Killing Me Slowly...

The Killer Inside Me 2010 UK

Directed by Michael Winterbottom

Screening at cinemas now

Well that was unexpected. I’d really assumed I'd quite like this movie. A Jim Thompson noir shot by a director who can be a bit hit and miss but who I quite like.

I’m having a hard time with myself trying to figure out why this movie didn’t check all the boxes for me. It’s well shot, lit, directed, edited... it has a nice, slow, leisurely European pacing to it which is a welcome relief to the majority of large screen confections which come our way these days. It had a really nicely designed opening credit sequence which, to be fair, was a lot more pacier than any of the rest of the movie put together. It also had some fine performances... but something just didn’t quite gell for this viewer.

Maybe it’s the controversy this movie seems to have caused when shown in festival. For some reason, even mild S&M with a little brutality thrown in seems to set some people off. It’s not a knee jerk reaction I can really sympathise with and it would be remiss of me not to point out that what is on show here is actually quite tame and nothing unlike anything we’ve seen before on film. It’s all old hat.

And maybe that’s why I was so disappointed in some ways. It’s all been seen before. And this time it just seemed a little drearier than usual. And there’s much less useful movies out there so perhaps I’m being a little unfair... there are plenty of people who really “got” this movie. In fact I went because of a positive tweet on twitter. But for my part I just felt a little underwhelmed by this one. It didn’t make me think and neither was I particularly entertained.

I’m sure it probably works better as a novel though. And I’m sure it’s a really “tight” adaptation. Maybe I should give the novel a read.

Four Girls on Black Asphalt

4.3.2.1 2010 UK

Directed by

Noel Clarke and Mark Davis

Screening at cinemas now

Oh look. It’s Mickey! Hello Mickey! Mick Mick Mickey!

Right, got that one out of my system!

4.3.2.1, not to be confused with a similarly entitled Perry Rhodan movie from 1967, is another film co-directed by, written by and also co-starring Noel “Mickey from Doctor Who” Clarke.

And it’s a really great movie.

I’ve not seen anything written by or directed by this guy before but all I can say is that the movie I saw this morning is as slickly, stylishly and glossily put together as any current Hollywood mainstream action flick... and it doesn’t really pull any punches either.

The film follows four, admittedly extremely good looking young ladies, over roughly a 48 hour period. It seems very contrived but you don’t really notice that too much as it kinda gets buried in the editing of what is an extremely stylised visual feast. The pacing is relentless... it never really lets up and lets you find rest and that’s probably one of its key strengths since the long line of coincidences which drive the plot forward may start to look a little bit bedroom farce if you were given any real time to think about them.

Early on in the film it starts getting all mid-sixties split screen and, since I’d never seen any of this guys movies before, I immediately assumed that this was probably one of his visual signatures (you know, like DePalma) but after the first half hour played out and the movie, which is told in flashback, caught up to the start of the film again... it became apparent that this technique was being employed as a stylistic device to act as an intro to separate strands of the movie. I hadn’t realised until half an hour through that this was going to be one of those films where the, in this case four, central characters are given their own separate strands and followed individually... all moving forward to the same resolution.

Loads of the cast of recent years of Doctor Who turn up in it... even the guy who is the voice of the Daleks has a solid supporting role... but the best cameo appearance is the two scenes “stolen” by Mr. Silent Bob himself, the one and only Kevin Smith. He seems to be losing a lot of hair but it doesn’t matter. In this movie he plays someone called Larry... but he’s still quite cool.

I think the only minor criticism of this movie from my point of view is that I felt a little bit excluded from the target audience. This film deals with College age teenagers and that seems to be exactly the audience it’s going after. So everything that comes out of the various characters mouths seems a little naive or innocent or... I dunno... just plain childish?

But that’s fair enough. It’s a small grumble and I was so caught up in the snazzy editing and energetic pacing that I kinda forgot everything else. Definitely worth a watch to support a good little British movie that brings a kinda Tarantinoesque quality to the teenage movie market. Good stuff!

Starry, Starry Pandorica Rising

Doctor Who: Vincent and the Doctor

Airdate: June 5th 2010.

UK. BBC1

Woohoo! Finally a pretty good episode of Doctor Who in the new series. That makes me feel so much better now.

Ok, I really haven’t got much of a bad thing to say about this one. All the writing and the performances were great and I didn’t even mind the very silly looking giant, invisible parrot.

This episode has all the appearances of being a nice, stand alone character piece... and while I would usually perhaps credit these kind of elements to be the contributing factors on why this was such an entertaining episode... as a viewer with an unfortunate bit of spoilerage locked inside me... I have to say that while this episode is indeed a nice, stand alone character piece as stated above... it’s also something entirely else completely.

Pandorica Rising people! All I’m going to say is... those paintings by Vincent Van Gogh... well they’re a bit inspirational aren’t they? Might give someone some ideas!

Ok... keeping what I know locked tight inside me like the pain of a soon to be earless artist... this paragraph is pure speculation but... did it seem odd to you that in his madness, Vincent went straight from that to being absolutely alright again? Yeah, I know, mood swings. Or did he have a little visitation which hasn’t been revealed yet? I would have expected a show produced by Stephen Moffet who seems to be quite open embrace the darkness would have covered the incident of Van Gogh’s missing ear... perhaps that part of the story is still to come. :-)

Okay... other things that struck me about this almost perfect episode were... was Bill Nighy also playing the Matt Smith incarnation of The Doctor and didn’t tell him? If you’re trapped in one regeneration of The Doctor for a long time, does one begin to age? It’s almost certainly nothing but I think it’s an indication of how giallo-like the programme is becoming. Everything and everyone is suspect to being not quite what it seems until proven otherwise. Like the curious case of Amy Pond. Bet that painting doesn’t say “For Amy” when the prisoner inside the Pandorica explodes and rips through time and space. Hmmm... what something exploding could possibly tear a rip through time and space? Oh... what was that the Doctor pulled out of the hole the other week?

So on now to a really amazingly nonsense sentence actually unless, there’s one near solution. Does a little exciting knowledge send children young but elderly running maniacally ever nowhere?

Blimey that was a strange paragraph I just wrote! What am I going on about? I think I’ll have to get back to that in a couple of weeks time. Think I’ll dedicate that last paragraph to twitter and blog follower flaysome wench ;-)

Ok... so I really liked this episode. Keep them at that kind of quality and Doctor Who will be back on top in no time at all.

