Last Night In Soho

Puppet On A Sting

Last Night In Soho
UK 2021
Directed by Edgar Wright
Universal Pictures

Warning: I guess this has some mild spoilers.

Trust modern wonder director Edgar Wright to make a movie which transcends initial expectations of what it actually is... perhaps an homage to 1960s British horror, Italian giallo etc... and deliver something which actually only nods to those kinds of movie more as an acknowledgement... instead bringing something fairly new (although not strictly too far out of the box) into the mix. Last Night In Soho is probably not the film most people may expect it to be and although some of those touchstones are in here... there are certainly elements of a ‘Dario Argento Meets Mario Bava’ influence in both the lighting (which is even given an on screen rationale in terms of a character’s bedroom window in proximity to a flashing neon sign) and odd half winks to their various movies (are the mannequins in one shot juxtaposed to the previous a little nod to Bava’s Blood And Black Lace... reviewed here... for example?)... this one is so much more than the sum of any stylistic parts and very much its own thing.

Now, I have to admit, it took me about 25 mins to get into this one and I’d have to say, my first impressions of the central character were quite bad. For a little while, the way sixties obsessed main protagonist Eloise (played brilliantly by Thomasin McKenzie) was written, in terms of her dialogue... well I was having a hard time liking the character for a bit. However, she did grow on me fairly quickly once she leaves her grandmother’s house (her grandmother played by wonderful 1960s icon Rita Tushingham) to come to London to the famous London College Of Fashion (I think I went there to use their library once when I studied Graphic Design at the London College Of Printing back in the day). It probably helped that the majority of her fellow students are just really horrible and so she seems way better than them anyway and, I soon got used to the naivete of the character to the point where she became the reason why I was watching.

It’s pointed out very early on in the movie that Eloise is one of those people who can feel and see psychic/spiritual vibrations from objects and things quite vividly and, when she rents a room off of a landlady played by another 1960s icon, Diana Rigg, she starts tripping back to the past in her dreams and becomes Sandie, played by the always watchable Anya Taylor-Joy, as she tries to be a to singer emerging from the Soho scene in 1965. However, Sandie falls in with a ‘manager’ played by Matt Smith and things don’t go exactly as she planned. Meanwhile, back in the present day reality, Eloise starts to pick up on people and things from the sixties Soho of her dream life and starts to unravel a long standing mystery leading to a darkness at the heart of Sandie’s world... while fighting for her own life as the dreamworld she has let in begins to splinter into her day to day reality and take her mind.

Okay, so I really can’t say anymore about the story because, a) it will spoil it and b) you’ll probably work out most of the twists and turns a fair bit before the film gets you there. The film is obviously referencing the 1960s a lot and includes another couple of iconic performers of the time... these being Terence Stamp and Margaret Nolan (both she and Rigg have dedications on the film... one before it starts and one after it’s finished, I think this was both of these two actresses last movie role and it’s a shame neither of them lived to see how well the film has been received by the critics). However, the one way this film disappointed me slightly was by telegraphing (despite some obvious misdirection on the part of one of the male leads) the true identity of two of the characters and their actual relation to Eloise’s dream adventures.

And, after my initial reluctance to follow the central character which, as I said, was soon overcome, I have to say I found the film to not only be a tight and technological marvel in terms of the art of putting together something like this but also a thoroughly entertaining romp too. If horror is your bag (which this film plays on the periphery of but, due to the ‘visions’ experienced by the central protagonist, it certainly gets there in terms of slipping into that genre pretty well by the end) then you will probably have a good time with this although, I have to say, it’s a very slow burn of a movie which really doesn’t push any of those buttons until a good way through, when things begin to emerge and bleed over from both worlds. That being said, it doesn’t take long before some really beautiful and stunning non-horror set pieces are visited on the audience. Such as the first introduction to Eloise’s dream world as the character watches bewildered, becoming the mirror image of Anya Taylor-Joy and vice versa.

