IT! The Terror From Beyond Space

It!’s Alive

IT! The Terror From Beyond Space
1958 USA
Directed by Edward L. Cahn
MGM Midnite Movies DVD Region 1 

A manned mission to Mars meets with tragedy at the hands of... well, a martian. The only survivor from the initial mission is under suspicion and another spaceship, crewed by seven people, is sent to Mars to bring him home to Earth for a court martial and a firing squad. Nobody believes his story and thinks the man killed his entire crew... until they realise a murderous alien creature has stowed away on their spaceship for the return flight back to Earth and has started picking off the crew one by one and then pulling them into the ventilation shafts where it’s been hiding. Hmm... yeah, this does sound familiar doesn’t it.

You know, I really do like Ridley Scotts ALIEN but, like other famous scientifiction extravaganzas such as Star Wars, it’s really easy to see where he, or at least his writers, got the basic story ideas to glue together in their own inimitable fashion... pulled right from science fiction short story writer Jerome Bixby’s own screenplay for this movie. And, just as famously, from Mario Bava’s excellent sci-fi horror movie Planet Of The Vampires... in which the crew of a ship take a look around a starship stranded on a planet and find a large, dead skeletal alien pilot still on board. That the ship in Bava’s film used music as a control device would not resurface in the movies of Ridley Scott until Prometheus, of course.

Anyway, IT! The Terror From Beyond Space is a movie I’ve been waiting to get around to watching for over 30 years, and I’m finally glad I got to see it because it’s actually a lot less unintentionally funny than I thought it would be and is a nicely crafted sci-fi, “creature on the loose” style thriller, actually. Writer Bixby’s work was of the calibre that he even wrote a few episodes of the original Star Trek TV show and I think that’s kind of pertinent here because this does work as much as an ensemble piece of sorts as anything else and it does, to some extent, have the feel of one of those classic 1960s Star Trek episodes.

The acting is pretty solid for the time and, looking at the cast, I couldn’t tell you any of their names (except one which I’ll get to in a minute because I hadn’t realised he was in it until the end credits) but these are all faces you’ve seen dozens of times in movies and in gazillions of episodes of old TV shows over the years. The kind of relied upon actors who get called in to pretty much all the TV shows of their day and play a different character in one episode a year for them (once everyone’s forgotten them from the last time around). So no star names but all solid, reliable and confident performances from jobbing actors who were rarely out of work. Confident enough that they will have you fearful of a “not so realistic” man in an alien monster suit who is rampaging a few floors down from them.

And it turns out that the “man in a suit” alien is none other than Ray ‘Crash’ Corrigan, old Western hand and star of one of my favourite serials of the 30s, Undersea Kingdom! Which is basically a Flash Gordon serial rip off but, hey, it’s one of the better ones (asides from a few little factors... hmmm, I should review that serial some day). It’s nice to see the guy working but I felt a bit disappointed that the Atlantean robot busting Corrigan had been relegated to such a role, where you don’t even know it’s him unless you are told. Bit of a come down. Mind you, one of his early roles was as the orangapoid Buster Crabbe fought in the original Flash Gordon serial... so at least he had some kind of grounding in his kind of “acting”.

There’s some unintentional comedy in the form of some massive 1950s sexism near the start of the movie in a scene reminiscent of the dining sequence in Ridley Scott’s ALIEN, where the crew of the ship are all eating together. It’s kind of telling of the times that the only two of the crew who aren’t having their supper are the two female crew members. Why? Because they’re busy clearing the plates away and making meals for the men. This stuff is comedy gold but I’d better not say too much about it. It is, however, an interesting indication of the prevalent attitudes of the time.

The film itself is very short and comprises scenes of the crew slowly being chased up, level by level, in their rocket ship by the titular monster, who wants to eat them. The monster is kinda done quite well in the earlier scenes, mostly stalking and killing as silhouette shadows on the wall in the way that films did so well then... however, the director certainly doesn’t balk at showing the monster as often as required and when you get a closer look at it, well it’s nice but not in any way impressive as something that could really be alive and is, perhaps, a little less skillfully designed than the kind of monsters that were coming out of studios like Universal at the time. The Creature From The Black Lagoon make-up, for example, would have been hard to top even from the company that spawned him... and that certainly proves to be the case here, I’m afraid. The monster in this one’s expression of savage anger can easily turn to comedy if you are not in the mood for it, to be honest.

It’s also an interesting film in that it leaves a few plot threads dangling at the end. One of the crew members is trapped on a level with the creature and is asked to hide in the airlock at one point while the crew attempt to extract all the air from the ship... however, the guys face plate on his helmet is broken and we’re not enlightened as to whether he survived at the end of the movie or not. Also, at least one of the crew members, probably two, is infected by the creature with a condition which is very much like leukemia, which needs treating with blood (which you just know is going to be stored on the same level as the creature) and, although he gets the blood, you don’t really know if he and his sick companion are going to make it to earth or, whether the leukemia is in any way treatable or not. It’s something which is just ignored after its usefulness as a dramatic device to throw the humans back into the mix again with the creature has been fulfilled, but glossing over it as a minor detail didn’t really leave me satisfied as to the outcome, to be honest. Then again, of course, this movie is set in the far, far, far future of... um... 1973. So maybe by the time we get to that far flung year they’ll have developed a cure for leukemia. Who knows? Oh, wait.

But the film is effective enough and also has a charming B-movie style score to it by iconic composers Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter (which is available from Monstrous Movie Music here). It all adds to the fun of the piece and the score CD is well recommended by me, as is the movie which is one I’ll definitely pick up to watch again in a couple of years. Maybe as a Christmas holiday double bill movie or something. Anyway, for any fans of fifties horror/sci-fi movies, this movie is grade A fun and you won’t want to miss out on it. So sit back, relax and watch it while the women folk do the dishes (as the film tells us this is obviously the way things are meant to be).

Torn Music: Rejected Film Scores, a Selected History

Tornography

Torn Music: Rejected Film Scores, 
a Selected History
by Gergely Hubai 
Silman-James Press
ISBN: 978-1935247050

Remember David Rose’s score for Forbidden Planet? No? How about Graeme Revell’s score for The 13th Warrior? Or Mychael Danna’s score for Hulk? Not ringing any bells?

Nor should they, but all of these films, among many others, have fallen foul of one of the more controversial aspects of cinema history... that of the rejected score. Which is a shame, actually, because sometimes, perhaps even often, the scores which are thrown out are either better or at least as good as the compositions written to replace them.

This is what happens to perpetuate this practise in a lot (but not all) cases where this happens.