Katrin Cartlidge is Claire Dolan

Claire Dolan 1998 US

Directed by Lodge Kerrigan

Artificial Eye DVD Region 2

Call me a cold bugger but it’s not that often that “movie star” deaths leave any emotional mark on me. I love seeing the people up there on the screen bring the light alive with their presence, but I really don’t know them so when various deaths are announced... I might feel a little shocked for a couple of minutes but usually I’ll just register it in my brain as a little “factoid”... useful for movie quizzes and bus shelter conversations and there’s really not much of a response in me at an emotional level. Would I pass Deckard’s empathy test with this stuff? Probably not but I can fake it as well as a Nexus 6. I am who I am.

Over the last decade, however... two actresses died who passed well before their time and their work always hit such a chord in me that their passing still causes me some major sadness in my heart when I think of them (Brittany Murphy almost made it three... but I’m not nearly as worked up over her). One of these two was the late, great Adrienne Shelley. Her murder sucker-punched me so much that I never quite got to see the last film she starred in and directed... Waitress (maybe it’s time I got around to seeing that one now).

The other actress who died in 2002 at the age of 41 due to complications rising from pneumonia and septicaemia was Katrin Cartlidge. I hadn’t seen a lot of her work but she was absolutely electric in Mike Leigh’s films, especially as the head-over-heels-in-love-with-David-Thewlis flatmate in Naked. She was suitably and typically gobsmacking as Jack the Ripper victim Dark Annie Chapman opposite Johnny Depp and Heather Graham in the Hughes’ Brother’s From Hell and when she put on a posh accent for her take as an out-in-the-field news reporter in Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land, another facet of her absolutely flawless acting talent was revealed. She also worked with Lars Von Trier in Breaking the Waves but that is another one I have yet to see.

I’ve been wanting to see her starring turn in Claire Dolan for a while... I think this is probably the only movie where she is the actual star and most of the footage on screen is of her. Finally saw it last night and I was not disappointed.

I’ve not seen any other films directed by Lodge Kerrigan but I’m going to have to take a look at some of his other stuff on the strength of this amazing film. Absolutely stunning framing throughout. Lots of geometrically composed shots using strong verticals and horizontals across the screen including some absolutely stunning shots of buildings which are very reminiscent of some of the building shots that Hitchcock used to use (see if you can watch the opening titles of this movie without being reminded of North By Northwest). I saw Cameron Mitchell talk about Mario Bava once on an interview. He stressed that when Bava used to shoot a film, every frame of the film was like a perfectly composed still photograph. I think the same could possibly be said of this director’s work... certainly in this movie anyway.

Claire Dolan stars Katrin Cartlidge as an Irish prostitute in the US trying to get out from under her pimp (Colm Meaney in an absolutely chilling performance that definitely puts paid to his Star Trek image) after the death of her mother. She tries to do this by earning as much as she can while getting her new “boyfriend” pregnant. Men are treated as interchangeable, sexist, mysogynistic pigs in this movie apart from Vincent D’Onofrio who she chooses to father her child (another wonderful actor who will always be remembered by me for his portrayal of Conan creator Robert E. Howard opposite Rene Zellwegger in The Whole Wide World).

This is not a dialogue heavy film. This is a film where the camera broods on the contemplation of Katrin Cartlidge as she immerses herself in the role of Claire Dolan. This is absolutely fantastic work. The dark, sombre movie is further enhanced by a moody, understated score by Simon Fisher Turner and Ahrin Mishan.

The movie culminates in a completely ambiguous ending which leaves you in a lot of doubts as to whether you should be feeling good or bad. It takes two shots/scenes - one of Claire Dolan on a positive note... but this is juxtaposed with another scene with her pimp some time after. Rubbing these two sequences together makes you ponder the things which have gone before. This is no easy resolution.

When I watch this actress at work I am always reminded of the tragedy of her death at the age of 41. So I’ll leave you now a reminder of her in her own words, with a quote from an interview a couple of years before she died...

“"I actually love getting older. I hated my 20s; I couldn't wait to be 30. I'm really looking forward to turning 40, if I get there. And not just because things are more successful now, but because I think the older you get, the more you find life interesting apart from your own problems. So roll on. I can't wait."

They Lost It At The Movies

The Losers 2010 US

Directed by Sylvain White

Screening at cinemas now

The Losers is a really great action movie. No doubt about it. If you’re into action movies, then The Losers is the one to catch.

I was expecting it to be a lot less than watchable and it turned out to be one of the better written action flicks of recent times. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is the “chief” of a “crack team” of five mercenaries who feels responsible for their fortunes after a mission goes well wrong and the five of them are, deliberately by their own hand, presumed dead. I didn’t know who this guy was when I saw the movie but I just looked him up on the IMDB (yeah, I know, not the most reliable source of movie information) and he’s the guy who played The Comedian in Watchmen. Would never had pegged that. Doesn’t matter... he seems to be one of those actors who can literally do nothing much on screen but you feel his charisma eating away at you from behind the celluloid (like Marlene Dietrich but just not as sexy).

I think the fact that the movie is based on an actual comic book rather than some illiterate, soulless action writers idea of a script (why is A Quantum of Solace just jumping into my mind? Hmmm) is why this one succeeds on so many fronts. Plus, with Zoe Saldana getting naked (oh rats... they did it tastefully) and Chris Evans playing a geek... this film really has a lot going for it.

And it has brilliant lines like... “You don’t need seatbelts. The G-forces will just hold you in.” You just know this movie is worth hanging in there for.

Plus the action editing is not going to confuse the f*ck out of you and the ending is... well not what you’d expect from a movie of this kind. Looks like they’re crossing their fingers for a franchise.

Seriously... if you like action movie writing which is up there with the likes of Shane Black... you should probably go and see this film.

Clash of the Gothic Icons!

Dracula VS Frankenstein 1970 US

Directed by Al Adamson

Cheezy Flicks DVD Region 1

Finally got to see this, um, masterpiece of mayhem yesterday. All I can say is “Wow!” If you like movies so bad that they actually make you laugh out loud and talk back to the screen... then you should definitely put this one on your play list.

The film concerns a Count Dracula who looks like he’s just stepped out of the ranks of the "Village People." He digs up the body of the original Frankenstein monster and brings it to the last surviving family member of the Frankensteins (played here by Universal veteran J. Carrol Naish) who runs a boardwalk ghost house come sideshow freak exhibition and does bizarre experiments on naked young girls in an attempt to find a serum for... something or other... sometimes you have to let art wash over you people.

