The Thief Of Bagdad 1924

Arabian Heights

The Thief Of Bagdad 
USA 1924 Directed by Raoul Walsh
United Artists/Imprint Blu Ray Zone B

Five years after Douglas Fairbanks formed United Artists... with Mary Pickford (to whom he was married), Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith... he got very enthusiastic about doing this huge, expensive epic of a film, The Thief Of Bagdad. This is the first film featured in Imprint’s new The Thief Of Bagdad three movie Blu Ray restoration boxed edition. A couple of weeks before he died, my dad expressed a more than passing interest in, when he got well enough again, rewatching his favourite movie, the 1940s Korda version of The Thief Of Bagdad. Unbeknownst to him, I’d already pre-ordered this set direct from Imprint in Australia (because the pound to Australian dollar rate is wonderful at the moment) for him as a Christmas present. Alas, my father passed away before it arrived and he was in no real state to watch it anyway but, my mother and I are now watching it for him, hoping that some kind of spirit of my dad is somehow watching it with us.

Now, I’ve not seen a movie with Fairbanks in it before and, while I can certainly admire his physical prowess and understand why he was so popular in his day, I found his acting to be a little more over-the-top than was maybe strictly necessary. It’s more what you think of as a stereotype of silent acting as opposed to what my actual experience of what silent movie acting can often be. Nevertheless, I also found him quite endearing and don’t begrudge him his popularity because... yeah... he’s still pretty entertaining to watch. However, another actor in the film does contrast with him in terms of style to his detriment... but more on her in a minute. 

I have to say, the prospect of sitting through over two and a half hours of this movie seemed daunting but, no, I was caught up in it straight away and it really didn’t seem that long at all. You can see why the film was so expensive to make... it looks truly epic and the sets are amazing. For example, the wonderful gate of Bagdad which splits open in four different directions, revealing giant teeth holding it together when locked, is absolutely marvellous and just one of many inventive moments in this movie (it certainly wouldn’t look out of place in the first Flash Gordon serial, reviewed here, made over a decade later). 

Fairbanks’ thief character (and his partner in crime, played wonderfully comically by Snitz Edwards) is set up in a long series of scenes highlighting his ingenious and skilled thievery (including some nice use of a magic rope in the early scenes which, honestly, the character shouldn’t have been so quick to throw away because it would have been useful on his later adventures in the movie). Anyhow, he becomes infatuated, in a series of incidents too convoluted to cover here, with the Sultan’s daughter, played by Julanne Johnston and, in the last hour of the film (with his character believed dead by all but his romantic interest), he competes with three princes to find and bring back the rarest treasure on Earth, to give to the lady and win her hand in mariage... specifically competing against the villainous Mongol prince, played by Sôjin Kamiyama (in a role which I can’t help but think may have influenced Alex Raymond on his newspaper strip creation of the Flash Gordon villain Ming The Merciless). 

The villain is also helped by the treacherous slave girl in the Sultan’s palace... who is played by Fairbanks’ big discovery and who is the actress I was talking about earlier, in a relatively small (spread out over the length of the movie) but pivotal role... 

So... when Fairbanks was trying to cast the film, he saw the film The Toll Of The Sea (reviewed by me here) and so he got in contact with the leading lady from that small production, Anna May Wong, to fulfil this role in his movie. And it pretty much shot her to fame and kickstarted her career properly. And she really does a great job here too. She also indulges in the essential style of silent movie acting where everything needs to be relayed with gestures and expressions but, she’s much more subtle and understated here than, for example, Fairbanks’ overuse of his hand making grabbing motions every time his character sees something he wants to steal. She’s pretty amazing in this, it has to be said and, yeah, a nice surprise because, when I pre-ordered this set, I hadn’t read her biography as yet and didn’t realise she was in this until I’d read that (my review of that book can be found here).

Anyway, back to the adventures... while his rivals pick up, respectively, a magic carpet, a magic eye/jewel and a magic, healing apple... Fairbank’s thief goes through several quests culminating in his recovery of a magic chest, which gives him pretty much anything he wishes for. So he braves The Valley Of Fire... timing his jumps over volcanic pits which pretty much pre-dates modern video game design... kills creatures in The Valley Of Monsters (slitting open the chest of one, we see the blood splash down in a moment that definitely marks this film out as a pre-code movie), braves The Cavern Of Enchanted Trees, meets The Old Man Of The Midnight Sea and then rides a pegasus-like horse from The Abode Of The Winged Horse to the Moon Kingdom to retrieve both his chest and a cloak of invisibility. All this before rushing back to Bagdad and conjuring a battalion of soldiers to defeat the secret army the Mongol Prince has raised in Bagdad for the conquest of the city. 