A rough cut of the film is shown to a test screening/preview audience and they are asked to comment on it. If a film doesn’t test up to a studio’s expectations (and there’s a lot of rubbish being made these days, don’t forget) then the people in charge of production need to do something about it. And when I say they need to do something about it... what I really mean is they need to be seen to be doing something about it. By this time, though, the film is all shot and reshoots for your actors can be extremely expensive, even if the actors schedules happen to miraculously match up to when you want to reshoot the footage and the sets or location haven't changed in any way. So the people in charge decide to fix the cheapest thing they can think of and... yeah, that’s right... blame the bad test results on the musical score. So what happens in most cases under these kinds of circumstances is that the original composer who has been on the project for a while is fired and another composer is brought in to compose, arrange and record a completely new score within a matter of weeks/days and this is then deemed a sufficient enough effort to try and “fix” the movie. It probably doesn’t always pan out like that exactly but from what I’ve read in various industry news pieces over the years... that’s pretty close to what happens a lot of the time.

And there have been some really hefty stories over the years, some of them very well known such as...

Alex North’s original score to 2001: A Space Odyssey being rejected and replaced with the original rough cut temp tracks.

Jerry Goldsmith’s shabby treatment at the hands of Ridley Scott concerning his written and replaced and spliced and diced cues for both ALIEN and Legend (in the case of ALIEN, for which he wrote a fair few alternate cues too, some of his score was replaced by some of his own music in the final cut from his score to Freud).

Philip Lambro’s experimental score to Chinatown, which was rejected and replaced with Goldsmith’s classic score.

Bernard Herrmann’s score to Torn Curtain (where this book obviously takes the inspiration for its title) which was thrown out by Hitchcock before it was all even recorded and which caused the rift which stopped them working together ever again, after a very productive and, some may say, perfect composer/director artistic relationship over the years.

Lalo Schifrin’s score for The Exorcist, replaced by Penderecki, Ligeti and others... including brief excerpts from Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, of course.

And also, one of the more high profile replacements of recent years, that of Gabriel Yared’s score for Troy which, after he’d been working two years on it, was rejected due to test screening cards and replaced with a rush job James Horner score within a matter of weeks. Yared was, understandably, very upset at the time... so much so that he went public with his rejection and put clips from his recorded score up on his web site. He was forced to take it down by the studio behind Troy very soon after although, a bootleg CD of his original score was quite easy to get hold of at the time (I’m not saying anything except, perhaps, to add that his original score sounded pretty marvellous to my tin ears). But I guess the studio must have thought it was a case of: if at first you don't succeed... Troy, Troy again.

These and many other stories, some powerful miscarriages of justice and others, probably a good call, are detailed in Gergely Hubai’s Torn Music: Rejected Film Scores, a Selected History and I have to say I certainly never expected to see such a volume in print in my lifetime, given the barbed nature of the subject matter.

The book is stripped down into around 300 chapters, one for each film score covered, ranging anything from half a page to four pages per chapter. These are presented chronologically from Max Steiner’s 1932 replacement score to the classic movie The Most Dangerous Game, all the way up to the solitary video game included as a nod to this trend continuing in the future... Steve Jablonsky’s replacement score for Gears Of War 2. Although the 300 scores are covered in detail in some very frank and informative sections, there are many other rejected scores named (and shamed?) as asides to the main text and even in his introduction, Hubai notes that 300 is just the tip of the iceberg and the book also includes some interesting TV score replacements as well, for such shows as Columbo and Doctor Who.

There are a couple of criticisms I have, the main one being that every now and again, something is represented as fact when it’s plainly incorrect. When covering Joel McNeely’s replacement score for The Avengers, for example, the writer incorrectly states that Diana Rigg was one of a few actresses who played the part of Emma Peel throughout the show’s history... when in actual fact the other actresses to play “Avenger girls” were all playing uniquely different characters. But asides from a few moments like this, the text is always warm and engaging and not scholarly enough to frighten off the casual reader while still retaining a wealth of information about the subject in hand.

My second criticism of the book not catching all the score releases is not really fair, I think. Because the timing of the book is such that it happened to be released in a year when a lot of rejected scores were given a limited commercial release (Chinatown, Wolfen, The Last Hard Men etc) and where, in a lot of cases, the author has kindly highlighted where portions of the rejected scores may be heard, either as commercial releases or reworked into other scores, the timing of the book was such that a few of the newer releases slipped by between the writing and publishing stage, is my guess.

All in all, though, this is not only one of the best books written about movie scores (and I’ve read a fair few where the authors just seem to be making it up as they go along) but also the only book, as far as I know, written on this particular specialism. To sweeten the pot for film score fans I should probably mention that the book includes a foreword by one of the more important names in modern movie scoring, Christopher Young, but even without that sweetener, it should be recognised that for anyone into film composition and the politics at work behind these works of art, this is an absolutely essential purchase. An amazing read.

As I Am: Françoise Pascal

My Favourite Mauritian

As I Am by Françoise Pascal

Pegasus Elliot Mackenzie 

ISBN: 978-1903490716

So... this is a remarkable book. 

I’ve read a lot of both biographies and autobiographies over the years and there seem to be very different pleasures and rewards associated with this form of writing... it seems to me. On the one hand, for example, a person may not have done very much in their life but a skilled wordsmith on biography duties can use their talent for language and drama to weave a fascinating picture of somebody who just sits around drawing comic strips all day and leads a fairly uneventful life... and make it so interesting you feel compelled to keep reading. In contrast, a person writing their own memoirs can sometimes have little to tell or share with their intended audience and it can all, in some cases, leave you feeling a bit uninspired and flat.

I’m happy to say, though, that Françoise Pascal’s self written (no ghosts here... at least not ghost writers) autobiography is written from the perspective of somebody who has had a very full life and the writer seems to have absolutely no worries about conveying her ups and downs over the years in no uncertain terms.

I first met Françoise earlier in the year, quite by accident in fact, at a Westminster Film Fair (now aggrandized to London Film Memorabilia Convention) where she was signing her book and I went to have a chat and got a signed photograph of her. She’s an absolutely charming lady and as I was talking to her I realised that she was one of those sexual icons of my early youth who I’d never really put  a name to but remembered as “the sexy french girl” from the TV situation comedy Mind Your Language from 1977 and onwards (actually she’s from Mauritius but the sexy part was absolutely true and, I can attest, still is to this day). I would have been 10 at the time that show was on the air and so that kind of makes sense in terms of timing when my hormones were getting a little more antsy than usual.

She’d actually slipped out of my memory for all these years but I had recently seen her in a movie by one of my favourite genre directors Jean Rollin (called The Iron Rose and reviewed here). I found the lady so approachable, chatty and downright charming that, when she was in attendance at a recent screening of another movie she appeared in (Burke and Hare... reviewed here) I went along to the event specifically so I could meet Françoise again and ask her to sign a copy of her autobiography for me. Again, it was an absolute pleasure meeting her and the time had finally come to read her book.

