Killer Mermaid

The Long
Fish Goodnight

Killer Mermaid
aka Mamula
aka Killer Mermaids
aka Nymph
Directed by Milan Todorovic
Serbia/Montenegro/Poland 2014
DVD Region 2

Warning: Some light spoilerage ensues.

Mamula or Killer Mermaid as it’s more commonly known (also Killer Mermaids in the UK, together with a wonderful DVD cover painting which totally misrepresents the film in almost every way) first came to my attention back in 2016. I was at the FrighFest they did that year in a shopping centre cinema somewhere near Shepherd’s Bush, sitting looking bored and lonely (as I probably usually am), either waiting for a friend to turn up or killing time before my next screening, when this curious guy sat down next to me and started up a conversation. Seeing as I’m inordinately English in my outlook, I was immediately suspicious of this intrusion into my personal space but he seemed like a nice chap and so I responded in kind. I told him about this blog and he told me about his new film he’d written, showing at that moment in one of the screens.,, called Downhill (I should probably check that one out at some point). And then he told me about his real ‘baby’ he’d wrote and presented a couple of years before, Mamula which had been rebranded Killer Mermaid.

So he was obviously Barry Keating, I think. And he told me the former film didn’t do as well as he’d liked/hoped. I promised I would keep a look out and review it for my blog at some point. And then we went our separate ways. But you know how time rushes by when you get past a certain age... I bought the DVD of the film the very next day but, yeah, it’s taken me 8 years to get around to watching it... sorry Barry.

But, heck, it was worth the wait. For me, anyway.

The film opens strongly with a cheesy song playing over home movie style footage credits of a young couple holidaying. Then, we join the two as the man is lured to the water by a siren song while the woman is brutally killed by someone with an anchor. As cold openings go, it’s not bad.

The set up to the film involves two American tourists, Kelly played by Kristina Klebe and Lucy played by Natalie Burn. Lucy was once seeing a college friend years before and so the girls go to meet him for a Mediterranean holiday in Montenegro. The guy also has his new fiancé in tow, which doesn’t go down well with Lucy but the four, and then five when a friend of the fiancé turns up, decide to go for a look at an abandoned, derelict prison island that Kelly spotted.

A local guy called Niko, looking for his lost daughter (who turns out to be the girl from the opening), warns them about going to the island, which was used for nazi concentration camp style experiments during the war. And Niko is played wonderfully well by the great Franco Nero. Anyway, when the kids get to the island, their boat is destroyed and it turns out both the killer mermaid of the title (well, half siren, half mermaid... there’s definitely some artistic licence here) and the anchor killer are there, hunting them... since the anchor killer wants to chop them up for food for his beloved mermaid.

If that sounds like a B movie horror plot set up to you then... okay, it is... but it’s an incredibly well made one, I have to say. The acting by pretty much all the cast is superb, with standout work from Klebe and, of course, Nero looking wonderfully intimidating and capable.  But it’s not just that... the film looks a gazillion bucks, so to speak. I’m assuming it’s a fairly low budget movie but what the cinematographer manages to get on screen is fantastic. Beautiful framing and wonderful colours (especially in some of the underwater shots)... it just makes everything look amazing. Even when stuff is borrowed from other films... such as when ‘anchor guy’ is slowly decapitating one of the main characters and the camera follows the motion of his axe as he chops away at the neck, presumably in homage to the scene in The Shining when Jack Nicholson chops through the door... it’s done in a very different way and doesn’t pop you out of the picture like it might have.

Now, my one slight gripe (because I had to have one, right?) is the slight telegraphing involved with the identity of the anchor killer guy. The film almost goes out of its way to imply it’s a certain person early on when, in fact, it turns out to be someone unknown to the cast of characters. I just thought the hints were a bit heavy handed and so I was pretty sure it wouldn’t turn out to be the character the film obviously wanted me to think it was. However, this was more than paid back when what I thought would be a very obvious, if somewhat laboured, twist towards the end of the movie... didn’t happen. Thank goodness... credibility would possibly have been out the window if what I was expecting to happen actually did occur.

So, honestly, I really enjoyed this movie and would love to upgrade this one to Blu Ray sometime if I get the opportunity... it looks pretty good. Killer Mermaid is a particularly fun horror movie and I’d recommend this one to most fans of the ‘monster movie’ genre, for sure. I mean... good acting, beautiful cinematography, nudity, gore and Franco Nero. What could possibly go wrong?

John Wick - Chapter 2

Klaatu Barada Wick2

John Wick - Chapter 2
USA 2017 Directed by Chad Stahelski
UK cinema release print.