And it’s great stuff... some of the special effects such as the magic carpet, done practically by lifting a platform on cables and flying it over the heads of the people of the set of Bagdad, look absolutely amazing and put to shame effects done differently over the years since this one hit cinemas. And though some of the creatures look a little fake and the wings on the horse a little less powerful than you would expect, I was completely bowled over by the spectacle of this film and enjoyed every second of it. Carl Davis’ ‘new score’, which has recycled bits of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music, including lots of repetitive steals from Scheherazade, really upped the game too (I love that whole symphonic suite anyway) although, the use of The Flight Of The Bumblebee seemed a little too on the nose, it has to be said.

All in all, though... great film and a wonderful transfer from Imprint films. I will wholeheartedly recommend this version of The Thief Of Bagdad to anyone I know and I look forward now to revisiting the Korda version in this set, along with the Steve Reeves version which I haven’t yet seen. 

Night Of The Big Heat

All You Can Heat Buffet

Night Of The Big Heat
aka Night Of The Burning Damned (US)
aka Night Of The Burning Doomed (US TV)
Directed by Terence Fisher
UK 1967 
Planet Films Distribution/88 Films
Blu Ray Zone B

 Warning: Minor spoilers.

Okay then. I’d not seen Night Of The Big Heat before 88 Films issued this new Blu Ray transfer, although I’ve got it in the back of my mind that it probably played on British TV a fair amount during the 1970s and 80s. This one is set on a small island called Fara where, in the middle of winter... and at odds with the rest of the country... the inhabitants are suffering a huge heat wave. Patrick Allen plays novelist Jeff Callum, who is on the island writing his new book and who runs the local pub alongside his wife, Frankie (played by Allen’s real life wife Sarah Lawson). Then Jane Merrow turns up as his new secretary, Angela, who had a fling with him in her past and wants to reconnect... plus take no prisoners as far as his wife is concerned. 

This all goes on against a backdrop of strange goings on at the island, with the big tropical heat just a symptom of something else that’s happening. There are instances of strange, high pitched whirrings in the air sometimes and this is usually a prelude to somebody being confronted by something off screen and then being burned to death, as is the case when a character played by Kenneth Cope runs away after attempting to rape Angela... only to be confronted with ‘something unusual’. 

Trying to get to the bottom of it all is Godfrey Hanson and his amazing scientific instruments, played deliberately unemotionally by the great Christopher Lee. And, billed as a guest star  (he is only in a few scenes dotted about the movie at various points) is the equally great Peter Cushing, as the local Dr. Vernon Stone. Shenanigans ensue when Jeff and Godfrey form an uneasy alliance after the latter shares his theory that the heat is a by-product of beings from another planet coming to the island as the vanguard of an invading species, who need the heat in order to survive. 

And, it’s a film on which I’m now very torn. On the one hand, it has all the makings of a good ‘comfort horror film’ and I suspect it’s one I shall come back to every now and again. On the other hand, there are a lot of problems with it, tempered by the heat being a good excuse for Jane Merrow to run an ice cube over her half exposed torso and neck. I mean, some of the dialogue and story ideas are awful, which is strange considering it’s supposed to be an adaptation of a novel by John Lymington. Apparently it was rewritten from scratch a day or two before filming. It kinda shows.

And the film also suffers from some very low budget and not terribly effective monsters. Most of the time the monsters are unseen and thus create a certain amount of suspense and jeopardy until the big reveal. Unfortunately, the big reveal is just light pulsing rocks looking like they’ve been constructed from canvass. So, yeah, not good. 

The other problem is... the body count in the film wouldn’t be nearly as bad if some of the characters just acted on common sense rather than whatever the heck they do here. For example, people are practically going off to their deaths in ways that can be easily foreseen and, I suspect, easily escaped from...

In one scene,  for instance, Godfrey uses his walkie talkie to contact everyone in the inn to tell them to turn off the lights as it’s what is drawing the creatures to people. And so a token is made of showing some of the characters doing just that but... do they heck!?! When we return to the scene of the people in the inn, they have clearly left a few lights on... obviously to light the shot, I get it but, yeah, it makes no sense by this point in the film and it’s almost like the various main protagonists are trying to get themselves killed by doing the lamest things ever. So, yeah, I have no sympathy for their actions throughout the film, for sure. 

But, the pace is nicely fitting for the film and it has a kind of interesting score by Malcolm Lockyer. Now, I don’t know Lockyer at all apart from his music for the first Doctor Who movie (reviewed here) but, I have to say, I recognised the style immediately as sharing the same DNA of that score and was waiting for his name to come up in the opening credits. Which is another thing that pushes it into comfort movie territory for me, for sure. 