Well, as I said before... Françoise Pascal has led a very full life.

Some people tend to hold back a bit when writing their memoirs and concentrate on the more positive aspects of their life or, at least, the parts of their life they think their fan base want to hear about. However, it soon became very apparent, even from her accounts of her early life on the island of Mauritius, that there was going to be no holding back where Ms. Pascal is concerned. This book is very much a book about the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth as far as this writer is concerned and while there are some really nice moments and highs in the book, there are also very many terrible low points in her life that most people, I think, would have been less than willing to share... especially in an official autobiography. But this is the absolute correct course to take and her life is presented with no extra frills or polish and, as I’m sure you’ll realise, this makes the book even more compelling and un-put-down-able. 

Ms. Pascal has met a lot of people, from celebrities to princes and right back down to, well, the absolute worst people you would ever want to meet on a dark night... but I don’t want to spoil it for you. She’s had untold experiences which she breezily lays out for you in her book and has survived fires, heartbreak and long term relationships which have tested her spirit but never, it seems to me, broken it.

I was personally surprised when learning of the actions and attitudes of one of my favourite genre actors in regards to the long and stormy relationship he had with Ms. Pascal and it was quite a revelation to me (and no, I’m not going to name him here... buy the book). I know I shouldn’t make the mistake of equating actors and actresses with the roles they play on stage or screen but it’s certainly given me pause for thought and I won’t quite watch his films with the same admiration I did before, I think.

Of course, the author tells her story just as she would chat to you in real life (which is why As I Am is such a good title for the book) and the whole reading experience is completely compelling, compulsive and, despite some of the events depicted, hugely entertaining. The structure of the events occasionally folds back in on itself in some cases when a particularly interesting point is explored in more detail and the occasional use of foreshadowing events in a future chapter is used but it doesn’t take long for the “narrative strands” to right thermselves and steer back to a chronological course when this does happen and the decision to explore those deviations results in a richer reading experience and certainly helps to clarify things later on when they turn up as main points in the text.

My only minor criticism would be that I would like to have seen... not more pictures exactly, but certainly the photographs which were chosen could have been presented in a better light and captioned so you know where you stand with them in regards to relating them back to the author’s personal history. I’m guessing this was a cost issue in terms of the publishers not wanting to go in that direction but I think it would have been worth doing especially since... well... well presented pictures of the gorgeous lady in question is always something we could do with more of. 

At the end of the day, though, it’s not about the illustrations and Ms. Pascal’s words paint a truly interesting picture of her life and certainly mark this book out as one of the more vital autobiographies of recent years. Even if you are not that familiar with the actress yourself, this book is worth seeking out because she has met so many people and done so much and it’s certainly a nice timepiece of everything an autobiography can be in this day and age. Definitely pick this up if you are into reading about a strong woman and the life she has truly lived to the full. 

Francois Pascal’s website, where you can buy this book, is here... http://francoisepascal.co.uk/ 

Mission Impossible III

Mission ImpossEyeballs

Mission Impossible III
2006 USA/Germany/China 
Directed by J. J. Abrams
DVD Region 2

Warning: Okay, so this one will need to have spoilers 
in it so I can talk about why this movie doesn’t work.

So here I am again, continuing with my Mission Impossible catch up, enforced by my dad. This third one came out 6 years after the last and I have to say that I am not as completely enamoured of the director of this one, as everyone else seems to be. I find it strange that each of these movies has a different director and they all bring to the gig their own specific visual style as opposed to seeking any continuity with the last one. Oh well, I guess that’s true to the nature of an episodic TV show of the time too, I guess... although I think it’s less obvious when you get less known directors who are happier letting the style of what’s been done previously dictate the art direction somewhat.

This starts off with a really strong opening scene which, I’m afraid to say, is also its biggest weakness. Here we have a captive Tom Cruise being interrogated, with his girlfriend tied and gagged in front of him while Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a really nasty character who counts up to ten and then shoots Cruise’s love interest right in front of him. It’s all thoroughly nasty and, therefore, thoroughly effective. Lot’s of problems here, though, which serve to highlight the main trouble with all of the entries I’ve seen so far in the series... it’s all too damned obvious what’s really going on.

So lets look at this opening scene shall we?

It’s got the lovely Michelle Monaghan in it playing Cruise’s leading lady. The producers are probably not going to waste her in a movie where she gets killed off before the opening titles have even started rolling... so you more or less know, due to the way this scene ends, that this is a flash forward to a later point in the narrative which we’ll be rejoining later in the film. Now Michelle can’t be another character wearing a mask because we can see very visibly she’s not wearing a throat mike except... oh yes she can... because they’ve taped her mouth shut so she can’t speak. What does that tell us? Well it tells us the director doesn’t want us to hear her voice as she isn’t wearing a throat mike... which means this woman who gets shot definitely isn’t Tom Cruise’s leading lady. So that’s that then. It’s all too obvious and drains the scene of any tension it might have had when we rejoin it towards the end of the movie. Really silly idea starting out with this scene, I think. It tipped me off straight away and also tells me there’s going to be a scene where Cruise’s wife (as she is) gets snatched. Damn silly.

Unfortunately, after the scenes which you just know you’re going to get establishing Michelle Monaghan’s character and a really cool action sequence where the rescue of an agent behind enemy lines goes horribly wrong (pretty much the best action sequence in the movie... it all goes down hill after that point in terms of on screen excitement... or at least that’s how I felt about it) the movie continues in using this same kind of policy of pointing out and showing you all its cards before any of them are actually played out.

Even in the first action scene we are shown an attempt to neutralise an explosive charge in a person’s head so we know Cruise’s character will be okay at the end of the movie (we are told that he has one in him during the pre-credits sequence so you are pretty much waiting for them to establish how to get one out or neutralise it as soon as they can). We are also given a new character played by the excellent Laurence Fishburne who is pretty much set up as a villain straight away and, since this is the way he’s been set up, you pretty much know he won’t really be the villain and straight away suspect Ethan’s friend/director character instead. This is pretty much spelled out in big letters for you when they trace the call of the lead villain directly to Fishburne’s office halfway through the film... from then on in you wonder why the filmmakers are trying to be so obvious with their misdirection and you know that Fishburne is almost certainly one of the good guys.

So yeah, this is the film where, like the first two movies in the series, I was just waiting for the penny to drop with the main characters for far too long again and kinda got bored waiting, to be honest. This is definitely my least favourite of this franchise so far because, well at least the second movie had fantastic cinematography and truly beautiful music.