He is aided by his not-actually-a hunchback-transforms-into-a-maniac-sometimes-and-decapitates-people friend played by Lon Chaney Jr and his puppy. Neither Lon Chaney Jr nor the puppy have any actual lines but that doesn’t matter... Lon Chaney Jr mimes his responses in a performance that, although I have a lot of respect for the man, induced spasms of gleeful laughter from this viewer (ok then, I smiled a lot).

This film has everything you need in a really bad film.

Really, really dire acting from most of the actors? Check.

Really horrendously wordy but totally nonsensical script which the actors seem to get wrong as they try to say those tongue twisting lines anyway. Check.

A REALLY badly written and badly performed song and dance number by the female protagonist and her two male dancers which had me grinning like a Cheshire cat at the sheer stupidity of the lyrics. Oh yes.

A groovy band singing in the hippy hangout. Have to have them.

Russ Tamblyn as the leader of a, very small, biker gang! Check.

A surly midget ticket seller who does magic tricks (“I eat your tickets!”) and dies by falling onto his own axe and splitting his head open. Tick that box.

An unbelievably over the top score (my limited CD is already on order as I type) which is mysteriously and mostly replaced during the last 20 minutes or so by tracked in cues from Creature From The Black Lagoon (which is cool, I like that score). That’s another check.

A really well designed Dracula ring that shoots bad special effects lightning to disintegrate people. Ok, so not all bad movies have to have that one but it helps.

And a completely pointless wrestle between Dracula and the Frankenstein monster at the end of the flick which results in both of them dying! Bingo.

The Cheezy Flicks DVD boasts an okay transfer, non anamorphic of the original 1.66:1 aspect ratio. It’s been a while since I had that much fun with a DVD!

Miss this one at your peril!

Land of Hope and Gory!

Zombieland 2009 US

Directed by Ruben Fleischer

Sony Pictures DVD Region 2

Been a little while since I saw Zombieland at the cinema... so thought I’d make a purchase while it’s still at Tesco’s chart prices and give it a spin.

Still a good movie. Well written dialogue and a friendly voice over narrative give this film a charm you wouldn’t expect. Also, the characters, while not completely fully developed (it’s 84 mins and it’s a zombie movie people!), are actually quite well fleshed out and they are well enough performed by the leads to make you care about what happens to these people.

It has kind of a buckshot humour to the jokes... they’re not all good but there’s so many of them thrown around that some of them are bound to hit. Bill Murray’s cameo turns into something very obvious, very quickly, but it’s okay. He doesn’t outstay his welcome and it’s nice to hear the Ghostbusters song again in a movie.

Nice set up for a sequel, quite a bit of heart in it... this one deserved to be the success it was at the box office. A gentle, zombie comedy.

Wong At Heart

Mr. Wong, Detective 1938 US

Directed by William Nigh

Monogram/VCI Home Entertainment

DVD Region 1

So... taking a break from the Mr. Moto series until I can get the second box at a “more reasonable price” (aka cheaper) I am continuing my pet obsession with USA made oriental detectives with the VCI set of the six Mr. Wong films. The first five of whom star Boris Karloff in the title role (with Keye Luke taking over in the sixth one!).

Ok. First things first. I love Boris Karloff. Think he’s an incredible actor and personality but... you have to be warned... at no time in these movies does Boris make any attempt to put on an oriental accent... like Warner Oland, Sydney Toler or Peter Lorre did, for example. He just ploughs through the role in his typical English “I am Boris Karloff” voice with absolutely no vocal concessions to the ancestry of his character. I don’t know how he got away with this. Maybe in the late 30s in Hollywood, English accents sounded unusual enough in a US movie that no extra vocal hijinks were deemed necessary. Who knows?

Rest assured though, the usual gravitas of Karloff’s performance more than makes up for the lack of oriental colouring.

This is very much a slow plod of a film but, refreshingly perhaps, this is a movie which goes out of the way to prove how grounded in science it is. Mr. Wong's scientific skills are pushed to the fore as he solves the riddle of the glass spheres which shatter and release their deadly poison glass at the sound of approaching police sirens. So the film kind of plays out like a typical 1930s Doc Savage pulp, but without the breakneck action pacing that hurtled you through the pulse-pounding prose of Lester Dent (aka Kenneth Robeson). Perhaps then, the film may have better been entitled Mr. Wong, Science Detective.

Lots of fun character actors in this one... including the guy who played Perry White in TVs The Adventures of Superman... and some series regulars, in the form of the blundering chief inspector and his screwball comedy fiance, are nicely set up here too.

Not as good as Chan or Moto but certainly worth a watch if you’re into Karloff!

Blood and Scales

Doctor Who: Cold Blood

Airdate: May 29th 2010.

UK. BBC1

Oh come on people. This is really getting to be upsetting. I am so trying to like this new series of Doctor Who and it just keeps getting more and more rubbish.

I can’t believe after the Eccleston and Tennant seasons, which were mostly sensational, turned on TV... we get this. It’s a real let down.

I don’t know if you can call this a review because I can’t quite focus my thoughts on anything major to latch on to. It just seemed a really... I don’t know... mundane mess of an episode.

And then we get this tagged on conclusion with the notorious crack in time and space chasing “our heroes”... and I’m just left confused. Why am I left confused? Because I actually know most of what happens at the end of this series... the whole “plan” and its diabolical coalition of antagonists are not something I am going to reveal out of respect to the creators of this programme... but even knowing what I know, the whole thing still doesn’t make any sense continuity wise.

Ok... so Rory is not just killed off but wiped from existence... but Amy can somehow forget him but remember all the other times this has happened. Funny that.

So future Rory and future Amy were waving at the start of the episode... time passes... enough time for a whole adventure... future Rory has been wiped... and Amy is STILL bloody standing there waving at the end of the story? What? Trainspotter much?

So it’s not okay to take Rory’s body with them because... well... the light is all around him... Um... but it’s okay for the Doctor to put his hand in the light, pull out a part of the exploded TARDIS and put it in his pocket for later. What the heck?

And pardon me... if the crack wiped out all the stuff that happened down there... um... shouldn’t Stephen Moore’s Silurian narrator have stopped commenting on it by the very end of the show... instead of, you know, talking about it in the past tense like he is around to remember it... and that there’s something left from the crack to remember?