 And, yes, I’d like to say ‘it’s all done with mirrors’ but there looks like there was some clever, practical stuff which was done ‘in camera’ here to use the actresses mirroring each other to both interact with the same co-star at the same time and so on. What’s more, the ways those actresses both reflect and then sometimes not, as they watch each other, shows a real intelligence from, not just the performers but from the way Wright has obviously worked out that you can enhance a scene by using the actions and expressions of each of the two female leads to add a commentary to the events they are caught up in. I was very impressed, for example, when McKenzie apes Taylor-Joy for part of a scene but then is left surprised or doing her own thing as the character splits away from her to fill her in on what may, or may not, be somebody’s back story. Not to mention the technical brilliance (and timing) of the scene where Matt Smith dances with both girls simultaneously by swinging each of them around the camera to transform into the next person and then back again... I expect it took a fair few rehearsals to get right and it certainly wears its trickery on its sleeve but it doesn’t make it any less impressive and well timed, for sure.

And, of course, there’s a sonic backdrop of old 1960s hits such as two of my favourite Sandie Shaw songs... Puppet On A String and (There’s) Always Something There To Remind Me... to get the nostalgia receptors engaged and even, in one sequence, an actress playing a young Cilla Black (what a shame that Work Is A Four Letter Word never made it onto the songtrack, to revive interest in both the song and the movie). The film really hits a nice groove and I’m sure a lot of the younger audience will be discovering the ‘sounds of the sixties’ on the back of this movie, for sure... if Wright can hook them on it. I’m not sure its box office has been all that it could be (well... we are still in a pandemic) but I’m sure this is going to do very well on Blu Ray sales and I, for one, can’t wait to grab a copy of this one to show my folks.

So, yeah, that’s me done on Last Night In Soho. It’s a lot of fun and it looks absolutely beautiful. The twist reveals, such as they are, are maybe not too cleverly done (you probably will be ahead of them) but it really doesn’t hurt the film any because they are also inevitable points that the film needs to hit and it all gives some of the nightmarish, Roman Polanski inspired (surely there’s a little bit of Repulsion in here?) supernatural dream vibrations a good sound logical reading within the context of the story and especially the characters as they are represented later. I’m also pretty sure that, now I’ve processed the content of the film a little bit, I am going to really enjoy watching the heck out of it on subsequent viewings... I reckon this is one of those ‘fine wine’ kind of films that get better with age and familiarity once you start noticing the accumulation of details which you missed the first time around. This is definitely one for fans of spectacular and well crafted cinema, for sure.

Modesty Blaise

Blaise In Sad Dolls

Modesty Blaise
UK 1966 Directed by Joseph Losey
Kino Lorber/20th Century Fox Dual Blu Ray Zone A

My path first crossed paths with the character called Modesty Blaise when my nan died.

It was the mid 1980s, which means I was in my late-ish teens and really not equipped to be able to handle death. Nobody really close had died on me before and I was very close to my nan, who taught me all the really useful stuff like Gin Rummy, Cribbage and Yahtzee. Consequently, I didn’t do or say much in the way of showing any emotional reaction and, to this day, I tend to experience the few brushes I’ve had with death in a fairly muffled manner.

Still, back to my nan.

On her death, I was asked if I wanted anything to remember her by and I singled out the large reproduction of the John Constable painting The Hay Wain which I always saw hanging on the wall of her flat whenever I was around there. Amongst her things though, hidden away in a box of old paraphernalia which, for all I know, might have belonged to my granddad who had died over a decade before, as much as it did my nan, was an old Pan paperback copy of the Peter O’ Donnell novel The Silver Mistress. Since the cover was quite seductive to a young man expressing healthy sexual appetites, I also asked to have that book and, before you knew it, I was reading one of a series of the best written adventure crime pulps ever produced. It wasn’t just the exciting content, though, which kept me turning the pages rapidly... it was Peter O’ Donnell’s central character Modesty Blaise who kept me enthralled.