Talking of music, I like Michael Giacchino a lot but the score in the mix in the context of the movie is a bit rubbish, to be honest. There was one cue in it which really made me stand up and say to my dad that this is why movie producers hire Michael Giacchino... because he’s really great at copying other people’s musical styles. And that cue I was responding too really did sound like it was coming from a 1960s TV show and it definitely hit all the right points for me. Unfortunately, when watching the end credits I found that this piece was, in fact, part of Lalo Schifrin’s underscore for the original series (quite apart from his main Mission Impossible theme tune which is used in every film in the movie series anyway) and so it was Schifrin’s original cue that I was responding to. Still, Giacchino is a cool composer and I look forward to receiving his score in the post soon so I can hear it without a layer of bullets and explosions over the top of it and evaluate it in a more ideal circumstance (even though that’s not the use it was originally composed for in terms of its primary function as a component element of a big movie).

Having said all this... it’s got a few nice things in this movie too. Seeing a mask sculpted and made and then collecting a voice for the throat mikes in the field at not very much notice is all very interesting and the performances of the cast in this are all pretty cool... to the extent that they’re allowed to be... seeing that the script manages to telegraph every little twist at least a half an hour before. The “one eyeball pointing one way and the other wobbled in another direction” death face of the young agent Cruise loses in the early action scene is also impressive in that it’s a neat idea of showing that something exploded inside her brain without actually demolishing the exterior of her head and because it’s also quite disturbing. It’s a very powerful piece of imagery and the camera does dwell on this a couple of times to get maximum usage from it. So that’s pretty good.

There’s no need, though, for yet another “Tom Cruise is left dangling” homage to the first movie (just like the last one did when that original sequence really wasn’t that great in the first place). What were they thinking?

All in all, not my favourite Mission Impossible film and, even though they were just as obvious, the first two definitely have more edge to them than this one, I think, in terms of both watchability and visual splendour. i guess I’ll be watching Ghost Protocol soon then.




Mission Impossible at NUTS4R2
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to click on one of the titles below to take you to my review.

Mission Impossible
Mission Impossible 2
Mission Impossible 3
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol 
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation 
Mission Impossible: Fallout

HSP: There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind

Terror Firmer

HSP: There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind
2013 Ireland
Directed by Rouzbeh Rashidi
Limited release at venues when announced.

Every now and then, the director Rouzbeh Rashidi contacts me and asks me if I want to see whichever film he’s been working on at the time. It’s always a double edged sword because I find Rashidi’s work (previously reviewed here, here, here and here) to be really great stuff but it’s also very challenging and I often question myself as to whether I can do artistic justice to his work in reviewing one of his pieces. But I always want to see what he’s been up to and I always bite the bullet and review it after... although I never know just where to start when trying to get down something which tries so hard to capture a glimpse of these specific works. Works which are both simple and vastly complex pieces all at the same time.

HSP: There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind is a film which, at first glance, seems to be a bit of a departure for Rashidi in terms of image content and the way that content is treated within the context of the movie. However, as you start getting into it, you realise that, actually, yes it’s very much a part of the “Rashidi Universe” and the concerns and level of what is revealed and concealed is certainly keeping in spirit with the films I’ve seen by him before. It just took me a little longer to adjust because this one seems to have a much more accessible (at some levels) story arc in some ways than the director’s previous films. That is to say, in as much as parts of the plethora of connected images are easy to corral into a rough narrative framework than they maybe are in others of his works.

The film starts off with a sinister face mask in silhouette in varying shades of focus while seaside wurlitzer style organ music, that I most associate with David Lynch’s Eraserhead, washes over the soundtrack. The aspect ratio changes to something approximating 4:3 as the mask seemingly changes form until eventually vanishing from the screen to usher in the title of the movie.

After the title, a man paces backwards and forwards in front of a garishly lit neon cinema before we cut to a shot of a ceiling fan rotating at various speeds in rhythm, which strobes us back to the previous shot at increasing speed. We then cut to an arial shot of clouds in orange and then to a blue tinted cemetery where James Devereaux slowly walks towards the camera to a piece of Philippe D’ Aram’s score to Jean Rollin’s Fascination. And here is one of the few slightly negative criticisms I’m going to make about this movie. Excuse me here while I have a musical interlude...

Quentin Tarantino, amongst others, is the master of the needle-drop soundtrack. And when I say needle drop, I mean he uses bits of his favourite film scores and sews them altogether to create the soundtracks to his films. The problems with this, though, is that even half cine-literate audiences are going to pop right out of the movie experience and start playing guessing games as to what movie the music originally came from. And this is exactly what happened when I first saw this shot of Devereaux underscored to this specific cue. Instead of watching the film my mind drifted off into... “What is that? A violin and a musical saw maybe? I know that music. I have it somewhere... oh, hold up... it’s Fascination.”

Now this may not be a problem for the film maker in question, it’s true. Godard would often want to deliberately jump the audience out of his movies and musical approaches were just one of the ways he did this. Now this may be what Rashidi wanted, I can kind of see this modus operandi working with other scenes in this film and also in some of his other films... but I suspect that wasn’t what was required here, although the musical association is certainly a non-verbal indication which supports the films end credits, which include attribution to the work of the famous French lesbian-vampire-surrealist director Jean Rollin. Certainly the film could stand roughly on the same side of the coin as some of Rollin’s early work like Le Viol Du Vampire... and could probably cause similar riots as this early Rollin work created back in the 60s if this was shown to a packed house around my local too, I suspect (that’s a compliment, by the way, if you are in any doubt). So it’s quite possible that we are supposed to make that association with the famous French director’s work from early on and certainly the sight of James Devereaux wearing a mask like some Diabolik or Fantomas or SuperArgo in many of the scenes creates an equally sinister feel as the ones worn in something like, say, Rollin’s La Vampire Nue (reviewed here). So maybe that was Rashidi’s intention after all?

We then cut to James Devereaux sitting on a park bench in two angles, split screen with, again, heavy filtering as he goes into a monologue on the left hand of the screen while on the right hand side of the screen he experiments with the mask from the opening titles. He then wears the mask evoking, as I said before, a typical masked hero/villain/ vigilante style character from early 1900s to late 1960s cinema.

This is a leap for my experience of this director's work because the unreality is hitting you at all angles as both the sound design and shot design are stretched like a piece of fabric with the kind of artifice which is just not that present in the earlier works I've seen from Rashidi. And, at this stage of his career, I can only assume it’s a progressive leap or, if not, then something which will be useful to him in the pursuit of his, very well polished, approach to his art.

In the very next sequence, Devereaux does a startling thing, and you begin to understand the title of the movie a little more (which is probably also a first for me in regards to this director, actually). The Devereaux character is seen fighting invisible demons who may... or may not be... there. I’ll get back to that later.

Things get spookier as scenes and then clusters of shots are pitched against each other in terms of colour tint washed over a changeable level of saturation. This is all good stuff and, as the masked Devereaux goes about his business, mostly dialogue free, concepts are introduced to the viewer’s minds eye due to the introduction of weird props and landscapes which Devereaux interacts with… seemingly almost shamanistically in certain sequences.