And so the Lone Wolf and Cub figure of contemporary American cinema is back... or should that be Lone Wolf and Dog? And instead of Tomisaburô Wakayama cutting a bloody swathe through hundreds of men as his wandering ronin figure, we have the modern stray dog samurai that is John Wick, shooting his bloody way through hundreds of men in a poetic celebration of kinetic violence.

Now, I’ve always had a certain amount of respect for Keanu Reeves. I don’t go and see all his movies but I think he’s an actor who brings a lot of heart and a certain amount of ‘under the surface’ perception to his roles which some other actors might not project as well as he can. He’s an actor who, I suspect, brings a lot of the historical, cinematic intelligence of the medium he primarily works in to the party and I can’t help but think that if Akira Kurosawa was alive today and making American movies, Keanu Reeves might be his contemporary Toshiro Mifune of choice. And as a big plus, Mr. Reeves is an actor who looks like he can do the kinds of wonderfully impossible things he does in these movies.

I actually quite liked the first film in this series, John Wick (reviewed here) and was, therefore, not expecting this second movie, John Wick - Chapter 2, to be much more than a, hopefully, competent follow up. As it was, though, I was pleasantly surprised because this movie is at least the equal of the first film in the series, possibly even a little better, and I had a really great time at the cinema with it.

It’s pretty much what you would expect in terms of content for a sequel to an explosive action movie in that it’s totally a series of well planned fight sequences strung together in a way that showcases some beautiful ‘bullet ballet’ moments where Reeves and, presumably, his stunt man, perform a dance of truly beautifully choreographed moves as hot lead penetrates the fleshy folds of Wick’s less than innocent victims in the truly ‘impossible odds’ style which has been the legacy of Japanese chambara over the decades. I’m not saying Reeves or director Stahelski are actually influenced by, or indeed channeling these classic samurai action classics of celluloid history but... it really wouldn’t surprise me, either.

Actually, right from the opening sequence, which is a continuation of the story from the previous film and set five days later, the audience has to come to terms with the fact that Wick is a little bit invincible in this, in some respects. Some of the things we are expected to believe a human being can get up from and shrug off, such as being hit at high speed by a car, before punching and kicking his way through to the next bloody victim is a little bit much and in some ways might be best suited to the over-the-top antics found in one of Jason Statham’s Transporter movies but, like I said before, Reeves always gives the conviction that he can do this kind of stuff and his facial expressions and body language reactions really sell the smoke and mirrors of this mythical, continued punishment that various people can inflict on each other.

It’s funny because, to write off my own analogy of the John Wick franchise taking its cue from various Japanese samurai movies, I feel that great directors like Kurosawa recognised that the action epic is not so much about the action itself as about the pauses between the action. However, John Wick - Chapter 2 barely lets up in the running, punching, shooting and stabbing business and this really shouldn’t work as effectively as the director seems to be able to make it work here and still have the scenes of violence achieve the poetically visceral impact that they do. He manages to do it, however, so this ex-stuntman turned director is definitely one to watch out for in the future, I think.

One thing I was sure of as I watched these scenes of cinematic brutality play out before me was that modern action cinema still owes a great debt to the James Bond movies of the 1960s. The aggressive editing of Peter Hunt’s legacy to modern cinema in those early 007 classics and, especially, the dialled up sound effects and comic book action on show in movies like From Russia With Love (reviewed here) are something without which the John Wick films, and many others like it, would not be able to exist in modern society. At least not in this form.

One thing I did pick up on in the choreography of the battles is the penchant for the main character to deal with one problem partially and then take out a few more problems before coming back to resolve his original dilemma. By that I mean, there are numerous scenes where Reeves will slightly injure an opponent and disarm him, then take out two or more other opponents, usually with bullet shots to the head (although there are some nice uses of knives and even a pencil here too) before finishing off his original opponent with a final shot. And this style of action takes place constantly like a repeat motif all the way through. I’ve not got a problem with it... I think it works well as a good survival strategy and it shows that the title character has a certain methodology and predictable approach to his fighting technique. It just seems to be a constant punctuation point, one scene after another, throughout the movie. It’s fun to watch though so... yeah, it kinda works well. I can’t remember if that specific way of fighting was a key factor in the character’s genetic combat approach in the first movie but... I kinda suspect it was. I’ll have to go back and have another look at it again at some point. 