Modesty Blaise is nothing, if not a strong female character. Her background is that, after her discovery as a near feral child in a far off land she was taken under the wing of a special mentor from whom she got her name and went on to become the head of the world’s greatest criminal network, literally called The Network... retiring at the age of 30 after making her first million (which was a heck of a lot more money in the 1960s than it sounds even today). The character is vibrant, can kick any man’s backside (and most women’s too), is feminine in nature when she wants to be, doesn’t suffer fools gladly, has amazing common sense and was about as feminist as they come. True, O’Donnell would sometimes have the odd male fantasy thing happening with her character, such as her stripping nude and greasing up her body to give her the advantage in a fight against a particularly deadly opponent so they couldn't easily grab onto her (I’m almost certain the Jason Statham ‘oiled up’ scene in the first of The Transporter movies is an homage to this) or entering a room containing multiple villains topless to take advantage of the few seconds of surprise to disable or kill them all why they were still trying to get over the prospect of a pair of boobs staring them in the face... but these were also very practical moments and in the context of the stories, which are not in any way exploitative, they were choices that always made absolute sense. More than that, though, she is not some 2D cypher standing in for something else. She is always so well written that she is never less than a full blooded, living, breathing, 3D personality who, frankly, anyone would be happy to go and hang out with in a pub.

In the books she is always accompanied by her ‘right arm’, the muscly cockney Willie Garvin, who always refers to her as his ‘Princess’ and who is a specialist with knives... always able to quickly judge distances and know exactly how many turns and half turns a knife will need to twist in the air before finding the soft target of his enemies. Willie and Modesty are gifted with that rare, almost sixth sense of a psychic connection that only lovers and the closest of friends seem to have. They were not nor had they ever been, though, bedroom partners... as they felt that would spoil their unique and special relationship, whether it’s playing golf, going to a nightclub or planning a ‘caper’ together and being the deadliest, most efficient pair of ‘Robin Hood’ style ‘thieves with a code’ in English literature.

The first novel by Peter O’Donnell was partially based on his Modesty Blaise comic strip which ran from 1963 in the Daily Express for almost 40 years non-stop in 99 serialised stories. To say the character was successful would be an understatement. When the film industry came knocking, O’Donnell wrote a script which the various producers and directors proceeded to ignore and change to suit their own take on the strips. I should probably reveal at this point that the eventual movie in 1966, directed by Joseph Losey, which I’ll talk about soon (I promise) is one of the worst adaptations of a character ever committed to screen. If you’re looking for a movie that sums up the character of Modesty Blaise and her supporting cast... this really isn’t it and it’s no wonder O’Donnell didn’t want anyone having the rights ever again after the fiasco which is this movie. This is not to say the movie isn’t without some merit... far from it... but in terms of a version of the source material it’s really like chalk and cheese here but, like I said, I’ll get to it in a minute.

When O’Donnell’s script was turned down, he turned his screenplay into the first Modesty Blaise novel, published about a year before the movie made it onto screens. It’s a bit of a masterwork, as all the books in the series are, and it sold gazillions of copies and was translated into many languages. I believe that, for a long time, the books were outselling Ian Fleming’s James Bond books by a long chalk... which were also, obviously, quite popular at the time. I’ve read all the novels over the years and all I can say is, there are very few writers in that particular genre who can touch them as far as thrills and spills with good solid characters and a trailblazing feminist heroine goes. Absolute masterpieces, all of them and if you’re a writer trying to figure out how to put plots together and put meat onto the bones of your characters, I suspect they’re something of a masterclass in the craft too.

The first novel has a clever character called Tarrant, who would become a friend of the pair and a regular in the series, recruiting Modesty to do a job for the British Secret Service because of her experience in fraternising and dealing with exactly the sort of criminals they will be facing. His lever is that he knows Willie Garvin is in a jail in another part of the world and about to be executed. He has his whereabouts, which is pretty much all Modesty would need to rescue Garvin from his predicament. However, instead of using this information as a bargaining tool, he does what his instincts tell him would be the absolute right thing to do in terms of what he knows of Modesty’s psychological profile. He doesn’t use this information as a bargaining chip at all... instead he gives it to her free of charge, knowing that Modesty’s basic sense of right and wrong will mean she feels in his debt and be only too happy to lend her assistance to this country’s little problem (The Network never got involved in drugs or people trafficking and only went after people who could afford it, if memory serves... adhering to a strict moral code). Alas, this is not how things happen in the movie version...