Honestly... with this season of the show, Doctor Who has stopped being a family show and gone back to very firmly being a children’s programme. Why? Because only very young children are not going to notice the incredibly bad continuity errors contained in this programme. I am really surprised they’ve let it get like this. Seriously not happy. I hope there’s a way this series can be somehow retro-corrected in a later series. Am I right in thinking the ratings have been steadily dropping? This show needs to get a lot better very fast. Still holding out hope that it can do that.

:-(

Klaatu barada [•REC] 2

[•REC] 2 2010 Spain

Directed by Jaume Balagueró

and Paco Plaza

Screening at cinemas now

In the words of River Song... this blog will contain “spoilers”. Spoilers! Got that! Spoilery, spoilery spoilers.

So, if you want to go into [•REC] 2 without knowing anything about it... don’t read this page. But please, come back and read it after you’ve seen the movie? Pretty please?

OK. I really liked the first [•REC] movie, and I’ll tell you why... but first I have to say up front that, to me, like 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, I consider [•REC] and [•REC 2] to be zombie movies. Why do I consider these films to be zombie movies? Well, firstly, they’re obviously hugely influenced by the more fashionable strand of zombie movies proliferated by directors such as Romero and Fulci. Secondly, they seem to display and play with the long established traits of the survival horror genre which traces its lineage back to those specific styles of zombie films. And thirdly because they are, in fact, reanimated corpses. You could, of course, quite legitimately argue that in this case they are demonically possessed souls out for a quick apocalypse and a friend of mine did argue just that in the pub after the movie... but let’s face it Jake, you have to be bitten and die off and be infected with the zombieistic virus before that happens so it’s still basically following the rules.

Besides which... weren’t Lamberto Bava’s Demons 1 and 2 basically just zombie movies?

Right, so now I’ve firmly established that [•REC] and [•REC] 2 both belong in my new “quasi-religious zombie” genre... I can continue my train of thought ;-)

So, as I was saying, I really liked the first [•REC] because it was a zombie movie that was, for once, actually genuinely scary. I mean lets face it, most zombie movies are really not scary movies and are presumably not designed to be. They’re basically just body-count style action movies with a little extra gore and cannibalism thrown in. And, to be fair, the [•REC] movies have their fair share of that element too... but the first one is also generally intense and scary.

Now... I hate to admit this but, the second [•REC] film is really not scary like the first one was... and it does have one terrible flaw... but other than that I have to say that I did find it really entertaining. Zombie movies may not be scary but they do have a kind of restful predictability to them so that you can let your brain relax and do some extra thinking to them.

[•REC] 2 uses exactly the same building that the crew shot in for the first one (it was used a couple of years ago in an episode of a Spanish horror TV show and it pretty much looked the same there too... think it might even have had the same directors). Anyhow, it’s pretty much been redressed to show the aftermath of the first movie. This film starts off with the army going into accompany a “doctor” into the building giving us the promise that this movie might be to [•REC] what ALIENS was to A L I E N. Thankfully it doesn’t make the same mistakes that ALIENS did and we are left with a piece of moviemaking that is still very much “low-budget independent” as opposed to Spainywood blockbuster.

At the start of the film the last shot from the first movie is replayed, giving the audience the impression that the events start a short time after. However, right near the end of the movie, just after something which is, unfortunately, way too obvious to be a proper twist is “revealed”, we find out that the time frame is actually located so that this movie starts about ten to fifteen minutes before the final scene of the last movie.

As I said, there is one really bad thing in this movie and it is this... instead of sending in a crack professional military team as the film would have you believe, they have instead sent in crappy Hollywood-movie style soldiers... that is to say, soldiers who get angry very quickly when confronted by things they don’t understand... and then make every stupid Hollywood-soldier mistake in the book and endanger all their lives needlessly because they let themselves be ruled by their emotions. Yes, these are the typical movie soldiers you would never want to accompany you for protection if you need to go into a zombie infested building.

That being said though, there is plenty to like in this movie. They’ve really played up that religious angle which they threw in for the last quarter of an hour of the first movie (and which, I am told, was eliminated from the American version) and run with it here. When the “doctor” is revealed to be a priest with the secret mission to bring back the original “possessed” childs blood so an antidote can be made, things get very interesting. Blood that reacts in a combustible fashion to the holy cross, zombies which channel the original demonically possessed girl so they can have Father Merrin-style conversations with the priest... zombies which back off when trapped by rosaries and recited religious verse. Some camera shennaniganary to demonstrate that there are two plains of existence within the penthouse of the building. You might think that the overabundance of this kind of material would spoil things somewhat but the way it is handled here is very credible and it is indeed a pretty good “take” on the merging of the zombie genre with the demonic-possession genre...

There’s a slight weak point about halfway through when the camera is killed and we resee some of the events of the last three quarters of an hour from a different perspective via a different camera following another set of characters... who then catch up to the original characters and pick up the story again... but this is just a small irritant.

The ending of the first movie gave us a strong possibility for a sequel through its last quarter of an hour. This time around the last 5 minutes provides us with a very definitive nod to a third movie with a very definite promise that things will need to be upscaled perhaps to Cloverfield proportions... so if they are planning to do a third one, well, budget wise they're going to need a bigger boat!

All in all then, [•REC] 2 is a good, solid, entertaining horror picture... so if you like that kind of thing then rush to see it!

Viva Bardot! Viva Moreau! Viva Maria!

Viva Maria! 1965 France

Directed by Louise Malle

MGM (restored epilogue)

DVD Region 2

Wow! What a brilliant and stupid film!

Ok... this is directed by Louis Malle and stars French screen sirens Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau and, if that wasn’t pedigree enough... two of the assistant directors on this brilliant mess of a movie are Juan Luis Buñuel (basically, Luis Buñuel’s son) and Volker Schlöndorff (he who went on to direct some brilliant movies, among them the amazing adaptation of Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum).

This film is just so ludicrous it would not get made today... all the more reason to watch it, say I!

After a series of flashbacks to the late nineteenth century which establish Brigitte Bardot’s childhood as an IRA terrorist who grows into someone who’s very good with explosives and weaponry in general (well... that was obviously perfect casting then) we come to her witnessing her fathers death and blowing up the people responsible as the film catches up to the first years of the twentieth century.