Pretty soon, other elements and scenarios are presented in an abstract manner. A lady in blue. James at his apartment waiting the arrival of something, by the looks of his body language... perhaps awaiting a psychic attack if one wants to look at the movie on a purely material level. A guy sifting through objects in the sand. People clambering down perilous, rocky terrain… looking like a mountain expedition washed up on Mars.

More seemingly random elements are introduced.

A gentleman... walking through a deserted alley in the snow. We cut back to the girl… are we watching three parallel timelines or are we, as I suspect, meant to inform the picture with our own sense of time and story within the piece? Mixed up footage inhabiting the same space and treated in a way that gives a sense of the past is also included. Are these flashbacks to one of our characters memories and, if so... which character. The girl on the bridge who leads into the possible flashback or Devereaux’s sinister, masked cypher... who possibly leads us back out of them from a different “mind space”?

And this is where things get interesting and I’ll talk about those invisible demons now.

When I was a kid I had (and probably still do have, I am sure) a paperback sized reprint of the first 12 or so comic strip stories of the Marvel Comics character Doctor Strange. Now this guy was interesting to me because in these stories, he often used to leave the physical plane of the earth (leaving his body slumbering) and fight his enemies, often Gods or demons, on a spiritual plane of existence of which mortal man is unaware. And this informs my response to this picture, in as much as I choose to take the “terrors of the mind” of the title as a specific attack on Devereaux from another character glimpsed in the movie. It’s not specifically spelled out and I really don’t think the director wants to lock us into a specific interpretation of the events and footage we see on screen. I do, however, think that Rashidi wants us to bring our own baggage into the screening room with us. These are not, I think, supposed to be passive movie experiences. I’ve said this and underlined it in magic marker before about this director’s work but, seriously, I think he rubs together little bits of incidents of something which he has the coda for, to give it the semblance of a linear structure in certain scenes, but I think he’s much more interested in stimulating the brain of the audience into bringing their own meaning and level to his work. I’m pretty dumb so I tend to take a lot of this at face value... which is why HSP: There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind is very much an exercise in surrealist science fiction for me (the HSP stands for Homo Sapiens Project, by the way). At least... I hope they’re not supposed to be passive experiences, at any rate, otherwise I’ve missed the point completely.

As we watch some of the sequences, the images are filtered, interfered with and deteriorated so much that we begin to imagine our own shapes and visions within the cinematic canvass in front of us. Much like a person staring at a piece of wallpaper with a particular pattern might begin to imagine they can make out faces in the surface detail after a while (this phenomenon is, of course, brilliantly demonstrated in Robert Wise’s original 1963 version of The Haunting). Some bizarre goings on with a camel (behavioural mind control?) is added to the mix and pretty soon your brain is really beginning to look at a lot of the footage (if not all of it) as metaphor or symbolistic in essence. But, as I said, with a lot of that kind of stuff... it’s very much open to interpretation.

Like a lot of Rashidi’s films, this one seems to be, very much, a celebration of a character’s internal struggle... the thoughts and moods they have made manifest in a half dream state and then emblazoned across the screen and pumped directly into your cerebral cortex. This kind of basic human state is something that is apparently frowned upon in Hollywood these days, as being something un-showabble. It’s not true though... cinema is fantastic at this kind of mood work. But also, in this one, you get a sense of shared or combined contemplation. You get a sense from some of the imagery that some of the... again, I’ll call them characters, or possibly cyphers, are two different aspects of the same person existing in two different planes of existence and overlapping with each other... a spiritual realm and a more (or less) realistic dimension happening simultaneously... like two different aspects of the old Moorcockian multiverse concept... but also with a sense that there are spiritual invaders trying to take possession of a persons actions. It’s a very interesting, science fiction style concept... and it really begins to get under your skin after a while.

When director/actor Max Le Cain comes in towards the end of the film to meet with Devereaux’s character, you almost feel that he’s a kind of Van Helsing or Carnacki character, here to help rid Devereaux of what ails him and to arm him with the magic bullet he so obviously needs to help him rid himself of the... well.. the terrors of the mind.  The last five minutes or so of the movie are definitely climactic, noisy and certainly feel like an end game before the epilogue. An epilogue which could be interpreted a couple of ways and, again, helps give you a finish to the “story”... if one chooses to look at it this way.

Now, this movie is really good and, if you struggle with it in the way I think is intended, then you’ll be rewarded with a certain state of mind which bypasses clarification in favour of a sense of shared wisdom. It’s not going to be an easy film for someone unprepared for this directors work, I suspect, but it’s certainly a very good one. I can’t imagine it playing in any lengthy cinema runs but, and I know I’ve said this before, this should find a home at least in an art gallery (it’s certainly deserving of finding a good home) and I hope the director plans to submit it to any festivals and screening opportunities he can find. I’m pretty sure the unfortunate exclusivity of an art gallery venue would not be on the directors most ideal list of locations and if he can see a way of getting this into local communities and stimulating thought and discussion on the nature of film and exhibition then all the better for it.

It's interesting because, although it seems to be a bit of a departure for Rashidi… well, as I said before, once you're invested in the film, there's no way you could mistake this piece of work for anybody else's art but, also, I think that this is one of this directors most engaging and accessible works... even while stretching the boundaries of the way footage is treated (or should that be mistreated) and the way we decode the images and sounds we are presented with.

What I do know is that HSP: There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind is a considerably mature work from a confident director who seems to be progressing from one phase or period of his work and into something else altogether. That may be a wild claim to make, perhaps, and in 5 or 6 feature films time we’ll get a better sense of the truth or lack of truth of that, I think. But for now, the artist is very much on top of his game and I would urge you to give this movie a go if you get the opportunity to see it at some point. If not, it might track you down and come looking for your cinematic eye on its own terms.

There is no escape!

Before Midnight

Midnight’s Last Gleaming

Before Midnight
2013 USA
Directed by Richard Linklater
Playing at cinemas now.

You know, two of my all time favourite movies are just about a couple of people talking to each other for the entire length of the feature... they’re a bit like My Dinner With Andre at a very basic level, but without being confined to just one room and with a less one-sided conversation.

The first of these was directed by Richard Linklater in 1995, who I already knew from his marvellous movie Slacker, and it was called Before Sunrise. It’s a brilliant, charming, funny and very romantic movie, perfect for watching with your lover (except in the case of one of my ex-girlfriends... when I tried to show it to her on Valentines Day and she made me switch it off after a quarter of an hour... she wasn’t a fan).