And so we come to the film. What a shame. At least as an adaptation of the adventures of Modesty and Willie. The movie does have some really nice things about it, or I wouldn’t have seen it multiple times and be reviewing an upgraded Blu Ray edition here but, in all honesty, any fans of O’Donnell’s original characters have good reason to be angry with the director and producers of this one.

Let’s get all the bad stuff out the way first.

Modesty Blaise, played here by the wonderful Monica Vitti, is portrayed as almost a damsel in distress of a heroine and prone to emotional displays. The opening, pre-credits sequence, which was nicely parodied in a scene in Roman Coppola’s wondrous and criminally ignored movie CQ, where her butler Weng reads her horoscope and her computer goes berzerk, is as totally wrong for the character as anything else which follows. It’s already heartbreaking as a movie for fans of the books. Also, although she is seen in her classic look at one point... black, almost ninja style outfit with her brunette hair tied up in a bun in some of the scenes (she used to hide a specific type of combat weapon in her hair to help pick out key points on an opponents body), the director decides to use this as an element of an elaborate joke about not being able to get out of her clothes for sex and... ahh... the whole thing is just a pathetic misrepresentation. Although this is the classic Modesty look created by the comics, it’s mostly ignored and for most of the film her hair is blonde and hanging down.

The blonde giant of a man that is Willie Garvin is similarly transformed into a puny but quite vibrant, dark haired Terence Stamp. Furthermore, Vitti and Stamp keep bursting into musical numbers where they moan about why they havent got around to sleeping with each other yet. Seriously, this is not what Modesty Blaise is about, people. It’s absolutely painful to relay this stuff here.

Gabriel, the bald villain from the comics, is played by a dapper Dirk Bogarde and throughout the movie he and the rest of the cast are taking pot shots against the kind of person who would read a comic strip. Honestly, he even has a scene where he tells his secretary to dumb down a message because the person receiving it will understand because, “he reads the comic strips”. Seriously, if Losey and the writers were so disdainful of the comic strip as a format in the first place that they feel the need to trash it at every opportunity then why the hell are they being left in charge of a production of, frankly, one of the more interesting British strips in the history of the art form? There are lots of stupid, irritating and frankly enraging things like this going on in here which completely destroy any attempt of a credible adaptation and... gah... I just don’t like dwelling on it.

What I will say, though, is that it seems clear, reading between the frames, from some of the extras on this new Blu Ray from Kino Lorber, that various people associated with the production blame the failure of the movie squarely on the ‘poor acting’ of Monica Vitti? Sorry? What? Although she is not playing the character as she is in the original source material, she is doing a damn fine job in the role, believe me... as is the often silent and smouldering young Terence Stamp... and the failure of the film really shouldn’t be blamed on the lead actors in this case. Rather on a badly written script which just doesn’t get the characters and their unique dynamic, as far as I’m concerned. Anyone has to look at Vitti’s performance in, say, Antonioni’s Red Desert (reviewed here) to see just how great an actor she was (and just how wasted in countries other than Italy).

Okay, despite how awful a version of Modesty Blaise this film is, there’s also some good stuff and this is the reason why I watch it every six to ten years.

Firstly, it is a product of its time. This film does some strange stuff and it firmly dates it as a typical sixties movie. You could never mistake this as being from any other decade and so, as a celluloid timepiece of its era, it’s an invaluable movie. The sets and art design, with bright op art, distorted checkered interiors (much like the shirts I used to buy in Carnaby Street in the 1980s) are absolutely amazing and stupid details like Dirk Bogarde’s ever expanding drinking glasses, in one occasion with a goldfish swimming inside it, are just typical of the swinging era that produced this flick.

This crazy artistic sensibility also extends to the editing which is infuriating, at some moments where, for instance, Gabriel says he prefers Modesty’s hair colour as brunette and so the camera jump cuts to the hair miraculously turning dark brown on top of her head... it not only breaks the reality of the scene but it looks quite ridiculous, even if it is done with a lot of humour.