On the run she catches up and ingratiates herself with Jeanne Moreau’s character who is a music hall singer with a travelling music hall show (which is basically half musical revue and half circus). Since both the characters are called Maria, and since Jeanne Moreau’s partner has just committed suicide the two girls form a new musical partnership... but, on their first night performing together, they accidentally invent the striptease! Seriously, I’m not making this up. The two Maria’s take the international circuit by storm, their names adored and loved everywhere. Bardot sleeps with almost every guy she meets, including three guys all at once on the night of her “musical” debut, while Moreau seems to be holding out for someone special. She finds that someone special in the form of a revolutionary leader (played by George Hamilton who is fortunately not in the movie for very long). On his death, the girls and their travelling... well it’s pretty much a travelling circus but without the animals... get mixed up in leading the Mexican revolution and blow up and kill lots of people. The film by this point has turned into the kind of circus/spaghetti western that Gianfranco Parolini used to specialise in.

But the church get worried that their names and images are revered by the people so they kidnap and try to torture the girls under the inquisition. However their torture equipment is all rusty and disused so it keeps falling apart before they can do anything. Then the rest of the company rescues them and all the bad guys get killed... and so the girls go back to stripping (in the restored ending print) and are a massive success. The end.

Seriously... what a blindingly bizarre movie. And frankly, no matter how bad and hammy it gets in places... I could watch Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau squeeze into and out of tight corsets all day.

Outstanding and striking visual images would be the two girls in their fine dresses destructively using a gatling gun (also some iconic publicity stills of them exist doing this but not from the scene which is in the film) and a wonderful sight gag as the company cross the burning desert and come across a skeleton in a ten gallon hat still mounted on a skeleton of his horse. Great stuff.

So... bizarre and campy sixties film filled with some very surreal imagery and blatantly unsubtle camera tricks, two extremely strong and overpowering female characters, a touch of Delerue on the score and lots of shooting and explosions.

Seriously... do I need to write anymore?

The Miniatures of Mr. Moto!

Mysterious Mr. Moto 1938 US

Directed by Norman Foster

20th Century Fox DVD Region 1

Now this is more like it. An absolutely entertaining Mr. Moto movie, very much in the style of one of the Chans!

This one’s set in London and has not one bad Big Ben miniature... but two completely different Big Ben miniatures! The earlier Big Ben establishing shot has an incomplete top... like the top of Big Ben has been completely lopped off and the camera was not supposed to frame it that far up... I recognised this one from it’s later appearance in on of the Toler Chan films.

The second Big Ben has a more complete top... but gor blimey guv’na... it’s the wrong colour. A white Big Ben!

Anyway... once you’ve got over that and the fact that the studio couldn’t find any right hand drive taxis, so all the cabbies are driving ordinary, non-taxi, right hand drive vehicles... you’ll find that this is a pretty good hour and a bit’s entertainment if you’re into those old thirties detective B movies.

This Moto film includes a fight in a pub which is the exact carbon copy cliche ridden saloon fight you’d see in an old thirties Western. No furniture or bottle unbroken. People getting hit by other people before they get to bottle our “heroes”. People climbing the chandeliers for absolutely no apparent reason. Great stuff. Also features a nice high speed car chase which is pretty exciting for the time.

And Harold Huber turns up. Harold Huber! And get this... he’s not playing a comical Brooklyn cop and he’s not playing a comical French police inspector... he’s playing a villain. So instead of cracking smiles and bumbling about as usual... he pretends he’s a dead ringer for Tristran Coffin for most of the performance.

Peter Lorre is taking the role into much more of a caricature of himself by this time but it works really well and... and this was a big shock to me after the other three I recently watched... he kills nobody in this movie! Even the not too hard to spot “surprise” villain at the end gets away lightly as Mr. Moto merely beats him up and captures him... doesn’t strangle or stab him to death when no-one is looking.

This one is well recommended!

The Drills Have Eyes

Doctor Who: The Hungry Earth

Airdate: May 22nd 2010. UK. BBC1

Ok. This is probably not a review that’s going to be looked upon very favourably given some of the tweets I’ve seen flying about but... well I’m sorry... I was bound to turn up a positive review for a Doctor Who episode at some time for the current series and this one is it.

It might be that I had considerably low expectations but The Hungry Earth seemed to me to have all the hallmarks of a classic, mid-seventies Doctor Who story... but certainly not because they “revived” the Silurians. Has anyone else noticed that the current series feels very Jon Pertwee in style? The bit in this where Amy and Rory from the future (we are told, we’ll see what they do with that later I guess) are waving at themselves is typical of the Pertwee era. Remember The Doctor and Jo Grant running into themselves in one of the Dalek stories (think it might have been Day of the Daleks but don’t quote me on that... can’t quite remember).

Anyway... a refreshingly A to B storyline (which makes a change for this series and is much needed to get one’s breath back, I think). No real surprises but, then again, no real need for them. Just a clear, linear, classic Doctor Who story and the best bit, for Matt Smith, is that they get Amy Pond out of the way for most of the screen time. Yeah, yeah. I know. Amy Pond is the best companion since The Doctor took a piece of sliced bread into the TARDIS but she drowns out Matt Smith’s personality something chronic. Believe me.... if they started up a show called Time Travels With Amy Pond I would be watching it noon ‘til night. It’s not called that though... it’s called Doctor Who and with Amy out of the way, Matt Smith is really allowed quite a lot of glory on this one.

So saying, they’d better get Amy Pond into it again, pronto! She’s the best thing about the new show. And she got the best line again... “Did you just shush me?”

And the Silurians would be a good monster... except they’re SO NOT the Silurians. What happened to those great Silurians from the Pertwee and Davison eras with the third eye in the middle of their heads? First they bugger up the Daleks... now the Silurians. What’s going on!

Okay, that’s about it... not much to be said. Fully anticipate the second part next week to go back to being rubbish again. Now if I can just keep those low expectations going I might enjoy that one too!

Now I have a different dilemma however. By a really bizarre and unlikely twist of fate I have come into quite a lot of information about the penultimate episode... Pandorica Opened. Now I know stuff about... um... appearances in this episode asides from the already publicised ones that the BBC obviously don’t want the public to know yet. Including what the Pandorica is and why it is and which character in which episode (which also hasn’t been aired yet) is kinda responsible for the Pandorica in the first place. But I can’t bloody tell anyone because I don’t want to compromise anyone. So that’s out the window then. Ever have a secret you’re just itching to tell someone but you just know you really shouldn’t? Rats. I so want to give a hint but even a few words would be major spoilers.