The denouement of Night Of The Big Heat is abrupt and totally unsatisfying, it has to be said. If you thought the ending of the movie version of The Day Of The Triffids was bad then, yeah, you ain’t seen nothing yet. So, all in all I would have to say that, in many ways the film is really terrible but, I found myself thoroughly entertained by it so, I was very happy to have 88 Films’ wonderful transfer hitting shops. It’s not one I’d recommend to everybody but fans of studios like Hammer and Amicus should maybe try and catch this one, for sure. 

OSS117 - Double Agent

The Assassination Game

OSS117 - Double Agent
aka Niente rose per OSS 117
aka OSS117 Murder For Sale
France/Italy 1968
Directed by Renzo Cerrato, 
Jean-Pierre Desagnat & André Hunebelle
Gaumont/Kino Lorber Blu Ray Zone A

Well this is going to be another very short OSS117 review but I can finally say I’m very disappointed with Kino Lorber’s Blu Ray set, OSS117 Five Film Collection, which collects the films made about this character in the 1960s and which, in the case of this film, is based on Jean Bruce’s novel Pas de roses pour OSS 117. Not because Kino Lorber have done a bad job... on the contrary, the transfers and prints on these things look fantastic. I think it’s more that these bandwagon competitors to the Bond franchise are just, mainly, as dull as ditchwater. And I can’t blame the actors either. 

OSS117 - Double Agent is about Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, alias OSS117, infiltrating the crime syndicate known as ‘The Organisation’ (no, not that organisation... a much smaller, fictional one) in order to foil their plan of assassinating people for money. Why the secret service are targetting this organisation in particular was, I think, passed off with an attempted explanation at the start which I really didn’t understand and it felt like a bit of an excuse to be honest. The plot goes from silly to worse as OSS117 is injected with a poison which will kill him once every 24 hours unless he has the next stage of the antidote, as the way his new employers try to keep their hired help on a leash and more pliable to their assassination missions. Hubert gets involved with a few ladies, has a few fist fights and eventually saves the day in the most anticlimactic, throwaway manner possible... which you wouldn’t expect from a film populated with some quite good actors, to be honest. 

For this fifth and final of the 1960s screen outings for the character, the lead actor has once again been replaced. John Gavin is playing him here and there’s even a reference... and a jokey dig... to the change in the male lead this time as one character describes him as having had plastic surgery to look like a specific killer and he gets the reply, “He’s much better looking now.” I guess it serves as some kind of testament to the acting talent that even Gavin... who was later signed on to take over from George Lazenby as James Bond, starting with Diamonds Are Forever (reviewed here), before Sean Connery decided to come back on board at the eleventh hour... can’t help save this film. The script and pacing is so awful. 

Nor can some of the other exciting names in the cast liven things up either... such as George Eastman playing a splendid henchman to the arch villain, played by future Bond villain Curd Jürgens, the wonderful Rosalba Neri and, five years after trying to kill Connery’s 007 in Thunderball (reviewed here), the stunning Luciana Paluzzi. I am guessing Paluzzi may just have been cast for her former association with the Bond film because, bizarrely, she disappears from the narrative about a third of the way in and is never mentioned again, even when it’s logical that OSS117 should run into her again at the close of the picture. 

Replacing composer Michel Magne for this one is the late but very great Piero Piccioni but, it has to be said, as nice as this score is as a standalone listen on CD, even Piccioni can’t save this one. I have to wonder at producer/director André Hunebelle’s decisions about this. He has two great composers on these films and it’s like he’s ordered them to play almost against the images and make them feel somewhat antiseptic and inappropriate to what’s going on in the film. As I said, Piccioni’s music sounds very easy on the ears but, really, does nothing to improve this one. A John Barry score would have really helped liven this picture up but, yeah, I have to wonder how both Magne and Piccioni seemed to both turn up such ‘out of place’ scores for these movies. 

And that really is me done with OSS117 Double Agent. I said it was going to be a short review and I can’t think of anything really good to say about the experience. The film feels somewhat lethargic and has a script which really lets everyone down. I can’t, in all consciousness, recommend this one to anybody. Possibly the dullest eurospy movie I’ve seen, I would guess. 

Shelter

S’Hell Ter Pay

Shelter
Directed by Ric Roman Waugh
USA/UK 2026
Black Bear
UK Cinema Release Print

Just a quick shout out on the latest Jason Statham action film... not quick because it’s not good but because it’s a nice, solid, well acted vehicle which hits most of the right spots and doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Shelter sees The Stath, as an ex-assassin called Mason, living covertly in a lighthouse on an island with a young girl, Jessie, played by Bodhi Rae Breathnach, being boated over by her uncle once a week to leave supplies for him. She never sees Statham’s character and wonders what his relationship is to her family (she doesn’t even know who her own father was and has been living with her uncle since she can remember). 