Of course, it’s not just the beautiful choreography and the pitch perfect performances of Keanu Reeves and his co-stars such as Ian McShane and, in a wonderful bit of stunt casting, Franco Nero, that make this movie worth watching. The director does some beautiful things with the compositions and especially with the coloured lighting which he uses in some sequences, bringing to mind the kind of artificial cinematography of the likes of Mario Bava and Dario Argento but without having it detract as much from the overall onscreen shenanigans. The media is definitely not the message in this particular director’s work but it does add real meat to the bones. This hyper-real approach includes a nice moment where Reeves is framed by an angel’s wings and there’s even an action scene set in a chamber of mirrors which manages to make you forget the horrible cliché of having this kind of setting in a movie. In fact, it’s almost as good as the one found at the end of the classic Bruce Lee epic Enter The Dragon. So well done to the people behind the lens for making this work so well.

One thing I didn’t particularly care for was the comic book emphasis on certain words in the subtitles to the characters when things need to be translated for the viewer. It’s certainly an interesting idea to emphasise certain words by making them bolder, larger, more colourful and possibly in a different font to the rest but... I don’t think it worked that well here, to be honest.

Okay, now about that story arc... I can understand why the director is saying that this movie series is planned as a trilogy and the ending of this movie, without giving anything away, certainly leads us straight into the idea of a sequel set very soon after. Even the opening of the end credits gives us a man who is trying to escape the shadow of his own destiny and, all the way through, in fact, you can’t help but feel sorry for Reeve’s former hitman character as he unleashes a chain of events that pull him further into the drama of the past life from which he has only ever wanted to escape. Admittedly, there is one scene where he almost brings his final fate on himself but it could be argued that the end result of his resolution to his immediate problems are a forgivable slip. This particular modern day ronin is one who you do empathise with to a certain extent and, if the series does play out as a trilogy as intended, I suspect John Wick probably won’t stand much chance of surviving to the final scenes of a third movie. Although time will tell on that one, I guess.

At the end of the day, John Wick - Chapter 2 is a blast that in no way lets down the memory of the first film and even improves on it, to some extent. I had a thoroughly entertaining cinema experience with this doomed and tragic character and, if you’re a fan of modern action cinema, then I suspect you will too. Certainly a movie where you might have to suspend your disbelief somewhat, at least in terms of the credibility of the human body to withstand the gruelling regime of near constant blows that the movie offers up to the title character’s ‘bullets for breakfast’ lifestyle. But, hey, isn’t suspending your disbelief a good part of what cinema is all about? Give this one a go.

Electric Boogaloo - The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films

Semi Golan

Electric Boogaloo - 
The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films
2014  Australia/USA/Israel/UK
Directed by Mark Hartley
Seen as part of the London Film Festival on Saturday 11th October

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. It’s really unusual to find a documentary film which hasn’t got a very specific agenda being pushed through the movie. Music or a one sided kind of attitude to the selection of footage to fit in with the film makers' ideas of what he or she wants to say is usually the standard for these kinds of affairs. I’m not saying that it’s a particularly bad thing to push an idea through a study of specific angles to push you own ideas, and there’s certainly an art to that, but it’s refreshing to come across the odd one which doesn’t seem to have too much of a personal agenda and so it is with Mark Hartley’s new film Electric Boogaloo - The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films. 

The film tells the story of Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus and the meteoric rise and eventual fall of their famous Cannon company, which it seems they bought rather than started from scratch with (something I didn’t realise). I was pleased to see the first screening of this movie in this country (to my knowledge) and there was an introduction followed by a post-screening Q and A with the director which is interesting in light of the seeming lack of specific bias in the movie.

The director told us that, while the project started off as a kind of “hero” project, as he began to delve deeper and uncover more alarming professional behaviour (for want of a better term) from the dynamic duo who were mainly known for trash movies... the film took on a very different shape. That being said, I think the tone is less negative than fun and he does show many a “talking head” real life personality with conflicting reviews. I didn’t personally find the movie that negative and one of the pair’s personal assistants from that time, who happened to be an audience member but who participated a little in the Q & A, took pains to point out that, while a lot of the people who had worked with the pair in the film were quite unflattering in their comments and judgement of the two... Golan rarely, if ever, said something that negative about the people working for them.

The film starts off with a really fun filled opening credits sequence which does set the tone for the piece quite nicely and while there are many a conflicting comment on show in the film, if it could be said that the director had any kind of personal agenda on this film at all, then that would probably be to make a fun film and, given the amount of really terrible movies that got made under the Canon brand, he certainly had a lot of good, laugh inducing material to work with, it has to be said.