Never mind. Not that many more weeks to go.

221 b.p.m... Baker Street

Sherlock Holmes 2009 USA

Directed by Guy Ritchie

Warner Brothers DVD Region 2

I don’t know Guy Ritchie’s films. Not seen any of them apart from this one. It came as quite a surprise to me, however, that I really liked his take on Sherlock Holmes. Holmes purists might find this version of the great detective somewhat harder to swallow than a lot of his previous screen incarnations but maybe they should go back to the original, classic pulp stories by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Watson, for example, is a lot closer to the Watson than, say, the version of him portrayed by Nigel Bruce in those classic Basil Rathbone movies. And don’t get me wrong here please... I love Nigel Bruce’s portrayal and can watch it time and time again... but that’s not really much like Watson a good deal of the time. Jude Law’s portrayal of him is somewhat closer to the original... although, as with all aspects of this movie, the usual film liberties have been taken.

Downey Jr’s portrayal of Holmes is, like most of his work, entertaining and always watchable. Downey Jr is actually a brilliant comic actor and his humourous approach informs all of his characters. His Holmes is no exception and he brings a more “human” quality to the part which might not sit too well with some members of the audience... but you can’t please everyone.

This version of Sherlock Holmes is a version which is trying to compete in a market where almost the entire output of current movie-making is action oriented. The Holmes here is a bare knuckle boxer, as he had been for a while back in the original stories, and Ritchie’s brilliance with the way to adrenalise the Holmes experience is to have a couple of scenes where you see (and hear) Holmes working out the fight in his head and each blow is seen in slow motion as he calculates what he is going to do and the probable physical and psychological damage it will do to his opponent. We then get to see it all strung together at “fast speed” in one hit. This maybe a cheap trick designed to lend a certain credence to the elevation of Sherlock Holmes as a modern action here... but honesty, for me it did the trick.

And added to all this you have a, frankly, near perfect score by Hans Zimmer. I’ve reviewed the score here... http://nuts4r2.blogspot.com/2010/03/sherlock-holmes-soundtrack-by-hans.html ... but it deserves another mention because it is just so catchy and infectious. He makes use of a well worn Steinerism too... which I hadn’t noticed in my initial viewing... permeating the action scenes around the Westminster area in the last twenty or so minutes of the film, he uses two long sustained sets of four notes in the baseline of the background which, if played faster, are the chimes from Big Ben. Really nice little musical joke for those of you who appreciate such things.

Performances are all wonderful... you’ll see some familiar faces here... and the obligatory action editing is nowhere near as confusing as a lot of modern action movies. Definitely a whole hearted recommendation from this quarter. The game is afoot!

Pandorum's Box

Pandorum 2010 USA/Germany

Directed by Christian Alvart

Icon DVD Region 2

I remember seeing this movie at my local cinema towards the end of last year and getting a little disappointed that it didn’t really take you anywhere new. But, I’m a sucker for shiny objects and the 3D lenticular packaging acting as a dust cover to Pandorum’s box, aided by the not inconsiderate cheap price tag, persuaded me to take another look at this movie.

When the first trailers for Pandorum came out last year, they sold this movie as being a claustrophobic and intense sci-fi tinged horror movie... a kind of The Descent among the stars. What we have here, instead, is a horror tinged sci-fi movie. And it’s really not a bad little movie, but... well if you’ve recently seen the trailer you’ll probably remember to be anxious for the first 20 mins or so... if you’ve forgotten the trailer then it probably won’t do much for you... at least not in terms of the scare factor.

The film plays out like an overextended episode of a fairly good Doctor Who... two crew members on a starship awake from suspended animation with memory loss. One of them runs around trying to get the generator started while avoiding big ferocious aliens and forming alliances with muscly ferocious non-aliens. The other struggles with his inner demons but doesn’t realise that is what he is doing until near the end.

There’s some great camera work with lighting schemes that come straight from Mario Bava and Dario Argento as seems to be the vogue again at the moment. So some standard shots saturated in either fluorescent reds or greens which show that the director might have watched Planet of the Vampires more times than was good for him.

There’s also some nice acting on show and you do actually care about what happens to the characters in this one. However, the denouement kind of lets this one down a lot... it’s not that there’s no surprise... just a sense of “seen it all before”. Modern genre cinema at the moment seems to be continually mining and retreading old 1950s scifi stories for their premise and moviemakers might want to stop to consider that... just because special effects have moved on and they can realise these old “amazing stories” really well... doesn’t mean that they necessarily should. They’ve been done to death... as the not inconsiderate Surrogates and the excessively unnecessary Avatar recently proved.

Still, there’s some nice quirky things here hiding among the cliches (love the “laser razor blade” at the start) and if you’re a die hard fan of running down dark metallic corridors and beating up monsters with sticks... then you might like this one.

Chasing Amy

Doctor Who: Amy’s Choice

Airdate: May 15th 2010. UK. BBC1

There you go then. This was probably the best episode to date for this series of Doctor Who. So far, so good.

Now don’t get all excited. I’m not giving it my unqualified approval... it’s definitely not the best story going and it’s, hopefully, not this years Blink or Love & Monsters. Hopefully we’ve still got that to come (fingers crossed).

I think my main pleasure at watching this episode, apart from getting to see a pregnant Amy Pond and listening to all the jokes about that, is the fact that the writer hoodwinked you into thinking that the conclusion of the episode must be a pretty humdrum affair because... well... the outcome is obvious isn’t it? The story sets our three intrepid time travellers the task of identifying and choosing between two alternative realities and the audience almost already knows that the correct version must be the version which is most like a standard Doctor Who episode format... so Amy Pond pregnant in a spooky village VS the TARDIS in space. Pretty obvious choice, yeah? Now normally I would see through this kind of writer led shilly shally and start looking for that third option... but, in my defence, when I was viewing this episode I was in the middle of suffering a terrible cold manifesting itself as a lot of coughing, a lot of sneezing, a splitting headache and limbs dull and aching... so I rest firmly in the knowledge that my mental faculties were already severely compromised and the bleeding obvious was in no way apparent to me. So when the Doctor decides to blow up the TARDIS and throws up the third option... I was at one of those whack myself on the forehead, how could I be so stupid as to miss that moments in my life. They don’t happen often... the Doctor caught me out when I was virally compromised.