However, another example of this editing style is in the way the director decides to ignore the rules of time. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t personally believe in time as a linear concept myself but this is something you do need to sort out visually for most films to appear credible. However, Losey does some nice things with it. For instance, in a scene where Gabriel arrives by boat and walks up the beach and into his castle, a monk goes to play a tune on the organ, welcoming him home. However, since the various shots of Bogarde at different angles of approach show him to be impossibly jump progressed from one place to another in a short amount of time, we can only assume that the music being played is both diegetic when we cut to the monk and non-diegietic when the camera is with Bogarde. So the director is cutting through time by changing the way the editing works within the film. But hang on, since more time must have elapsed for Bogarde’s return than we are shown, then how come the tune finishes diegetically within the same time frame as he arrives in the same room as the organist? This makes no sense whatsoever as Losey totally screws around with time but, to be honest, it very much is an element of the film (this isn’t the only example) which again makes it a perfect showcase of the rule breaking, care free 1960s era of movie making.

And finally, coupled with this, we have one of the greatest motion picture scores ever set to a movie. I remember it took me about 6 or 7 years to find an old vinyl copy of the original 1966 soundtrack recording and it was extremely expensive for somebody who had to use more than one pay packet of his College Saturday job to pay for it... but it was worth it. Johnny Dankworth did the jazzy score and it’s just amazing stuff... with a strong theme for Modesty herself which is first heard in a stupendous song over the opening credits. Later manifestations of this tune as leitmotif include a wonderful fairground organ scene where the music on the pipes suddenly transforms into a fairground style rendition of the Modesty Blaise theme... just brilliant stuff and, even if you don’t watch the movie (it’s not one I can, in all conscience, recommend), I would urge you to seek out the CD from the Harkit label in England (which also has a couple of bonus tracks not on the original vinyl release) because it’s a perfect example of a swinging sixties score... wonderful music.

And that’s me done on this fun to watch (if you can divorce yourself from the terrible limpness of the adaptation) but, ultimately, terrible travesty of a movie. If you’re a fan of Modesty Blaise then this film is certainly not for you. If, however, you don’t know the character and want to look at a really interesting movie time piece then... yeah, you might want to take a look at this one somewhere down the line.

Modesty Blaise was attempted twice more in the world of the moving image. I’ve never been able to source a copy of the Modesty Blaise pilot film which was shown on TV in the 1980s with Ann Turkel in the role but I’ve heard it’s as much a dreadful distortion of the source material as this was. The Quentin Tarantino produced My Name Is Modesty could have been a good movie but it suffers from being set before the events that take place in O’Donnell’s first story... instead dealing with the character’s back story and therefore falling sadly short in terms of the actual iconic elements which make that character what she is. She is a Modesty somewhat unfamiliar to fans of the books and strips and, therefore, this movie doesn’t score any points either, it’s sad to say.

The original strips and novels both concluded in slightly different ways. When Peter O’ Donnell retired and the strip stopped, the last few frames made it clear that Modesty and Willie were also going to have a bit of a rest and were retiring. However, in his last book, published sixteen years before his death, Modesty and Willie have quite a different exit. The book, Cobra Trap, is a series of short stories, each one set in different periods/eras of Modesty’s life. And there’s a big spoiler right here for anyone who’s not read the last story... in the last story, Modesty is hiding the fact that she is dying of incurable cancer. In the final pages of the book, Modesty and Willie sacrifice themselves to buy time for their friends by single handedly delaying what amounts to a small army. They are both killed charging the enemy but both find themselves leaving their bodies and running together towards some kind of afterlife. A much more final ending to the series and a very fitting, if heartbreaking one, for fans of one of the longest running British heroines spanning many decades. If only the 1966 movie had been a straight adaptation of O’ Donnell’s beautiful books and strips but, alas, it was not to be.

Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children

Play Miss P For Me

Miss Peregrine's Home
For Peculiar Children
2016 UK/Belgium/USA Directed by Tim Burton
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very light spoilers.

Although I’ve not read Ransom Rigg’s novel Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, the new adaptation once more continues my increasingly hit and miss (when once they were all hits) relationship with the cinema of Tim Burton. This is not one of my favourite films by him but, it has to be said, I did quite enjoy it in places although, in all honesty, there seems to be something a little less Burtonesque about the final product.