The film is basically just put together as talking heads intercut with clips which often support the particular agenda of the person speaking at the time but, as I said, rarely... if ever... takes sides. The talking heads include some great people too, such as Lucinda Dickey, Shabba Doo Quinones, The Boogaloo Shrimp, Franco Nero, Cassandra Peterson, Richard Chamberlain, Martine Beswick, Sybil Danning, Bo Derek, Dolph Lundgren and Alex Winter (I could go on here but it would quickly turn into a list article... and you know I rarely do those).

There are some fascinating stories on hand such as one of my personal favourite Cannon movies Breakdance (aka Breakin’ in pretty much all other countries apart from the UK) but I was very disappointed that Lucinda Dickey and her male leads really didn’t get along in real life. Which is a shame. Now I’ve always loved that first movie but never really took to the second movie, which the title of this movie obviously cribs from... Breakdance 2: Electric Boogaloo (aka Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo). That being said I was kinda pleased that the main stars of the two films also hated the second one... so that makes me feel validated somewhat. It was also good to hear Cassandra Peterson (yeah, that’s right, Elvira -Mistress Of The Dark herself) talk about her complete lack of stunt double when she was working on the King Solomon’s Mines sequel Alan Quatermain And The Lost City Of Gold. It’s not a film I’ve gotten around to seeing yet (it’s on the to watch pile, I bought them both when I found out Elvira was in one of them) but when I do I’ll definitely be watching a particular sequence with a certain amount of insight into safety issues.

There was also a lot of stuff I’d have liked to have heard more of. There were a lot of actors mentioned, for instance, who didn’t have any input into the documentary. Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone and Gene Hackman (for the Superman IV: The Quest For Peace debacle) spring to mind and, when somebody in the audience asked the director who he’d tried to get a hold of during the production of this film to talk about the Golan and Globus partnership, he did say that he’d contacted everyone and pretty much anyone who we don’t see speaking in this documentary declined. Which I think is a little telling?

I personally would have liked to have had a little window onto the nefarious financial practices the two are supposed to have indulged in to keep their company afloat and their productions going... but the director also answered another question fielding this in which he said that there was a lot more on this stuff in the original cut but that he's had to remove it for legal reasons. Which I think also says a lot.

However, there was some pretty great stuff in here and I loved the fact that the director spent some time on Lifeforce (which Hartley admitted to loving himself... something which I heartily approve) and was pleased that, to counter all the negative things people were saying about the two (and with good reason, from what I can understand... somebody I know was afraid this film might lionise Golam and Globus but it certainly doesn’t do that), he also included acclaimed director Franco Zeffirelli saying, whole heartedly, that Golam was the best producer he’d ever had. So that was kind of nice.

At the end of the day, while this film doesn’t penetrate quite as far as I would have liked (which is understandable given some of the comments of the director after the screening) it is one of those kinds of documentary films which makes up for it in sheer entertainment value. The audience I was with were absolutely lapping it up and there was a lot of laughter throughout the screening. According to the director the film is hopefully getting some kind of theatrical release from Metrodome next year and that, of course, will hopefully be followed by a home video version where some of the 45 minutes plus of deleted scenes from the movie might find a place in. If there is I’m hoping there’ll be a section on my other favourite Cannon movie, Cobra, somewhere in there. Either way though, if you’re interested in the history of film, then Electric Boogaloo - The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is another one of those compelling documentaries about a small slice of our cinematic heritage that you should definitely put on your "to watch" list. Great movie.

Django Unchained

Strange Fruit, 
Underneath The Django Tree

Django Unchained
USA 2012
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Playing at cinemas now.

In the words of Colonel Hans Landa, the main antagonist of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained is... "not too terrible."

That is to say...

I quite like the movies of Quentin Tarantino as a rule. Not too sure about the personality of the director himself but, while the films can, it has to be said, be a little hit and miss in some areas, they’re usually worth watching at some level, at least, and certainly Django Unchained flourishes at a certain level here. It’s no coincidence I use the word “level”, either, because most Tarantino films exist for a certain section of the audience (and I include myself in that particular section) as more of a giant game/puzzle than an actual movie. They are just an audio/visual hit list of famous (and some not so famous) movie references and the thrill and wonder of seeing a fresh movie from this director can primarily be seen at the “game level” as a half decent pub quiz loaded with film questions. And that’s often where the pleasures of these particular movies best exist.

Django Unchained is no exception and as soon as the movie started to the strains of the title song of the original Sergio Corbucci Django movie, I was sent immediately into “game mode” and, sure enough, like many Tarantino films before this one, more than half the movie seems to play out to cuts from old CD soundtracks in my personal library... including, of course, many much loved spaghetti western scores.

