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.