When I first saw the trailer for this film, and being unfamiliar with the book, I immediately thought it would be the kind of story telling that someone like Burton would want to be involved with, until I realised it was indeed directed by him. That being said, while the concept and tone of a film dealing with secret children with special powers who hide from their sinister and terrifying enemies by living in time loops where they never age through the years is, absolutely, something I would imagine this particular director would excel at (and to a certain extent, he kinda does), it doesn’t feel like the execution of the story is realised in a way which is consistent with other Burton projects in the past.

For instance, while the realisation of the children, their locales and the situations they find themselves in is full of imagination and peculiar whimsy, the look and feel of these elements seem to be just a little less wrought and twisted in the same way that the director usually pushes his visuals. Stylistically, it seems less controlled than usual but... perhaps that’s to be expected when the director himself has gone on record as saying that he did as much of this as practically and in camera as he could. It’s quite possible that this CGI element, removed somewhat from the equation (although there’s still loads of it, to be honest) is a contributory factor in my personal response to this piece of art. However, it is art and you are never going to get anything too naturalistic from Burton, you can be sure of that. On the other hand, in his early career, he still probably had a lot less to call on in terms of CGI effects than he’s used here... and those films always felt like they were coming from the same place.

Style aside, the film does still grab you from the very beginning and, although the follow through isn’t quite as good as the concept that’s being explored in the first half of the movie, it will intrigue most audiences I’m sure and, it has to be said, certainly give the viewing public an interesting ride.

My main reason for seeing this one was the casting of Eva Green, one of my favourite contemporary actresses, in the role of Miss Peregrine. Alas, she’s not in the film quite as much as you might expect, seeing that she is even mentioned in the title but... she’s in it enough and her absences from the screen at various times certainly contribute to the forward motion of the story as it unfolds. She is ably aided by a cast of children including Asa Butterfield and Ella Purnell as the two main male and female 'peculiar protagonists' and, it has to be said, the kids in this film really do a great job in this. They are all equally supported by a great cast including Samuel Jackson as the villain of the piece, Judi Dench (in what amounts to almost a cameo but she’s still pretty good here) and the always watchable Terence Stamp playing Asa Butterfield’s grandfather. I don’t want to give too much away about the temporal nature of certain passages of the plotting but Stamp is in it a little more than you might think he is going to be, after you get a little way in. This isn’t a throwaway cameo like he had in Star Wars Episode I - The Phantom Menace (reviewed here).

The acting is superb and the shot design, although less what I would expect from this director, is still quite beautful and it is, for the most part, fast paced enough to keep things going without losing the attention of the audience too much during certain sections. It’s inventive, has a moral heart for the people and the situations they find themselves in and, in a sequence which I knew must have been a labour of love for this director, has a scene which is pretty much a direct homage to Ray Harryhausen, as far as I’m concerned. There’s even what looks like an updated shot lift in one close up moment which had me thinking back to films like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason And The Argonauts. All I’m saying is... if you like watching Harryhausen’s s skeletons, you’re in for a treat here.

There are also a few little things which annoyed me about the film, too, it has to be said. Such as why would an English girl who has been living in Great Britain for so long and who makes her home in a time loop in 1943 refer to an Underground Train Station as a ‘subway’? Sounds a little like an American anachronism to me. If you’re going to set a movie in a specific time zone in the UK then at least research the differences in the language of the time.

Another interesting point for me is that of censorship. Don’t worry, I’m totally against any kind of censorship other than self-censorship after a certain age. However, I think that before the age of, say, ten, then a child’s parent or guardian should make decisions about what might affect that child in a negative manner. Now, Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children is rated a 12A over here in the UK. Which means that children under the age of 12 must be accompanied by an adult and, as it happpens, when I went to the performance on Sunday morning, the majority of the audience seemed to be in the 7 year old range... plus accompanying parents. That being said, this film is absolutely filled with graphic images of eye injury... minus any blood so that, presumably, censorship can be gotten around and a less damaging rating can be bestowed upon it. Which I don’t really agree with because, graphic violence which is bloodless just teaches impressionable minds that violence has no consequence.