It tells of one day in the lives of the two lead characters - Jesse, played by Ethan Hawke and Celine, played by Julie Delpy. The two characters meet by accident on a train going somewhere and they get on so well that they both decide to get off the train in Vienna and spend the rest of the day and night there seeing what’s going on before continuing with their respective journeys. The camera follows them as they encounter people and situations of no real consequence and keep up an absolutely charming conversation about various ideas throughout. It seems (and probably was) as much improvised as it was scripted and the film is an absolute testament to the fact that a low, practically non-existent budget can often produce great art.

It was an almost perfect film and the ending was absolutely brilliant. The young lovers, as they come to be over the course of the hours they spend together, are both going back to their homes the next morning... Jesse to the US and Celine back to France. So they make a pact... they will meet each other in exactly one year at a specific time and place and continue their relationship then. No addresses are swapped or numbers given. Just the chance to properly continue what they started in a meeting designed to recapture the fleeting spontaneity of this first encounter. They then go their separate ways and that was it... film finished and the story is done. Or so we thought. It was left up to us to figure out if they got together again in a year’s time or not. It was beautiful.

Except... what nobody knew is that it wasn’t over.

In 1994 Richard Linklater made an absolutely mind blowing and very cool animated film called Waking Life, which will either overload your circuitry by 20 minutes into the running time or will actually force your mind to expand and cope with it and deal with it on its own terms. Two of the many “dream protagonists”, in a five/ten minute cameo, were Jesse and Celine carrying on their conversations from Before Sunset, again voiced by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. It was a nice little tribute to these characters and it was at that point that you start to wonder if, perhaps, Linklater and his two leads were not done with these characters just yet.

Then, out of the blue, nine years after the release of Before Sunset, a sequel movie materialised, with  Hawke and Delpe also contributing greatly to the dialogue and shape of the finished product (as they do in their current collaboration). This was absolutely gob smacking to fans of the first movie who neither expected or really wanted, in all honesty, a sequel to the first. That being said, this is my second favourite “conversation movie” and the thing which got people back into the cinemas to watch it was basically because the film is also set 9 years after the first in movie time too. We all wanted to know if Jesse and Celine both made their rendezvous a year later as they’d planned or if events had transpired to stop them. Well... I’m not giving anything away in this review to spoil it and, without having seen it, you’ve absolutely no way of knowing whether they got together or not. The second film is set over a four or five hour period in Paris and it kind of leaves you almost, but not quite, with a question similar to the ending of the first. A decision is made by one of the characters and you think you know what that decision is but... it’s a transient world. Nothing is set in stone. What happens next?

Well this time fans weren’t going away saying, “We’ll never know.” This time they were saying, “How long until we get to see the next one.” And, of course, the answer to that is... now.

Yay! Jesse and Celine are back!

Nine years, again, in both real and fictional time since the events of the second movie and... yes, things have moved on once again in these two character’s lives. I’m not going to say too much about the story of this one... especially since these really aren’t films that have, or are about, story except in very minimal terms, if you look at the broad arc created by the end of each movie.

Instead, what I will say is... this is another great film in the... um... “Before Series” (I wont say Before Trilogy because I’ll be gutted if they don’t make another one).

This time the “action” (or lack of, in reference to these films) takes place in Greece and the situation the two characters find themselves in is an opportunity centred around Jesse’s occupation in the second and third films. It’s a brilliant meal of a movie but its main course is quite bitter/sweet. The ending is once again left at a place where decisions seem to have been made but, due to the volcanic eruptions preceding this decision, the nature of the ending is not set in concrete and one wonders where the characters will end up in relation to each other within a year of the ending of this one.

There are a couple of things in this one which are a bit of an oddity for this series of films. The first is that for a big chunk of the first half of the movie, the characters are not just interacting with each other but with a bunch of other characters who are their companions at this point in time. This seemed a bit unusual for these movies but I rolled with it and was ultimately rewarded again with the total isolation of these two characters with each other by the last segment.

Secondly, and regular readers may be surprised at this, this film had a musical score in places which really didn’t gel with my remembrances of my experiences of watching these characters before. There’s not much of one and it only comes in at the odd moment but I did feel it was just a little too obtrusive and maybe it’s a sign of the studios perhaps not having enough confidence in the fabulous threesome (the director and the two main leads) at being able to carry the film on their own genius. And, yeah, I recognise the irony of someone like me who regularly champions film music to not want a score in this film. It just felt wrong.

Everything else about it felt right though. The dialogue, performances and extra long takes of between 10 and 20 minutes in some cases (just like the first two movies) were all there and the conversation was gripping and, in places, a little depressing... it has to be said. I was totally hooked again in these fictional people’s lives right from the first shot and, as a consequence, my stomach was doing butterflies as the tone of the film grew darker towards the end... not even Julie Delpy’s magnificently naked breasts were able to stop me worrying about the territory these characters were getting into. This is intense.

I can’t tell you what happens. It would be really terrible of me to do that to you. Just wrong.

All I will say is this... If you liked the other two films in this series, then go and see this one too. It’s my least favourite of the three but by no means less brilliant and it deserves your honest box office coin. If, however, you haven’t seen the first two... steer well clear. You really do have to see these movies in order. These characters are too great for you not to experience their conversational adventures in chronological order... you owe them that much as a fan of cinema in general. Before Midnight is, like the two before it, one of the best films of the year it was released in. If you are into cinema then you need to see these three movies. They are part of what the art is all about.

Roll on 2022... which is when I expect the next one to be released.

World War Z (aka World War Zed)

Dead’s Zed, Baby

World War Z (aka World War Zed)
2013 USA/Malta
Directed by Marc Forster
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: Dead looking spoilers
suddenly springing to unlife to bite you...

I really didn’t know much about World War Z going in.

In fact, the only four things which I did know were as follows...

1. Brad Pitt is in it. I don’t mind him as an actor but at least one of his decisions in the past, if what I read was reported accurately, caused some bad consequences for other people in the business and consequently, since I don’t know him... I am wary of him. That said, his performance in 12 Monkeys was astonishing and I enjoyed his comic book performance in Inglourious Basterds a heck of a lot too. However, he’s a major star (and producer of this film) and my feelings say that major stars change the tone of projects... and that’s not often a good thing.

2. There was a lot of fuss, really a lot of reported news in the film press, that this project has been going for a long time and that major changes and reshoots were made. This is usually a sign of a bad movie, or often a really good movie which doesn’t match studio expectations of it, which is deemed in need of fixing and that tampering, from what I see of it, is rarely for the better (the extended cut of the Universal remake of The Wolfman, for example, became a contradictory mess in its longer version, whereas the original studio cut is quite watchable - reviewed here).