Then, one day, she nearly dies on a fierce storm trying to return to her uncle’s boat (which sinks and takes him to his death) and is rescued and resuscitated by Mason. Here starts the almost but not quite True Grit style relationship between the two characters. Then, to get urgent medical supplies, Mason goes to the mainland and gets recognised by the government’s illegally operating facial recognition software (which targets him as someone else, deliberately), run by Billy Nighy’s villainous ‘off the grid’ ex head of British Intelligence and the rest of the movie is a manhunt as Mason and Jessie are on the run while an elite killer and lots of other human problems are hurled at them, as Mason tries to find some way to get Jessie to safety. 

And it’s all very nicely done. The characters are all likeable and, while you’ve seen the whole ‘child bonding with a trained killer who has a heart of gold’ storyline before... because Jason Statham and Bodhi Rae Breathnach have good chemistry together, it’s easy to ignore the cliché and let yourself be entertained by two good actors. 

Added to this, the action scenes are a touch more naturalistic than in something like, say, The Transporter and they hit harder, especially when contrasted with the two central characters. For instance, a car chase sequence between just two cars is well shot and the chaotic and almost clunky brutality of the sequence works really well when juxtaposed with the sensibilities of the two characters reacting to the situation. Like I said, a solid action piece. And it helps to have people like Bill Nighy and Daniel Mays on hand to lend the piece a little gravitas too (both are equally excellent in their supporting roles).

The one big surprise for me is where the story goes or, rather, where the story fails to go. It seemed obvious from the start that Jessie is, surely, actually Mason’s daughter and he’s been keeping her safe by leaving her with her uncle and, although it seems the obvious story choice, it’s never actually revealed here. Maybe because it seems too obvious or, perhaps, maybe they’re leaving that moment for a possible sequel (the film is definitely geared towards a sequel being a possibility in the last scene). In a way, I’m kinda glad they held back that revelation because, it’s way too telegraphed throughout the rest of the film so, yeah, maybe a casual reveal in a follow up movie would be the best way to go into that (if, indeed, we get one). 

And that’s really me done already on Shelter. I tend to like Jason Statham action movies and this one is another of his good ones. If you’re up for The Stath punching and shooting people for an hour or so (after a slow but sure section of character building) then you should have a good time with this one. I’ll certainly be looking out for a Blu Ray at some point.

The Mummy - Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor

Life’s A Dragon, 
Then You Die

The Mummy - 
Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor
United States/Germany/China/Canada 
2008 Directed by Rob Cohen
Universal UK Blu Ray

Warning: Some mild spoilers.

We were all smacking our lips in anticipation of a third film in the Rick O’ Connell Mummy series after the brilliance of The Mummy (reviewed here) and the pretty great follow up The Mummy Returns (reviewed here). And we were all dreadfully disappointed in what finally came out in cinemas. Stephen Sommers, who wrote and directed the previous two installments, did not direct this movie... other than he’s listed as one of the producers. I hate to say it but... it really shows. I don’t know why he wasn’t involved but his 2004 movie Van Helsing, where he further expanded his reimagining of the classic Universal monster movies, was not treated kindly by critics or box office alike. I don’t know why because I thought that particular take was also pretty good but, I don’t know, maybe that’s why he didn’t do the third Mummy movie. He is sorely missed in this sequel. 

Now, the film isn’t a total mess... it certainly works as a typical action adventure movie of the 2000s but, that’s where this film also fails big time. The thing about the previous two installments is that they were both something very special... so expectations were high this would deliver a similar concoction and, to be fair, a lot of the ingredients which made those two a huge success are present and relatively correct. There’s a huge element missing though and, that element would be... fun. Despite an overemphasis perhaps on the humour found in the first two, this film is not the entertaining romp it should have been and falls flat a lot of the time. That being said, there are one or two notable things in the film and, honestly, it’s not the cast’s fault for sure.

We only have two returning actors from the first film present and correct here... that would be Brendan Fraser as Rick O’Connell and John Hannah as Evelyn’s brother Jonathan. And they’re as good as they can be with this script... as are all the other actors. Another character returns from the previous film, Rick and Evie’s son Alex but, of course, since this is set halfway through the next decade again (each Mummy move in this series is set in a different decade) and Alex is supposed to be considerably older and grown up, he couldn’t be played by the same actor (as this was only about seven years since the last film). Instead they get Luke Ford, who makes a not bad stab at this and even, somehow, manages to have some of the same character traits of the child version from that last story. I say somehow because, character consistency is not high on the priority with the next actor I’ll talk about... again, not her fault.

