d like to say the cinematography was at least as striking as the Roger Corman or Mario Bava films this movie seems to be desperately trying to imitate but, yeah, there was nothing that made me sit up and take note at any time and it just seemed a bit pedestrian, to be honest. I mention those two people because Damon starred in one of each director’s important ones... namely The Fall Of The House Of Usher and Black Sabbath... and the film seems to be as dated in its time as it does now. It seems to be trying to harken back to those very early 1960s exercises in sustained gothic atmosphere with a little sex thrown in to attempt to make it more modern but... failing at it, it seems to me. 

The lack of any interesting twist outside the obvious conclusions that... Lionello is not a well person... gives the movie a real anticlimactic feel and even the end moments, when Lionello is stabbed by his alter ego, don’t throw up any supernaturally charged questions because it’s probably just taking place in his head and he’s just dying from the gunshot wounds inflicted on him by his sister’s husband. 

Saying all this, I kinda enjoyed it as an example of someone trying to do a Corman or Bava gothic way past its sell by date and there was an attractive entourage of naked young ladies to catch the eye. Saying that, though, my only real take home on that count was that, in olde worlde gothic era times, it looks like young ladies didn’t bother shaving thier armpits. So, yeah, I guess I learned something there... or at least had it reenforced that this was probably not something which happened in days gone byleth. 

Byleth - The Demon Of Incest is an okay film but I wouldn’t recommend it to most people. Asides from what looks like some water damage in certain scenes, the quality is pretty good for its age. Unusually for Severin, there are absolutely no extras on this thing at all... you just have a choice between the original Italian audio or a German audio track plus English subtitles. Oh... and a wonderful cover of a naked, red headed lady in peril which is easy on the eye. But, yeah, I’m not sure this would appeal to too many people out there. 

Strange Houses

Best Laid Plans

Strange Houses
by Uketsu
Pushkin Vertigo
ISBN 9781805335375

A very short review of a book I discovered when I was in a shop attached to the courtyard of Somerset House in London a little while ago (while taking in their slumbering courtyard sculpture), on the way to the August FrightFest. Uketsu is, apparently, a somewhat anonymous YouTuber in Japan who always appears masked and with a voice changer. He (or she) has also swept the reading market by storm and has recently become Japan’s best selling novelist. Two of his/her novels have so far been translated into English, including this one... Strange Houses... and a third is on its way.

This one caught my eye because of the spot varnished paperback cover of a house floor plan in shocking pink, blue and black... with a meat cleaver and a severed hand also plonked onto the design. And, when I opened it, I discovered that 90% of the spreads also included versions of a few floor plans of houses and that “The Chilling Japanese Mystery Sensation” was based on speculation by the characters (who are said to be the author and his acquaintances... but who I assume are completely fictional, despite the afterword of the book designed to make me think otherwise) and that you have to solve the mystery of the oddness of the floor plans in order to try and figure out what's really been going on with the occupants.

Which the characters, kind of do. So plans are shown to the reader and then details of various bits with highlighted areas are speculated on, as to issues like why there is a hidden crawlspace kind of passage here and where that might lead if overlapped with another level of the house... and so on and so forth. 

This is mostly told in terms of a series of conversations, like a screenplay or stage script might be written, in that, aside from various descriptions and scene settings, the characters are all named on the left with a colon and then their speech is written. to the right So, yeah, just like a script. Consequently, this makes for... well certainly a quicker read and, somehow in this case, a somewhat more immersive one too... especially once you see that a lot of the speculation about what the characters think the oddness of the plans mean is quite convincing. 

Once a second set of plans and a third main character is bought into the mix, the tale becomes not just a look at what is going on in these particular houses (one of which has been burned to the ground at some point) but also leads to who is involved in what is obviously a linked series of killings, leading to something rather more ritualistic and sinister, I would say. 

This one held my interest throughout the majority of the tale although, I have to say, I was having trouble remembering the various character names once the cast of the tale, so to speak, is opened up into new areas, involving a whole family history. And the ending... does the author land it or not? I couldn’t make up my mind but s/he certainly made a go of it by including an afterword section by one of the characters, giving the reader a slightly different perspective on things than the author (as a character) did. 

Put it this way, as I conclude here... Strange Houses was read by me over the space of just a couple of hours (if that) and, whether I thought the conclusion was a good pay off to the building mystery or not, I was certainly kept entertained for that time and I may seek out his other translated volume, Strange Pictures, at some point. Worth a look if you want something presented in a slightly different fashion for a small diversion. 

Daughter of Shanghai/King Of Chinatown

Anna-B

Daughter of Shanghai
aka Daughter Of The Orient
Directed by Robert Florey
USA 1937
Paramount Pictures
 
plus

King Of Chinatown
Directed by Nick Grinde
USA 1939
Paramount Pictures
Both screened in 35mm at NFT2 
on Saturday 20th September 2025

Warning: Some spoilers.

I’d booked three separate screenings of the Anna May Wong - The Art Of Reinvention* season at the NFT this year because I wanted to see her in more films and, honestly, three was all I could really afford, both in coin and time. And I was expecting this second visit, featuring a double bill of B movies from the late 1930s, to be a good chance to see Anna in a couple of talkies I’d not seen before, expecting her to really knock my socks off with her acting (which, to be fair, she did) and expecting not much else from them. 