It’s not quite the spaghetti western movie everyone was expecting it to be, however, and right from just the movie’s title and poster campaign, which uses the typography from the original 1966 Django movie (and many rip off sequels, no doubt), Tarantino seems to announce that “the game” is afoot.

Lets have a look at this for a second...

A film which is actually only half spaghetti western in its make-up (but that half was pretty good) is called Django Unchained, uses the same kind of typography as the original Django, uses one of the original title song recordings (from the English language version of the film), uses a heck of a lot of spaghetti western iconography in it (and therefore also the trailer) and even goes so far as to cast Franco Nero, the original Django, in a cameo scene and give him a joke line about how you pronounce the name Django... well you kinda expect this to be a continuation or possibly a remake of the very first Django movie, right?

Nope. Against all those expectations, Django Unchained is not a continuation of either Django or Django Strikes Again (the two “official” Franco Nero Django movies) or even Takashi Miike’s recent Sukiyaki Western Django (which featured Tarantino as one of the main characters) however, I’m onto Tarantino’s game here. And this is how it starts, I believe...

When Kill Bill was released, the Japanese edition had several more gory sections in it (plus some alternate shots) and some extra shenanigans involving the final fate of one of the characters that was curiously absent from the US and International print of the movie. Why was this? Well... many people say that he didn’t want any extra censorship issues... to which I say, “Nah... he would have had those issues if the extra footage was included or not”. Tarantino’s game here is he, as a die hard movie buff, knows that a lot of the various exploitation movies from the 60s, 70s and 80s had a lot “harder” cuts in Japan than they did in their international versions. Hammer films famously had extra gore in their Japanese versions, for example. Fans of various movies would then have to jump through hoops to get the extended, harder editions of their movies and this is probably something that someone like Tarantino would feel a certain sense of nostalgia for. So he went ahead and created his own “Japanese edition” for the Japanese market, so fans could go nuts hearing about it and going out of their way to get hold of copies (I remember the feeding frenzy at the time of the Japanese DVD release to get certain editions of these movies).

So...

When the original Corbucci movie Django came out in 1966, it was almost as big, in fact I think it was bigger, than Sergio Leone’s famous first movies in the Western genre which he reinvented and reinvigorated with his personal stylistic flourishes. Django was big and everyone wanted in. Many “unofficial” sequels and prequels were quickly released onto an unsuspecting market, almost all of which had nothing to do with the original production team. Added to this were many movies which just took the name, Django, and just retitled the original film so it had Django in the title... whether there was any character who vaguely answered to that name in the movie or not. In terms of unofficial Django movies all released in a period of only a few years... I think we’re talking literally hundreds. The Sabata and Sartana films also, I believe, spawned many unofficial sequels in much the same manner (if I’m inaccurate on that point, keep watching the comments section for this article as I’m sure I know one guy who will jump in and correct me).

So really, what I’m saying is... Tarantino probably never wanted to make a Django movie in the first place... his game was he wanted to make another of those “fake Django” movies and unleash that onto an unsuspecting audience. That, I believe is what happened here.

Now, anyone expecting a full on spaghetti western here is going to be mistaken. True, there are a lot of the trappings of those movies in here... enough to make the first half of the movie Tarantino’s “mini-spaghetti” and on many levels that works really well. There are some great moments in here. Some of them even seem like they originated in this movie... I think... yeah, I’m sure some of those sequences are less referential than others but, who cares, the script on this one sings along and is a joy, in the hands (or mouths) of some of the actors, to behold. And, as I made clear earlier, it’s nice to play “spot the reference” with these movies anyway...I loved seeing a training montage shot to the strains of Riz Ortolani’s score for Day Of Anger, for example, although I didn’t quite see how the context of that sequence related to the original movie as no betrayal or rivalry is evident in this movie as that use of music might suggest. The relationship between the two lead protagonists in Django Unchained are not like that of Giuliano Gemma and Lee Van Cleef in that earlier movie.

There are a lot of moments in this film that, I dunno, don’t quite make sense in internal logic (as is often the way with a Tarantino movie) but are fun little moments to pick out anyway. For example, the snowbound landscapes from the first half of the movie where Django pairs up with a German bounty hunter are obviously quite referential to another of Sergio Corbucci’s key westerns, The Great Silence... but Morricone’s score from that movie seems curiously absent from these sequences and whereas the “bounty killer” in The Great Silence was played by a steely eyed, Klaus Kinski as a brutal antagonist, the German bounty killer in Django Unchained is played with much gusto and charm by the inimitable Christoph Waltz who is similarly steely in certain scenes but who is definitely one of “the good guys” when it comes to this movie.