Okay, so the great Rachel Weisz did not, for reasons known best to her (with many different reported explanations for her absence but I think I believe her when she says she didn’t like the script), return for this sequel. However, the character of Evelyn is all present and correct and the original actress was replaced in this film by Maria Bello. And she does a great job so I mean it as no disrespect to say that, in this role, she is no Miss Weisz. Now, one of the problems I have with her is that she is playing it in a much different manner to the character we’ve come to know. That decision could be defended by remembering that, in the last movie, Evelyn was resurrected from the dead as both herself and the daughter of the murdered Pharaoh in the first film... so a slightly different personality could be a valid choice... if that fact were at all referenced in this one but, nope, not much (if anything) is said about it (this time it’s her husband who gets killed and then brought back to life). She does get a nice line of dialogue though... which I’ll come back to in a minute. 

For the record, both Arnold Vosloo and Oded Fehr declined to return for this film also... so the original script must have been pretty different from what we ended up with. 

Two other big actors in this movie are both kung fu legends in their own country... Jet Li as the villainous Dragon Emperor himself and future Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh. Both are great but, come on... another reason people were chomping at the bit for this movie was that we wanted to see them both put their kung fu skills to use (and a ten minute fight scene between the two would have been most welcome). It would be an understatement to say that neither has a chance to shine in this one... especially in Yeoh’s case. 

Right... there are a few nice things. One is that we are re-introduced to Evelyn at a book reading of her latest novel, based on the second of her adventures. When someone asks her if the character in her book is based on her, Bello’s face is revealed and she says... “Honestly, I can say she's a completely different person.” Which is a nice and cheeky nod to the audience (pretty much the only one in the film, I’ll get to that) that she is a different actress taking over the role. It’s the exact same kind of metatextual comment on casting that George Lazenby delivers at the end of the pre-credits sequence in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (reviewed here) when he turns to the camera and says, “This never happened to the other fellow.” So... a nice moment. 

The only other nice thing in this movie... for me... asides from a nod to the first two films by having the name of Jonathan’s night club be “Imhotep’s”... is the inclusion of a small bunch of abominable snowmen... aka yetis... who help out our merry band of heroes at a crucial time. They’re nicely done although, I’ve no idea how two of the creatures can make a visual reference to the game of American Football... to be sure. Maybe try not to think about that too hard. 

A curious thing is that, when Jet Li’s character is fully resurrected, he can take on various forms. The two things he shape shifts into seem curious choices. One is a three headed dragon which bears an uncanny resemblance to King Ghidorah in the original Godzilla films and the other creature he changes into seems to slightly resemble King Caesar, from that same cycle of Godzilla films so... I dunno... I’m surprised the studio didn’t get sued over this. Maybe the director was secretly trying to pitch for a Godzilla reboot at the time? Who knows but... anyone who is into their kaiju eiga would surely get a jolt at seeing these creatures here.

As I was watching the film... I was trying to figure out why it just doesn’t work. There’s loads of humour (which mostly falls flat for me... unlike the other two movies), the action set pieces are well put together, the actors are all good and Randy Eidelman’s score for this (although partially replaced by stuff from John Debney, it would seem) is sweeping and fine... if not a patch on the scores provided for the earlier films by Jerry Goldsmith and Alan Silvestri. I think, for me, the film loses out in terms of the script and the way the humour is played. The script is really stating the obvious and explaining every last thing to the audience and capitalising it... me and my father looked at each other this time when a particularly stupid line (one of the unintentionally stupid lines) came up. And the other problem with it is that, unlike its predecessors, the audience aren’t let in on the joke. Asides from the “different person altogether” line, there are none of the sly winks to the audience that the other two had. It feels like its taking itself too seriously and, consequently, it never really gets us on its side... it’s just not as entertaining as either previous installment and... yeah... it’s just a bit of a let down.

No further films were made (as yet) in this series although, the Tom Cruise version of The Mummy (reviewed here) does include the book of the dead from the first film as a visual reference in one scene... so it’s technically taking place in the same universe. A fourth one featuring an Aztec Mummy was planned but never came to fruition... again, as yet. As for how I stand on this... well, for me, The Mummy - Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor certainly hasn’t grown on me. It was as much of a disappointment this time around as the previous times I saw it so, yeah, if you only see this one, don’t miss out on the first two just because this is not up to scratch. I hope someday the original writer/director and cast will come back to do just one more but... who knows if that will happen. 

The Music Man

7T6 Trombones 
With A Capital T

The Music Man
Directed by Morton DaCosta
USA 1962 
Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone A 

I’d never seen one of my dad’s favourite musicals, The Music Man, before... although, of course, the song 76 Trombones is obviously a musical earworm to this day. Indeed, the film and stage show is such a well known piece that, even though I’d not seen it, I was easily able to recognise that wonderful parody of one of the songs and a character featured in The Simpsons episode about the monorail. 