What I got was so much more...

I mean, wow, these were both roughly an hour in length but they’ve got to be two of the most entertaining B movies I’ve seen in quite a while. These were rip roaringly paced aplenty and gave me an Anna May Wong I’d never seen, quite, like this before. 

For starters, she’s not talking in any stupid pidgin or broken English here... she’s fully playing a Chinese-American, born and bred in the US, just as she was in real life (the Daughter Of Shanghai title references her stage name when she goes undercover as an ‘exotic dancer’). So she just talks naturally and has a pretty amazing presence here... but in a slightly different way. Less mysterious but certainly still goddess-like. 

Also, she’s very much playing a woman of her own agency in both pictures and not some minor character or somebody doomed to die in the final act. Indeed, in Daughter Of Shanghai her part was greatly changed, tailored for her and made more important once she’d signed on the dotted line for Paramount. 

The casts in these are terrific too, for B movies. In both films, Wong’s romantic interest is played by Korean-American actor Philip Ahn, who does a really good job in both his roles... one as a police investigator and the other as a lawyer. In King Of Chinatown we have Akim Tamaroff playing a soon to be reformed, bad but getting good guy, heading up a protection racket. The real villains of both films, doubling up in tandem, are played by J. Carrol Naish and a very young Anthony Quinn. And that’s not all... in King Of Chinatown, Anna May’s father is played by Sidney Toler, just a year after he took over from the great Warner Oland as Charlie Chan. 

And, the real discovery for me... the chief henchman, a nasty piece of work... in Daughter Of Shanghai, with a moustache no less, was the great Larry ‘Buster’ Crabbe. Yep, Flash Gordon himself in the same year he played Buck Rogers (which featured Ahn’s brother as the diplomat for the Saturnians, reviewed here) and was about to shoot his third and final Flash Gordon serial, Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe (reviewed here). I’d not seen him play a villain before so this was a bit of a revelation. He was obviously trying to not let himself get typecast in certain roles, I suspect... but he does it really well. 

Daughter of Shanghai, tells a story which could easily be ripped from today’s headlines in the UK because it deals with human traffickers bringing cheap labour from overseas and forcing people to take them on in employment for bed and board (while getting rich off the fee to get them safely into the US). We see how ruthless they are at the start because, on the plane crossing over to America, when a government aircraft starts following them, they pull a lever and, in the back of the plane, the floor opens and drops the hopeful people to their death. 

Anna May plays the daughter of a prosperous store in Chinatown but, her father is killed when he starts to investigate the people who are threatening him to take in illegal immigrants and... well, the villains think Anna May’s character Lan Ying Lin is dead also, but she outsmarts them and gets away without them even realising it (she manages to pull this trick off twice, when left for dead in this movie). Then, rather then wait for Ahn to find out who is behind the smuggling ring, she goes undercover and abroad, finding out for herself before being rescued by Ahn and then returning to America to find the real ring leader. At which point the film turns into shooting and fist fights which would not look out of place in the best of the Republic serials. It’s... as I said... rip roaring stuff.

In King Of Chinatown, Wong plays successful surgeon Dr. Mary Ling, who saves the life and, looks after, Akim Tamaroff’s character... partially because she thinks her dad might have been responsible for the shooting in the first place and partially because she wants the money he’s paying her privately to look after him to fund her hospital when she goes to China. And it’s another brilliant story with double crosses, a fixed boxing match and, surprisingly, a whole lot of heart coming from Tamaroff’s mob boss, who is inspired by the good doctor to change his ways and turn over a new leaf. So... of course he gets killed before the end... the reach of the Hays Code strikes again. No crime unpunished... and all that.

Both films were presented in 35mm prints on loan and, honestly, I was absolutely in love with these two movies as I watched them. These both deserve decent, UK Blu Ray releases, for sure. 

My one big disappointment of the day was what the BFI did at the start of the screening... which made my blood boil. On a notice outside the door they’d put up a so called ‘trigger warning’. It read, "DAUGHTER OF SHANGHAI + KING OF CHINATOWN. King Of Chinatown contains racist attitudes, language and images including yellowface." This last, I suspect, referring to Sydney Toler’s make-up**. Honestly, these warnings really get under my skin. Are the woke brigade so unbelievably stupid that they can’t watch a movie in the context of its time. How crazy is this? I mean, if I was an ace surgeon and I went to that screening, would I be shocked that Anna May Wong was pretending to be a surgeon and maybe getting some stuff wrong? No. So why are people getting so sensitive when an actor is able to effectively pretend to be from another race. This stuff is crazy and these censors of public attitudes should be stopped. 

So, yeah, that put a slight krimp in my evening. But, honestly, Daughter Of Shanghai and King Of Chinatown were such good movies that my spirits soon lifted and I enjoyed the heck out of them (and I already want to see them again). So if you get the opportunity to check these ones out, do so is the advice I would give. 

*Alas, it was not to be. Real life stuff has caught up to me in the most unpleasant manner and I am now unable to attend that last screening, which was to be the day this blog post is published. To say I'm gutted would be an understatement.

**Also, I should probably point out here that Toler’s make-up, aphorisms and broken English further push the idea in the movie that the father is originally from China and is used to contrast Wong’s ‘born in America’ attitude towards the world... so yeah, not only effective but it serves a purpose.