And were talking about a lot of eyeball stuff here folks. I mean, the plot is such that the villains of the piece harvest the eyeballs of children so they can eat them as a means to bring themselves back into something closer to themselves before they had their ‘terrible accident’ (which is shown for us in flashback). People’s eyes are removed, bowls of them are eaten and, in a particularly gruesome scene, eyeballs are squished out with tentacles. I can’t but think that, with all that stupid fuss over films like Zombi (aka Zombie Flesh Eaters) in the 1980s, this film might well have made the Video Nasty list (and you can read more about two documentaries dealing with that peculiarly British phenomenon here and here). So I’m somewhat bemused that young children, who are pretty robust (as was pointed out by someone close to me), are allowed to see something which is, in my opinion, far worse than anything found in that particular Lucio Fulci classic (which you can read my review of here).

The other thing about this movie which deserves a brief mention is the musical score by Michael Higham and Matthew Margeson. Anyone remotely familiar with the films of Tim Burton would be able to tell you that almost all of his scores are provided by Danny Elfman. I can only, in fact, think of three Burton films which didn’t have an Elfman score and, I can’t help but wonder why he didn’t score this one. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice enough score but it doesn’t hit the same kinds of rhythms and arrangements that Elfman might have provided and so I also wonder if this is one of the reasons why this seems less like ‘a Tim Burton movie’ to me. Director and composer relationships such as the infamously torn one between Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann or the amazingly long held one by Steven Spielberg and John Williams can sometimes be a battle of egos, I suspect, but it also sometimes leads to the best work being created by either of the two artists involved and so I have to ponder, since the score for this one is less a pseudo-Elfman score than Howard Shore’s amazing contribution to Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, if this is a big contributing factor to the way I mentally received the film in this case.

Either way, it’s not something I can definitively say yes or no to so I’ll leave that thought there and just round up this review by saying that, although it’s not as Burtonesque, nor as consistently brilliant as I was hoping, Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children is still a pretty entertaining ride and worth a look if you like the idea of the art of cinema showing you something you can’t, quite, see in anyone else’s movies. A definite good night out at the picture palace for most people, I suspect, and certainly worth catching at the cinema if you have nothing better to do one evening. And, despite my evenly tempered reaction to it... I do hope Burton adapts some of the other books in the series. I’d kind of like to see where this goes.

Mystery On Monster Island

A Verne For The Worse

Mystery On Monster Island
1981 Spain/USA
Directed by Juan Piquer Simón
Midnite Movies DVD Region 1

This film first came to my attention only a couple of weeks ago when I finished reading the excellent book on Paul Naschy promotional material, Muchos Gracias Senor Lobo (reviewed here). I saw some beautiful poster artwork for this movie in this book and, not only did it seem to star Paul Naschy... top billing went to Peter Cushing and Terence Stamp. Furthermore, it was also based on the writings of one of my favourite writers, Jules Verne, so there was no way I wasn’t going to order the cheap Midnite Movies edition off of Amazon for less than a fiver!

I’d assumed, when I first saw the poster, that the Jules Verne tale this one took as its source would have been my favourite of his tales, the semi-sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea... Mysterious Island. There were no monsters in the original tale of that one, of course, but there is a mystery at the story’s heart and famous adaptations of that particular work in the past have often featured giant monsters of one kind or another (heck... I even have a 1950s cinema serial of Mysterious Island which also sees fit to include invaders from another planet lead by a dominant queen) so this was my first guess on the source.

And of course I was dead wrong... something which most reviewers of this movie, it seems, tend to ignore or remain ignorant of when doing their own research on the subject! Being as most of them seem to proclaim that this movie is based on Mysterious Island. Not so!

In actual fact, the film is based on Verne’s work School for Robinsons, which I believe may well have been a partial sequel to one of his many other, interlocking books but unfortunately, my little knowledge of Verne is sadly limited to the 10 or 12 of them which are continually kept in print in the UK... and we have nothing like the whole of his work available to us over here (although maybe if I joined the Kindle revolution?). So, having said that, I obviously can’t judge as to whether this movie is a good adaptation.