So I finally saw it and was not only charmed by it... I immediately leapt onto the computer to grab one of the last remaining copies of the movie version soundtrack from that well known website named after a tribe of women who used to cut their own breast off in order to improve their use with a bow and arrow (more coverage of that in a future blog probably never but, I like to throw these little pieces of dubious info in from time to time). I had to source a copy of the film on American Blu Ray because there just seems to be a dearth of the genre available in that format in the UK at the moment. C’mon people... we want more high definition musicals!

Okay... so... adapted from the very long running Broadway smash by Meredith Wilson (and including many more songs which never made it to the stage version but were indeed written for it at one point or another), The Music Man tells the story of Professor Harold Hill... not a professor but, instead, a conman who goes from town to town selling the proposition of a boy band with instruments and music, swindling people out of dollars and keeping his neck out of deep water with a little bit of oomph and pizazz.

Hill is played by Robert Preston, blessed with more than a regular helping of that particular oomph and definitely a large side order of said pizazz, who made the show his own on stage but was nearly passed up for the movie by Warner Brothers, who wanted someone bigger. It apparently took Cary Grant to both refuse the part and furthermore tell Warner Brothers that he wouldn’t even go to see it in cinemas if Preston wasn’t in it, to seal the deal. 

Preston’s love interest, the target of his initially false affections until the con backfires on his emotional wellbeing, is Shirley Jones (pregnant at the time with young Patrick Cassidy, of TV fame) who does a wonderful job. Preston’s friend, in on the con, is Buddy Hackett and, playing Jones’ very young brother, is the then seven year old Ronny Howard. Yep. The same red headed kid who would grow up to star in films like American Graffiti, hang out with The Fonz in Happy Days and, of course, be a major modern film director, still, at time of writing. 

And it’s all just wonderful. Shot in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, the film is very well designed with frames based, as far as I could see, on vertical rectangles in the composition to divide up the screen to highlight elements of the story. Not to mention some wonderful transitions where, towards the end of a scene, everything apart from the principal actors will suddenly fade to pitch black, revealing the artifice of the stagey setting in what I can only describe as a ‘soon to be’ Godardian manner. Although, I guess at that time, it’s probably more akin to Brechtian theatre? Lars Von Trier would cerrtainly know, I suspect. ;-)This technique is also used to softly pull frames out and set them aside each other in a kind of masked split-screen, so songs and their counterpoint can be put together and shown from different scenes simultaneously, at one point. 

And Robert Preston is just amazing in this. What a vibrant personality this guy has, as he fast talks his way out of everything and then makes a little, throw away hand-dusting motion every time he gets over a little hurdle in his con game. Talk about buckets full of charisma. 

And the songs are... well, you always get a couple of duds... but the majority of them are not just great, they’re multilayered with the lyrics doing an abnormally large amount of heavy lifting when it comes to plot exposition, Which sounds bad but it in no way makes them any less charming. On the contrary many of them are very clever and... I’m guessing very hard to learn with some of the dense sets of layers bounding off each other. There must have been an awful lot of rehearsals in this production.

And, yeah, I’m not going to say much more on The Music Man, I’m just going to leave it for you to discover for yourself if you haven’t already, except to say that as much as Meredith Wilson made from this show, the film and the profit percentage... it was actually surpassed by the amount of money he made from The Beatles cover version of ‘Til There Was You from this musical... which is not a song I like but, there you go. But, yeah, give this movie a go because it’s very cool. 

Return To Silent Hill

Dodgy Pyramid Scheme

Return To Silent Hill
Directed by Christophe Gans
France/United States/United Kingdom/
Germany/Serbia/Japan 2025
Entertainment Film Distributors
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: A hill full of spoilers herein, I guess. 

Well, okay then. 

I was kinda looking forward to a third Silent Hill movie when it was announced, especially since it’s directed by Christophe Gans, who did the first movie and who also directed the masterpiece that is Brotherhood Of The Wolf (reviewed by me here). This third film, Return To Silent Hill, is kind of a soft reboot for the franchise in that the only returning characters I could detect here are the grotesque nurses and, of course, Pyramid Head.

However, it has to be said that, for a good deal of the running time I was a bit disappointed in this one (although for the first half an hour or so I was convinced this would be the best of the three to date). I certainly had no problem with the lack of context to the surrealistic nightmare that was the town of Silent Hill and all that goes on in its environs, that’s for sure. And following an almost optimistic, love story approach to the opening of the story, the quick spiral into the main lead (played by Jeremy Irvine) going to the town in question in search of his girlfriend (played by Hannah Emily Anderson) and the driven, unflinching and unrelenting plunge into frequent, morbid and nightmarish suspense was something which initially had me on the edge of my seat. Again though, only for about half an hour or so until I figured out something... and here’s where my short review gets kinda spoilery folks. 