3. I’ve not read the original novel this thing is based on but I’m told that there is no one central protagonist in the book and that everything is pieced together from different news reports on a global level. Now this could be perceived as a problem because Hollywood and its stars don’t react well to narratives which have no real main protagonists in them but, you can tell even from the trailer, that this movie did have a starring lead role for the picture... Brad Pitt. I wasn’t too worried about this (not as much as I might have been had I read the book, for sure) and I think sometimes in the film industry you have to streamline things down to a central narrative character arc in order to get the film to something watchable... so not too many worries there.

4. The trailer worked really well for me. We had gazillions of zombies eating everything in sight and people in peril. So, really, whatever cynicism I might have been harbouring for the final product on screen... it was going on hold. I like zombie movies. They’re strangely comforting (for the most part).

Now just a couple of days prior to this, I’d heard some criticisms of this film on twitter based on it being filled with action for the first two thirds of the movie and having a strangely subdued last third and, yeah, I can almost see how some people might have had a hard time with that except for one thing, and it’s this...

Although the movie does celebrate zombie action over anything else for the first couple of acts, the third act, while slower in pacing and less spectacular in setting (although no less spectacular in set design), is certainly no less an intense or a suspenseful sequence than what has gone before it. In fact, I’d argue that it’s a whole lot more breathtaking and interesting than the rest of the movie put together... even though by now you’ve completely figured out how the movie is going to finish (I’ll get to that later).

So what we have here is like a big computer game with the first couple of levels in action mode and the final level in stealth mode. Pitt is quite convincing in his role and although it’s not a character driven plot, the film does take time to invest you with a feeling of Pitt’s “family unit”, which is a dead giveaway to the emotional state you will get to at the end of the film and why you know Pitt’s “final solution” will work... it has to in order to pan out the family drama. This drama is badly handled right at the last couple of minutes, I feel, and is one of the worst things about the movie, imbibed with a certain saccharine sweet sentiment instead of going for the natural sugar which was all it needed at this point.

Nevertheless, despite critics redundant rumblings, World War Z is a pretty entertaining time at the movies. It’s basically the big budget end of Hollywood finally catching up to something the low budget end of US film-making has been doing well since the late 1960s and, in this, it does kind of come across as George R. Romero meets 28 Days Later but with a slicker, commercial feel and lots of money to do it in style. But so what? It’s fine by me... I get to see a big budget zombie movie which actually gets to play at local cinemas with enough showings for me to be able to catch it. That’s not a bad thing and, as I say, it was pretty entertaining.

The film enthusiastically goes from one impressive set piece to another and is basically split up into three acts:

1. Escape from the zombie epidemic that suddenly hits where you are living and destroys your entire city in the space of an hour...

2. Become a globe-hopping researcher to try to find the cause of the plague and find some way to stop it... with impressive stop overs in both Korea and Palestine.

3. Go to Cardiff in Wales and sneak around a zombie infested World Health Organisation building with all the atmosphere (and some of the cast) of a really good Season 2 or Season 3 Torchwood episode.

Job done. Great film.

I did find it to be a bit “art-imitates-reality” poignant when Pitt’s character discovers that by immediately lopping off the hand of a female colleague he can halt the infection before it starts, considering the tragic events that have recently plagued his own real life family, but this film is a really well oiled machine of what is known these days as “the summer blockbuster” and it didn’t fail to deliver the goods (as many of them, of course, do fail to do just that).

There were a couple of disappointing things about the movie, though.

I don’t understand the USA ratings system but certainly, over here in the UK, the movie has a 15 rating. That’s kinda crazy because this film is pretty bloodless and lacking the kind of goriness you would usually expect from a good zombie movie. It’s like the producers were playing it safe on every level and not wanting to annoy the censors too much. So anything which might have been better explained by seeing it demonstrated as on screen violence, like the aforementioned, quick fire hand amputation or the killing of an “up-close-and-personal” zombie threat is often just off the side or bottom of the screen where you can’t properly get a handle on it quickly enough. It’s not too detracting or damaging to the movie as a whole, although it obviously distracted me enough to notice it each time they did (or rather, didn’t) do it but I’m guessing this just means there’ll be a harder, longer  and more satisfying cut of the movie released on video at some point.

The other thing which bothered me was the obviousness of the final solution and it’s successful outcome. By the time of the third act, Brad Pitt (and the audience) will have more or less figured out what the “chink” in the zombies’ armour is. However, in the last part the film makers place the lead character in a position where he is surrounded by zombies and there is no way out... unless he tests out his theory on himself and goes with his final solution. Which is what he does and, since we’re already so invested in him getting back to his family, we know it’s going to work, no question. This kind of lets it down in some ways but it doesn’t make it any less watchable for it and it’s only the very end of the picture with the family reunion where it gets maybe just a little less palatable... on the whole.

But there it is. World War Z is a pretty entertaining movie and it certainly won’t let down people who are into these kinds of monster infected pleasures (myself included, of course). The performances are fine and, aside from that one mis-step with the predictability of the “cure”, the writing is pretty good too with some excellent and hard hitting dialogue in places, performed by a cast who are obviously enthusiastic about hitting the right kind of tone for the story. I can’t speak for anyone else who’s seen this movie, obviously, but from my end, that of the endless audience, it’s certainly a top notch summer pop corn movie and people should have a good time with this one. I certainly enjoyed it a heck of a lot more than the last film I saw by this director, Quantum Of Solace, which perhaps isn’t saying a lot, come to think of it. However, World War Z is something I am quite looking forward to introducing to mum and dad when it comes out on Blu Ray... and that’s not a bad thing. Go see it.

The Killer Is On The Phone (L’assassino... È Al Telefono)

The Bald and the Beautiful

The Killer Is On The Phone 
(aka L’assassino... È Al Telefono)
1972 Italy/Belgium
Directed by Alberto De Martino
Camden Collection DVD Region 0

The killer on the phone is not the best giallo I’ve seen, but it’s certainly nowhere near the lower tier of some of these films and it’s got some quite interesting stuff going on it. This held my attention for the full running time without me even looking at my watch... and that in itself is a good thing these days.

It’s a little unusual for the majority of films in this genre... and this one joins the likes of Luigi Cozzi’s The Killer Must Kill Again (helping to create a little sub-genre of giallo all its own, perhaps), in that this is one of the few, the very few that I can even recall, where the identity of the main killer is pretty much known to the audience right from the start of the picture. What we don’t know until the end, although you really will begin to suspect this from very early on... is who the killer has been hired by. Therein rests the mystery, such as it is, in The Killer Is On The Phone.

Now there’s one big problem with this specific giallo and it’s the story/writing. The principal idea is okay and we watch Telly Savalas play a hit man who goes to kill a woman, five years after the death of her husband... an event in which she was a witness. Don’t ask me why it’s taken him five years to figure this out because, frankly, I don’t know. Anyway, when Telly approaches the main protagonist/ heroine, Eleanor (as played by Anne Heywood), she has a bizarre memory thing going on and feints dead at his feet. I don’t know why he doesn’t just finish her off there and then... except that they are out on show to the general public at large to a certain extent... although why you would then confront her in public at all and tip your hand is anybody’s guess at this point.