And as he did with the role of Hans Landa in the earlier Tarantino movie Inglorious Basterds, Christoph Waltz quite literally waltzes off with all the scenes he’s in... as interesting as Jamie Foxx and his colleagues may be to some movie viewers (I’ve not actually seen Jamie Foxx in anything other than in a role in the Robin Williams vehicle Toys, and I don’t remember him in it... but I know he’s quite well thought of), it is always Christoph Waltz who you can’t help but watch in these scenes and when he is absent from certain portions of the film... that’s when things get a bit dull in places.

Leonardo Di Caprio, is another actor I’ve not seen in much and, although I can see that he’s an absolutely brilliant actor, I’m not the biggest fan of him and find him quite a boring actor on some levels myself. Unfortunately for me, and possibly the movie, he is also playing a quite unsympathetic racist and exploiter of his fellow man and, this coupled with his general drab personality, means that some scenes tended to drag for me.

In fact, the whole second half of the picture seems to drag in a fair few places and, although that might have been the intention, it really didn’t do much for me. And I like films with more talking and less action in them, quite often.

It’s been said that film making, and I think we’re just talking about the stereotypical view of US film making here, I suspect... is all about cause and effect. It’s often frowned upon or seen as something to not do to have scenes which don’t add anything to the general narrative thrust of the picture and it’s not a prescription I would prescribe to personally, when talking about movies in general. Early on in his career, Tarantino was praised for making films which had no extra fat and which told a story where every scene shown mattered,,, that’s hardly the case with the films we see by him now and the quirky indulgence of a director to take as many tangents as he or she wants from the storyline is always fine by me. That’s all part of the art of movies... as long as you remember the trick is to not be too boring. Django Unchained could, in my opinion, have done with a lot of trimming to get the running time down and to eradicate various scenes which dragged. In fact, I’d have removed great sections of the last third if it had been me.

But of course, it’s not me, it’s Tarantino... and he should be allowed, as an artist (and he is an artist and a damn good one sometimes) to be free to put exactly what he wants on the screen for the audience. Just as it’s the right of that audience to reject, accept, enjoy or hate what is up on the screen in front of them. Django Unchained, for me, was a movie that was just a little too long and not quite oiled enough to be as vastly entertaining as his great movies like Inglorious Basterds, Kill Bill and Jackie brown. 

Unlike those movies just mentioned, the movie strains to become something more than the sum of it’s celluloid drenched, movie referencing, post-modernistic parts... but you know what?

That doesn’t matter either because it’s still worth watching.

Fans of the specific movie genres referenced in this film are going to have fun spotting and hearing the references... and even people who don’t know or don’t catch the references should have fun too. And after all, good or bad, films like this one are always worth taking a look at so you can have some kind of opinion on them, right?

Django Unchained is playing at assorted cinemas and flea pits across the UK now. Check it out if you have the time.

Die Hard Christmas Double

Merry Yippee-Ki-Ay

Die Hard
1988 USA
Directed by John McTiernan
20th Century Fox DVD Region 2

Die Hard 2: Die Harder
1990 USA
Directed by Renny Harlin
20th Century Fox DVD Region 1

Okay. So I thought, rather than hook up with Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life for Christmas again this year, I’d watch a few alternative Christmas movies to celebrate the festivities instead. Rare Exports you already know about (reviewed here) and my next choice this year was to take another, long overdue, look at the first two Die Hard movies, both of which are set during the Christmas period.

Before I go into these, however, I just want to make one thing clear... I really like Bruce Willis.

I understand, from stories I’ve heard told by co-stars and directors alike (James Garner and Kevin Smith) that he can be a real pain to work with. I’d even gleaned that myself from documentary material I watched years ago on Terry Gilliam’s excellent 12 Monkeys, where Bruce was questioning the direction of a scene with Gilliam. To which my initial reaction was, “Shut up Bruce, he’s a director and you’re just an actor who’s not doing what he’s told you. Do what he tells you to!” Which is probably a less actor-friendly reaction than I maybe should have had, actually, and I probably wouldn’t have the same take on that these days... but when it’s Gilliam you have to recognise directing genius and so... anyway... enough of that...