After a direct confrontation between the male lead and the fan favourite Pyramid Head, I figured out something pretty basic about the nature of these two and so I stopped caring about what was going to happen to the anti-hero of the piece. If I’m not very much mistaken (and it’s made both clear and then obscured or muddied by the last sequence of the film, as I see it), then the main protagonist is also an aspect of Pyramid Head, from what I could tell... or did I get that wrong? He’s just a self induced metaphor for the horrors of Silent Hill. That’s my interpretation of the visual data here, at least. 

So after this... I knew he couldn’t come to any harm and I kinda stopped caring (although it’s not made implicit until near the end of the movie for the ‘hard of thinking’, it seems to me). And, although the film is well made in terms of inventiveness (presumably culled from the video game Silent Hill 2, which I’ve not played myself, only the first one) and it’s very well put together, I had a few other problems with the movie too. 

One of those is... it’s not all that scary. Which should be a cardinal sin for a film in this particular franchise. For instance, the sexy, mutant nurse thingies which were such a marvelous and terrifying element of the first two movies, seem to have absolutely no visual impact here at all. It almost feels like the director has included them because people expect them to be here. But the effect of them is totally diluted and they seem an easy enough challenge to overcome. 

And the other big thing which really unsettled me was the way in which some of the acting was rendered. Especially the main lead played by Jeremy Irvine. Now congratulations to Gans if this was indeed supposed to look flat and clumsy like a video game interpretation of living human beings but, I don’t know, was it something in the make up or lighting that made me feel that Irvine wasn’t even on set. He felt, a lot of the time, like a bad CGI render of a person, much like you would find in a game. And it was totally off putting and maybe contributed to my personal apathy in regards to this film. I am caring much less about manipulated pixels and much more about flesh and blood when I watch a movie. It’s almost like the director ran a filter or some such thing over some of the main characters to make them seem more lifeless than perhaps they should have been. So, if it was a deliberate choice then well done for making me think I was watching a video game but... yeah, I don’t want to see a video game when I’m sitting in a cinema. I want to see something that will move me or connect with me on an intellectual level, rather than break everything down to something somewhat lesser than the sum of its pixels. Which is sadly what happened here for me. 

And so that’s my main takeaway from Return To Silent Hill, I’m afraid. It started off well like a white knuckle ride but steadily lost any traction as I lost empathy for any of the characters or the situations they found themselves in. What I thought would be my favourite film in the franchise turns out to be the worst entry in the series. So, yeah, nothing more to say on this one, I’m afraid, That’s me done on these for a while.  

The Vault Of Horror

 

Taking It EC

The Vault Of Horror
UK 1973 
Directed by Roy Ward Baker
Amicus/20th Century Fox  Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: A vault of spoilers. 

The Vault Of Horror was another of the Amicus portmanteau horror films with which they had a lot of success and, as the title suggests, the five stories found within (not including the framing story, I would guess) are adaptations from various 1950s EC comics, repeating the formula from their Tales From The Crypt movie (reviewed here). Despite the title and what it claims on the opening credits, which play out mostly over shots of London, none of the stories in the film are actually taken from the original The Vault Of Horror comic... instead, the segment entitled The Neat Job is taken from an issue of Shock Suspense Stories while the others are versions of stories first published in the pages of Tales From The Crypt. 

The film starts off with an elevator picking up various of the five main characters, played by Michael Craig, Curd Jürgens, Terry Thomas, Daniel Massey and Tom Baker. They are all going down but, down way further than any of them expect, as the elevator deposits them all in an underground chamber. They can’t get the elevator to take them back and so, for the rest of the film, they exchange stories about various nightmares which have been bothering them, allowing the audience access into the five segments which make up the majority of the film’s running time. 

Now, I’ve actually read four of these stories but only remember three of them in terms of a little of the details, because I read the entire run of Tales From The Crypt a few years back. So in the first story, I can definitely tell you that the term adaptation is loosely used. Don’t get me wrong, we still have the same story and the final panel of the comic is rendered as the final shot of that story but, yeah, it’s been watered down somewhat.

To explain, the first story is based on the Tales From The Crypt story Midnight Mess. In this, Daniel Massey pays a private detective who goes to find his lost sister, who has been left everything after their father has died. The detective, played by Mike Pratt (Randall, from Randall And Hopkirk Deceased) finds her but is killed by Massey, who then goes to find his sister. He can’t get served in a restaurant because it closes early in the village she is staying in, so he goes to her house and kills her. He then goes back to the restaurant, which now appears to be open. However, when he’s served dishes made from blood and human flesh, he complains and gives himself away. The waiter pulls back the big curtains in the restaurant to reveal a big mirror... casting only his reflection. All of the other diners are vampires, including his sister who also has a drink when the patrons set him up in the bar as a human bar tap, syphoning his blood ‘fresh from the source’ as the still alive Massey has a tap plugged into an open wound on his neck. Incidentally, his sister is played by real life sister Anna Massey. 