So... there was some really nice stuff. The place they picked out for location shooting of the village was a really nice place... the kind of place I’d want to live, as long as it was less than an hour from the heart of London. The Dream Lord was cool and charismatic and I’d like to see more of him but, given the nature of the episode, I think he’s a little bit of a one trick pony in terms of reappearance possibilities.

Red headed Amy, as usual, stole the show and I’m really beginning to think that we may well not be seeing her as the regular companion past the end of the current season. I hope that’s not true but given the track record over the past few years of any companion who isn’t Billy Piper... coupled with the fact that her personality really drowns out The Doctor's... I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they chucked her at the seasons end and left her as the little girl version from when The Doctor first met her. Just a wild theory of mine.

And, of course, Amy gets to utter what is probably going to be the best one liner of the current series in this episode... “My boys, my poncho boys! If we’re gonna die, let’s die looking like a Peruvian folk band.”

You know I think the whole dynamic of this particular Doctor works best when Rory’s around. Pretty much following in the footsteps of the Jamie and Zoe days I think. Rory gives the Doctor a slightly knocked back personality to play off and explain things to; when you know Amy’s not going to need or want any explanation. Actually... has anyone noticed how aggressive Amy’s been getting just lately? Gets angry and growly at the drop of a hat? Moody red head on acid or is there something more here?

Okay... so what have we got next time? The first of a two parter featuring the return of the Silurians. Now honestly... I would try and get excited about this except, if the shots I’ve seen are anything to go by, they’ve redesigned them to such an extent that they don’t look anything like the Silurians. This will be their third appearance in the show to date but really! If they are going to make the Daleks look like plush toys you could grab out of a seaside crane game and they are going to make the Silurians unrecognisable as Silurians... well I’d rather they just didn’t bring back any more old monsters, thank you very much! I’m much more looking forward to Matt Smith’s Doctor meeting Katy Manning’s Jo Grant in the next series of The Sarah Jane Adventures than I am at seeing the Silurians on Saturday. And at seeing the last episode of Ashes to Ashes, since reality finally seems to be breaking down for all the “people” in the 1980s in that show. They all keep seeing stars... will they bleed it into Doctor Who? Is Sam Tyler’s sister Rose Tyler? Nah, probably not but it would make for some compelling viewing.

Oh, well. Let’s give it a chance. My expectations are so low for the next two episodes that they’ll probably turn out to be my surprise hit of the season.

Sorry People!

Hi there. Very sorry but I'm just too ill to write any new blogs today. Please check back in a couple of days... I hope to start writing and making up for the time lost this weekend as soon as I feel on the road to recovery.

I'm just in no condition to write just now but hope to be on the mend soon!

Blog Writer Struck Down: Vampire Virus

The irony doesn’t escape me that, as I write about a man who is the sole human survivor of a virus that has killed the rest of the world and left the rest of the population as vampires, I am struggling desperately to string this sentence together through all the sniffing, coughing and splitting headache that I have at the moment. I presumably don’t have the same vampire virus that kills the world off in this movie, but I can tell you now... I’m finding this hard just to find the right keys to hit... let alone focus on the screen properly. So apologies if the grammar and spelling go a bit wrong on this blog post... or at least, wronger than usual.

The Last Man on Earth 1964 Italy

Directed by Ubaldo Ragona

MGM Midnite Movies DVD Region 1

Okay... it’s been a while since I last saw this movie and the only reason I thought I’d check it out again now is because I recently... kind of accidentally... bought yet a third DVD version of it... due to it being the second half of a double bill on one of those brilliant old MGM Midnite Movies release, dual-sided flipper-discs. I desperately wanted to see Panic in Year Zero so I ended up with another digital print of Last Man by default.

The Last Man on Earth is an Italian movie and is the first of four loose “adaptations” of Richard Matheson’s excellent novel... I Am Legend... the other three being The Omega Man 1971 with Charleton Heston, I Am Omega 2007 with nobody special and I Am Legend, also 2007, with Will Smith. Out of the four of them, The Last Man on Earth is by far the most faithful to the original source novel... perhaps because, before he disowned the movie on it’s release, Matheson wrote the rejected Hammer Films screenplay on which this movie was based and is credited under a pseudonym. It has to be said though, that while this is a great little movie... The Omega Man, which throws a lot of the book out the window, is by far the most fun version.

Just in case there’s anyone left in the world who isn’t already familiar with this story, the main character played by Price is a doctor who is the last survivor of humanity (his blood is the vaccine but he hasn’t figured out why yet). By night he barricades himself in against the vampire attacks... and they are proper vampires like in the novel in this version with garlic and crosses and stakes through the heart... and tries to find any human survivors on his ham radio by day and also kills and buries vampires by day. Not realising that a group of vampires who have been working on their own cure all fear him as a monster and that he has become “Legend” to these people.

There’s not much bad that can be said about this version of the movie. Vincent Price provides a voice over narrative during most of the film as he talks to himself in his head. It’s a real tour-de-force for Price and viewers perhaps only familiar with his more “hammy” roles will be surprised to see what a great actor he really was. He really knows how to hold your attention through body language and it’s a pretty challenging role to have to carry most of the film with no large chunks of dialogue.

There’s this moment in it where you think he is going over the top and then... how to explain it... you know Kevin Smith’s Dogma. There’s a scene near the end where Ben Affleck’s fallen angel starts laughing hysterically and then it turns into tears because he is not sure if he is happy or distraught and he’s caught between these two emotions which he’s trying to express simultaneously... the point when you realise, despite contrary opinion, what a great actor Ben Affleck actually is. Well, Vincent Price got there first... he does exactly that kind of thing here... an over the top Doctor Evil laugh which turns into an absolute expression of grief and tragedy. There’s not that many actors who could really pull that off methinks.

Another thing to recommend on this movie is... you know how in those old movies you’d get a montage of the hero and heroine in love with shots of them having a good time superimposed over various places... or a montage in a hard boiled detective movie which shows the detective constantly plodding while various location names float around him... well I’ve been trying to think of another one but I reckon this is the only movie I can come up with that has a hunt and stake vampires montage done in the same tone! Anybody else know where a vampire killing montage has been attempted? I’m sure there must be one... I just can’t think of one.

There is also an almost iconic shot of Price burning bodies in a pit, wearing a gas mask to protect himself from the smoky fumes of the dead.This film really doesn’t pull any punches like a modern movie might in certain scenes. Like the scene where he sees his freshly dead young daughter thrown into that same burning pit from years before.