Bruce Willis is one of the very few modern actors who would have fitted right in with the old studio star system. It may sound obvious but most modern actors and actresses are usually just really good (or bad) modern actors and actresses, period. They are not the larger than life personalities who were seen regularly performing or abusing their craft back in the 20’s, 30s, 40s, 50s and even the 60s. There are very few these days, for example, who could stand head and shoulders with the likes of John Wayne, Errol Flynn, James Cagney, Charlton Heston, Greta Garbo, Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn and the like. These weren’t just actors, they were stars... they had a large following of fans for many decades and their names brought the audiences to their movies in droves. These days, there are just a handful who can sustain that kind of interest over a long period of time and be popular enough to be caricatured for their specific personalities and character traits. I’d say, off the top of my head, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzennegger, Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner... maybe Johnny Depp... and Bruce Willis is very much a part of this very exclusive set of the modern equivalent of old-time studio “stars”. At least that’s how I see him.

As for Die Hard... well my perception was always quite contrary to most people’s opinions in that I actually thought they got better each movie, with number 3 being the greatest, and then dropping back slightly with 4, which I still enjoyed better than the first one... except... looking at the first two now, I don’t things are quite that simple.

I’ve told this story before in my review of the Frank Sinatra film The Detective (see here) but Die Hard is an adaptation of the sequel novel to The Detective and when Frank Sinatra, after being given first option to replay the character in the sequel, refused that option, the character’s name was changed to John McLane and tailored to give the rising star Bruce Willis (who I and probably most people only knew from his stint on the excellent TV show Moonlighting at the time... although I’m not sure how that show would hold up these days) a shot at big screen stardom. Die Hard, and a few other movies he did, really cemented his reputation and kick started his big screen movie career... a career in which, even when he’s playing a parody of himself in films such as The Expendables 2, shows no signs of letting up (indeed, his fifth Die Hard movie is due to open here next year, at time of writing).

The first Die Hard was originally something of a disappointment to me twice, I’m afraid. I first saw this maybe 6 months to a year before it actually got released at cinemas. A friend of mine who I used to visit had one of those “very 80s” dodgy videos-to-your-door, pirate services (which is why I saw the original, uncut version of Wes Craven’s Last House On The Left when I was in my teens). We all sat and watched this fairly fuzzy copy of Die Hard and my friends all loved it. I thought it was nothing special but, by the time it was released in cinemas and my friends were still going nuts about it, I’d convinced myself that maybe I’d just seen it in the wrong frame of mind, on a fuzzy pirate, and that maybe I was missing something. So when a bunch of friends went to take another look at the movie when it hit the big screens, I went with them. My verdict? it really was nothing special... I’d been right.

Then I remember going to see the second one when that came out and thinking that it was much better than the first... and I was very impressed with the third one. Watching the first two again I realise that my perceptions of the films have changed and I think I prefer the original over the sequel now... and I think it’s because I can better appreciate the design of the shots now than I could previously.

Die Hard
Die Hard is a much better action movie than I thought... but it’s a film which takes away from itself even as it gives. To explain: visually the film is actually pretty good. The film can, in many cases, work with an absolute minimum of extraneous detail but it’s like the producers got worried about it and looped in unnecessary dialogue and exposition which detracts from the films obvious visual strengths.

For example, a shot near the start is a perfect way to demonstrate this. We already have established that Bruce Willis is playing somebody called John McLane and that he’s there to visit his wife and kids. A little while later we get a female character who goes into her office to get the phone and sits with her back to us, talking to John McLane. She is on the extreme left of screen and the camera is focusing on the photographs on the shelf behind her which take up the rest of the screen and, as the camera pans and dollies to show more of these details, we finally see a photograph of her and Bruce Willis together, signifying to the audience that this, is indeed, Mrs. McClane. This is an impressive use of visual shorthand to establish characters and their relationship to each other without actually having to spell things out in as dumb a fashion as possible to the audience.

But then, of course, the movie does then spend the next ten minutes or so spelling it out less subtly and in no uncertain terms that these two are actually married (although living apart). This takes away all the strength of the visual material and dilutes it down while at the same time re-enforcing the concept. Which is a shame because the movie is full of visual flourishes like this. John McClane’s lack of shoes is elaborated on twice visually before the camera decides that the shoes he’s left in his wake are not enough of a clue to the bad guy (played by Alan Rickman, one of the more intelligent presences in Hollywoodland screen villains) and so throw in a shot or two where he notices John McClane is not wearing shoes and then gives the order to shoot out the glass on a floor. They really didn’t need to do that as it then makes no sense to establish this earlier in the film and give it such an elaborate set-up with a conversation that takes place on a plane. So that’s a bit of a problem for me.