What I can say for definite is... it’s a mostly lousy movie. It does have some cheesy looking monsters in it and, obviously, that can only be a good thing... but ultimately, this movie never really succeeds in hitting that mark where, “it’s so bad it’s good”. Instead, becoming a mostly tiresome and plodding effort which you will probably find yourself wishing to end sooner rather than later.

It’s a bit of a strange beast as well because it’s obviously a childrens film - certainly, the comic relief character is squarely and irritatingly pitched at a younger audience in the most over the top manner you wouldn’t even catch on an episode of Playschool and, since he seems to get the majority of the screen time, it’s pretty much a kid’s holiday film at heart. Much less a family film than it is a youngster’s glittery distraction. However, saying that, Paul Naschy is seen taking a few blood squib explosions to his body very early on in the proceedings and is depicted with both his arms literally running red with blood... which is interesting considering the obvious target audience. I really couldn’t imagine this got much, if any, of a release in this country at the time.

Which leads me into Paul Naschy’s demise and the way that he and the two actors who take top billing are treated. This must have been a really cheap movie because Naschy lasts less than five minutes on screen before he is blown up and drops out of the story. Peter Cushing and Terence Stamp fare a little better... but not by much. Cushing and Stamp really only appear for 5 minutes or so at the start of the film and 10 minutes maybe at the end. The budget obviously didn’t stretch to having them on set for very long and, for the rest of the movie, the beleaguered audience has to make do with two male leads who, between them, seem to show either a total lack of personality or, in the case of the comic relief, an overabundance of obvious and overblown comedy enthusiasm. This doesn’t make for good viewing. What’s worse is that Terence Stamp is supposed to be the main villain but for the majority of the picture the main villain and his many henchmen run around with their bodys and heads totally covered in heavy masks and coats... presumably because the cheap budget meant that the producers had to hide the fact that they didn’t have Terence Stamp on set most of the time, instead electing to dub his voice on a hidden actor's lines instead.

Having said all that, there were a few things which made it so, as bored as I was, the movie wasn’t one I actually regretted seeing... although it was a close call. The monsters are mostly fairly cheesy and this lends the few scenes where you actually see some, a certain amount of amusement (or at least more amusement than the official comic relief provides, at any rate).

Secondly, in an effort to defend their desert island home from Stamp’s villainous horde, our irritating heroes construct some defences around the piece of sand they call their home. One of the things they make, although I’ve no idea how, is a homemade Gatling gun made of bamboo chutes which rapidly fires bananas at the turn of a handle. This is, of course, something of a stroke of genius and I am, and always will be, happy to say I’ve seen a film in which a banana firing, bamboo-chute Gatling gun is used to ward off a bunch of antagonists.

A third thing, which is another mixed bag, is the music. The composing credit doesn’t come up until the end of this one but it seems to be put together by three separate composers. So I’m guessing this means the movie has a needle-drop style score, from a library of universal cues written by these particular composers... or the film had a very troubled production history (which I suspect is probably the case). Or possibly, even, a less than thrilling combination of both of those elements. Either way, there’s a really strident and neat tune which is played quite a lot throughout the movie at various points which really does catch the ear. Unfortunately, though, it’s completely inappropriate to any of the scenes it’s used to score. So while I am quite happy to keep this as my own personal earworm, and would rush to buy the score to this movie if anyone is wise (or perhaps foolish) enough to release it... I would have to say that the movie itself suffers from the inclusion of most of the music here and if anything, the score robs the lacklustre shot design and jarring edits of any kind of power it might have had a chance at gaining and kind of makes things a lot worse most of the time.

Nice music though.

And there’s no more really to say about this one. I don’t regret buying this movie (banana Gatling gun, remember?) but this is definitely not a film I’d recommend to many people, even die hard B-movie enthusiasts who have a love of cheesy monsters. It’s just not that noteworthy I’m afraid. For the jaded and curious only, I would say. All others may be best advised to keep their distance. The greatest mystery of Mystery On Monster Island is how the budget holders were persuaded to let loose their purse strings and unleash such a piece of uninspired tosh into the world.