If you like of sci-fi movies and especially post-apocalyptic movies or just vampire movies in general... The Last Man on Earth is definitely worth at least a look. And now, having done my duty and written this... I can collapse back into bed and try to ignore this horrible virus that’s eating up my body. Thank goodness for spell checkers.

Centipedal Force

The Human Centipede (First Phase)

2010 Netherlands

Directed by Tom Six

Six Entertainment DVD Region 0

Ok, I’ll admit it. I wasn’t that much interested in seeing this movie to be honest. I’ve been around the block a bit and I’m way jaded beyond my time and so I assumed that this film was in no way going to be anything as horrible as people were saying... and to a large extent I was right about that (seen it all before)...

However... there’s a small problem getting in the way of me dismissing this as something on a par with the grubby little j-horror clone I thought it was going to be.

If you don’t know why this movie is getting a lot of knee-jerk hype at the moment, this is the basic plot. A mad German doctor joins a Japanese guy and two all American gals backside to mouth so they make up a human centipede sharing a cobbled together digestive tract (and all that your imagination might struggle with at that last half a sentence).

I was prepared for the movie to be a bit of a “one joke repeater” in terms of it’s plot development... and yes, to be fair... it is.

But... what I wasn’t prepared for was for it to be really well acted, not terribly written and having some of the best cinematography I’ve seen in movies for a long time. Seriously, if you want to see some of the most beautiful and colourful and, frankly, very clean but not quite clinical shot composition... then take a gander at this flick. The look of it reminded me of the beauty of the design of Hal Hartley’s Simple Men or No Such Thing. You know that kind of carefree but informed look which you only get from good European cinema or independent US films?

And the lighting is fantastic too. They’ve used a suggestion of a fire and the suggestion of a swimming pool to have moving light bouncing off walls so that if a shot is in danger of being too static, you’ve got all this going on in the background. Really amazing work. Renoir filtered through Ridley Scott! And it has nice, slow, leisurely paced camerawork which slowly reveals things to you... not a shaky cam MTV job for the kiddies.

And the performances are just amazing. Dieter Laser as the “enthusiastic” Dr. Heiter, the villain of the piece, is absolutely riveting. A really interesting person to watch on screen who will have all of your attention. And the three “segments” of the centipede are all quite sympathetic characters in their own right. A little speech by the Japanese guy towards the end of the movie before he does... something which was a bit silly all things considered... and the doctors reaction to his words is truly compelling and it’s a shame there wasn’t time to see a proper dialogue between these two characters in the earlier stages of the film.

Would I recommend this film to people who are primarily interested in story as their main response to cinema? Heck no... there’s nothing you don’t know about this movie from a one sentence synopsis. You will know how it’s all going to pan out and there’s not a whole lot of variety to be had.

Would I recommend this film to lovers of cinema who don’t give a damn about the story and are more conscious of their cinematic pleasure by the way it is conveyed through the medium? Absolutely. A film for the discerning cinephile if ever there was one.

So... I don’t know who this Tom Six guy is but...

Kafka meets Cronenberg with some spit and polish so as not to dirty the camera lense... the joy of Six!

Gojira Mon Amour

Godzilla 50th Anniversary

Soundtrack Perfect Collection Box 6

Various Artists Toho Music (THM)

No: 0304 of 1954

Well. That was a bit of a monster to get through!

The sixth and final volume of Toho’s Godzilla 50th Anniversary Soundtrack Perfect Collection is finally released 6 years after the inaugural box set and, like the 4th and 5th in the series, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. This 9 disc set covers the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th films in the “third wave” of Japanese Gojira movies plus a re-issue of La La Lands 2 disc limited issue of David (007) Arnold’s score for the US Godzilla movie. Plus there’s a special bonus if you ordered your copy, along with the previous 5, from Ark Square Soundtracks in Japan... but more on that later.

The box opens strong with female composer (they’re a comparatively rare breed in soundtrack composing circles for some reason) Michiru Oshima’s pretty cool score to Godzilla X Megaguirus: The G Extermination Strategy. This is some nice work and the main theme seems to me to have a distinctly British sound to it... kind of like Goodwin’s 633 Squadron meets Knott’s Curse of the Wererabbit. It works really well as a kind of throwback to Ifikube’s old Gojira theme... which they keep splicing back into these movies anyway so it does its job.

The second score in the set, Kow Otani’s Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack is pretty ropey but this is followed by two more Michiru Oshima scores, for Godzilla X Mechagodzilla and Godzilla X Mothra X Mechagodzilla: Tokyo S.O.S which stylistically and thematically cover the same ground as her first Big G score but aren’t quite as punchy... although the latter has a couple of interesting new renditions of Akira Ifikube’s Mothra song in it.

Then we have the score I was most interested in hearing... Keith Emerson’s score (of Emerson, Lake and Palmer fame) to the last, to date, Japanese Godzilla movie... Godzilla: Final Wars. If they were to list every monster that makes an appearance in that movie (including the US Godzilla from the Emmerich production who gets demolished by the Japanese Godzilla in three seconds flat) then the title of this movie would go on for pages. Just be thankful that they called it Final Wars.

Ok, so the three Emerson discs for this score were a bit of a disappointment for me. I really admired his work on various giallo and horror scores (his score for Argento’s Inferno being a particular favourite of mine) but this one leaves me a bit cold... until you hear his original demo cues on the third disc. These have all the vibrancy and playfulness that I feel was missing in the actual score. So that third disc will definitely be getting respun in the future.

The last score is Arnold’s score for the US “reimagining” of Godzilla and all I’m saying on this one is just that it reiterates one thing really well... just how professional Arnold is as a composer when he delivers this fantastic score to a dreadful movie that didn’t deserve it. Possibly the best thing in this sixth set.

If you order the box from Ark Square in Japan and provide the numbers on your personal editions of the previous boxes, you also get a bonus Region 2 DVD of a lecture by Akira Ifikube (shame they didn’t put any subtitles on it) and some footage from some scoring sessions of Ifikube’s scores. A nice little extra for those of us who have been scraping the money together to buy these bloody expensive sets since 2004.

In summation, the sixth box set is nowhere near as consistently listenable as the Akira Iikube and Masaru Sato scores which made up the first three boxes of the 50s, 60s and 70s Godzilla films comprising the First Wave... but it’s got some nice stuff in it and if you’re a fan of the Big G’s music, probably a bit of an essential purchase.