The problem with this segment... and why it’s watered down, in my opinion... is that in the original comic book, the lead character was an innocent. He doesn’t kill anyone but he suffers the same fate anyway... with the last panel being much more graphic in its depiction, if memory serves. I get the feeling the writers here turned him into an evil character so that it feels morally right to have him killed in such a grim fashion. Which kinda weakens the story but, there you go, this film pulls its punches a bit, that’s all. 

The next segment, The Neat Job, is the one told by great British comic actor Terry Thomas, where he marries a character played by actress Glynis Johns. This one is actually quite fun and you can tell these two must have really enjoyed working on this. It turns out that, after they are married, the wife finds out her husband is one of those people with a mania for neatness and everything in its proper place... with even his tool room with jars for each different kind of screw thread or length, kitchen cupboards with tick boxes to indicate stock replenishment etc. After a while, her attempts to please her husband culminate in a sequence where she bumbles about and manages to wreck a couple of rooms as she tries to re-tidy them for him when he comes home. On his discovery of the shambles, she deals him a huge hammer blow and we see the comedian with a claw hammer sticking out of the top of his head before he topples. In the final scene of this story, his wife has pulled out all his various body part and internal organs and put them all in correctly labelled, categorised jars. 

The third story is This Trick’ll Kill You and it’s features a stage magician played by Curd Jürgens and his wife played by Dawn Addams. While on holiday in India, looking for magic tricks, he stumbles onto a really good version of the old Indian rope trick but he can’t persuade the young lady performing the trick to sell it to him at any price. So he arranges a private show for his wife in their hotel room and, while the girl is performing the trick, he stabs her dead. He then re-performs the trick and his wife climbs up the rope but, suddenly, she disappears at the top of the rope and a slowly spreading puddle of her blood forms on the ceiling where the rope was leading too. The rope then gets out of control and has its revenge on Jürgens. 

The fourth story, Bargain In Death, is the worst of the five and features Michael Craig in a dire and slight tale of a man who slows his heart to fake death so he and his friend can split the insurance money... and then expects his friend to dig him up but, obviously, that part doesn’t happen. He does get dug up though, by a gravedigger played by Arthur Mullard at the request of two young medical student friends who need the body. In a curious piece of what would now be called stunt casting, the two med students are played by Robin Nedwell and Geoffrey Davies, who were known as the ‘comedy doctor’ duo in the long running British TV sitcom Doctor In The House. The other nice part of this is when one of the characters is seen reading the novelisation of the Amicus Tales From The Crypt movie.

The fifth story, Drawn And Quartered, stars Tom Baker as a British artist living in Haiti. When an old friend stumbles on him, he finds out that his old agent who had deemed his paintings worthless and bought them for a song, has colluded with an art critic and buyer and his paintings are now fetching high prices in London. So he goes to a voodoo man who gives his painting hand magical powers and he returns to London to take his revenge. Anything he paints and then erases or destroys gets erased or destroyed in a similar fashion and so he paints the three and causes them pain and death by taking their hands or eyes or, in the case of his agent, played by Denholm Elliot, gets him to shoot himself due to drawing a red dot on the forehead of the painting. However, he shouldn’t have left his own self portrait out in the open after he found leaving it in his safe was depriving him of oxygen after a while! Any kind of accident could happen to it. 

And that’s the five stories and then, of course, the elevator doors open to a graveyard and it turns out the men are all dead and forced to tell the same stories to each other for eternity. However, unlike the comics, the Vault Keeper who used to present the tales didn’t make it into the movie.

But it is an entertaining movie and it’s easily one of my favourites in the Amicus portmanteau horror series, falling just behind Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors (reviewed by me here). Roy Ward Baker’s direction is assured and, once again, he uses some interesting camera movements... like that trick he does where he will zoom into something at the end of a camera pan to change the focus of the frame. Douglas Gamley’s score is also pretty good and he seems to use the Dies Irae musical motif a lot throughout the movie (darn, I wish there was a soundtrack CD to this one... or to any of Gamley’s music, to be honest). 

And, yeah, not much else to add to this. The Vault Of Horror, despite being the only one of the Amicus horror portmanteaus that didn’t star Peter Cushing, is a really entertaining little film and one I would happily watch a number of times. Something about the print or transfer on this seemed a little dodgy, I thought but, it’s still pretty watchable and I’m sure the Blu Ray authors have done the best they can with the materials. Definitely worth a look sometime if you are into this period of British horror movies, for sure.