A small problem, too, is Willis’ early screen performance where either he, improvising, or the script writers, were not willing to allow him to relax into the role without cracking a steady stream of Moonlighting-style one liners. This doesn’t really help the movie and, since he’s on his own for most of the film, these little monologues come off less as James Bond-cleverness and a lot lamer than the producers probably realised. When he’s not wise-cracking, though, Willis does a really good job and you can see how the writers got the ingredients right and why he was propelled to big screen success from this movie.

The score is fantastic too, although I understand there was a lot of “management intervention” on this one (there's a moment which bugged me right from the first time I saw it where James Horner's score for ALIENS is tracked in). The late, great Michael Kamen goes for what would be his typical action-writing sound but because of the film being set at Christmas, introduces quite a few seasonal touches which are woven into the underscore and work at, for most people, an unconscious level. Trust me, you’ve never heard the opening of Winter Wonderland orchestrated so sinisterly as it is in here. He’s also used quotes from Beethoven’s Ninth to establish the origins of the villain in this one and, for some reason less obvious to me, unless it’s foreshadowing a scene involving a sprinkler much later in the movie, musical quotes from Singin’ In The Rain. Whatever... it all works very well and is fittingly regarded as an all time action classic in regards to scoring as well as it’s similar status as a movie in its own right.

With its claustrophobic setting, with only infrequent breaks to show what is going on outside the “tower block under siege” element of the story, Die Hard is a much more enjoyable film than I’d originally thought it and, because of the strength of the holiday spirit in both the dialogue and the score, is a great little action movie to watch in the run up to Christmas.

Die Hard 2: Die Harder
Die Hard 2: Die Harder is a different story. John McTIernan is replaced as director by Renny Harlin (a director I actually quite like for action films, despite his reputation) but, perhaps because it’s based on a book by a totally different author - 58 Minutes by Walter Wager - the film does not plunge the John McLane character (who was again, obviously, not the character who was in the original novel) into a “single player” claustrophobic situation like the first. In this one the action takes place in an airport one snowy Christmas while he, aided and abetted at various times by people he finds along the way, fights to stop a team of crack mercenaries and a team of professional soldiers (who they are in cahoots with) from freeing an important political prisoner when he lands.

To do this, the bad guys knock out communication and leave loads of planes circling in the skies above the airport, ready to crash when they run out of fuel, and the tension and suspense of this movie is about whether John McClane can take the bad guys out and find a way of getting the planes to land safely, before his wife’s plane crashes into the runway.

Well, I say tension and suspense and I suppose it’s fair to say that these elements are present in the movie, but they are just not tightened up to screaming point as they were in the hands of director McTiernan in the first movie. Harlin makes movies which are action spectacles for the sake of the guns and explosions, I think, and while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this very valid approach to making movies... it’s just not quite as effective as the first in the sequence. Although, as I said earlier, when this one first came out, I was singing a different song.

Saying that, though, there’s still some nice things in this movie. Willis is still spewing unwanted monologues everywhere but, also, is consistent in the role and very watchable. The iconic legend who was Django, Franco Nero, is also in this one as the political prisoner villain, but I have to say he was really wasted in this. I wish he’d have been playing the main villain on this one because I still see Nero as a man of action and it was only three years prior to this movie that he’d made his “official” Django sequel, Django Strikes Again... and so he could still do all the physical stuff. He does, though, add a certain weight to the role... so maybe that’s why they picked him. Whatever reason, it’s certainly good to see him and this element, along with plenty of action sequences from Willis and another, out-the-park musical score from Kamen (which is, alas, not as Christmassy in spirit as the tone of his first Die Hard score), make for a very entertaining Christmas action movie.... if not quite as taut as the first.

So that’s one of my Christmas doubles then... after which I watched... ahh, you’ll find out.

Die Hard and Die Hard 2: Die Harder have both dated quite a bit... this is the age of the pager, not the mobile phone, when these movies were made. In fact, it strikes me as I write this now that you just  couldn’t make these movies with this kind of story anymore because the invention of the common-or-garden-everybody-has-one mobile phone would kind of make the necessary communication limitations on the plot redundant. However, with the franchise still going strong, the films will be well thought of in “action-thriller” circles for quite some time, methinks, so if you haven’t seen these ones then it’s probably worth checking them out, if only to have an opinion of them.

I’m going to watch the third and fourth on BluRay sometime after the new edition of the box set comes out with an extra disc at the end of January, so I’ll let you know what I think of those two when I watch them... not to mention my verdict on the fifth one when it hits our cinemas next year.

Happy New Yippee-Ki-Ay!