Anyway, when Eleanor recovers she goes to her house to find it’s been knocked down. When she goes to ring her husband, she asks for her “other” husband who died five years ago, not her current geezah on the spot. It’s clear by now that Eleanor is finding herself a little plagued by memory problems and as, throughout the film, her amnesia has brief signs of clearing through dreamlike flashbacks... including knife murders and bondage sequences opposite both her previous husband and Telly Savalas... our lovable hit man is stalking her and waiting in the wings to see if her memory comes back, delaying his next contract killing so he can sort out his loose ends here.

It sounds okay but the execution in terms of the writing is really not great and while the premise itself is actually quite strong, the writing is just not dextrous enough to pull off any real surprises or take the audience unawares, it seems to me. Right from early on a character is introduced into the proceedings and by then you’ll probably have your suspicions as to just who has been (and is) killing off people around Eleanor... although, it has to be said, the pleasantly surprising motivations behind these murders kinda makes no sense when you think about it... unless Telly Savalas is actually acting completely alone. Which he’s obviously not. So, yeah, I think it’s fair to say that this is one of those gialli when it’s really best not to scrutinise the story content too much and just try and go with it.

Which isn’t a bad thing to go with on this one.

Story issues aside, the movie is a visual and aural treat with performances by all the leads, who are particularly strong for this kind of movie. There are a fair few sequences throughout the picture with little or no dialogue and this makes the majority of this picture just about physical acting... and I’m not talking about action sequences either. Some of these scenes get into the whole aesthetic of stripping the craft of acting down to something along the lines of silent cinema, where a walk across a street can be as interesting as anything else that’s going on during the movie.

This not only gives the actors a breather away from some of the terrible lines they have to say (the version I saw was in Italian with English subtitles but this didn’t blunt the mediocrity of the dialogue as it often can in foreign films) but it also gives the cinematography, set design and music a chance to shine just a little brighter. And they do.

The director does what a lot of his “giallo comrades in arms” do on these things and goes for elaborate camera shots which frame and sub-divide the scenes beautifully. My theory has always been that the scripts on these things were so bad that the directors distracted themselves from the tedium by crafting the most complex mise-en-scene you can get in cinema. Whatever the reason, this film is no exception and De Martino splits shots into smaller blocks to frame different parts of the screen and even goes as far as to add texture or reflection to different plains to push your eyes right where he wants them to be in the frame. He also has some quite dynamic moments with combinations of movements and characters in a single frame falling naturally into each other. An example of this would be fairly early in the film where Eleanor gets into a car and we pan round as it drives off to the right of the shot... and then turns a bend and is driving away from us... then Telly Savalas will enter from screen right as the car is driving away from us and we’ll track back round to the left and follow him to where he ends up. Stuff like this always resonates with me and I find these kinds of films relaxing.

The score, by giallo stalwart Stelvio Cipriani (which was released last year as a 500 limited edition pressing from Digitmovies) is a departure from some of the writing I have come to expect from this guy in the past. It’s not a trippy bass line with beats and a big swooping melody like some of his scoring from around this time... it’s much more sedate and haunting and, it has to be said, a little more mono thematic than I would expect from him. With the exception of just a couple of typical “atonal jazz crime” cues, the score is mostly variations of one theme played repetitively and, mostly, slowly over the course of the film. It’s not bad but you won’t be able to stop humming it for a while... not because it’s particularly catchy but because of the amount of exposure it gets in the film. Still, a good support for the movie and nicely done.

The version I saw is known to be an uncut version but the film is, with the exception of one “giallo-typical” naked lady stabbing, mostly bloodless... even when Telly Savalas dies a particularly nasty death towards the end of the picture... before the, not so big, reveal of the person behind the whole plot. The camera cuts away at his slow dissection just at the last minute... which is curious for a genre of cinema which would normally revel in the amount of gore and arterial spray it can get up on the screen to satisfy an ever jaded audience. This is not a criticism... merely the pointing out of an oddity within the course of a giallo which, to be fair, is decidedly odd itself.

As I said, the performances are great but not particularly character based, although you do get a real sense of some of these characters as you follow them around and little details such as Telly’s collection of toy soldiers flesh the people out just enough without straying too far from the expected territory in that sense. Savalas does an excellent and very subtle job on this one which is kind of strange when you compare it to the role he’d just completed in the same year before shooting this, the over-the-top cossack in Horror Express (reviewed here).

All in all, I would say that if this kind of movie is really not your thing anyway, then I wouldn’t bother with this one... it’s not a jumping on point to get you hooked on the genre by any means. If, however, you are already invested in this genre to some extent, then The Killer Is On The Phone is certainly one you should see if you know what to expect, to a certain extent, from the Italian gialli of this period. Not a great giallo but certainly a competently made and watchable one.

The Monster That Challenged The World

Slime Doesn’t Pay

The Monster That Challenged The World
1957 USA
Directed by Arnold Laven
MGM Midnite Movies DVD Region 1

So here I go on another review into uncharted B-movie territory, this time with the 1957... err... classic, The Monster That Challenged The World. My main hooks for watching this one were, firstly, because it’s on the same disc as another movie I wanted to watch soon - IT! The Terror From Beyond Space - and secondly because I already have the score to this movie on CD, and it’s always nice to go back and see how the music fits the film.

This one’s another hilarious horror but the monster looks quite classic. Ropey but, yeah, definitely classic. There’s an old pulp magazine from way back when which has pretty much this same monster featured on the cover. I know what it looks like but I just can’t remember what the title was and the cover to that one also used pretty much the same illustration on it... so I’d be interested in seeing which one came out first. Anyway, there are a number of monsters in this movie, all of the same species, but since we never see any two together in the same shot, I’m guessing the prop and costumes budgets on this one weren’t outrageously expensive.

The movie is set in an American town called Salton Sea and all the main protagonists come from the military base there or are police or scientists collaborating with the military. After a small earthquake, the movie starts out with two sailors going to pick a guy up out of the sea who has just landed in the drink as part of a parachute test. When they get to the spot they saw him go in, however, they realise he’s not around... only his parachute, bobbing in the water. When one of the two sailors goes down to find him, he also doesn’t return. Then, a creepily devilish shadow in the shape of a giant centipede thing sets the remaining sailor to screaming, so we know that it won’t be long before lots more people start to go missing.

We also know that the actor playing said sailor can’t scream for toffee... instead, emitting a manly vocal rendition of repeating “Arghhhhs” which sound more like the product of an act of sexual coupling than a harbinger of slime covered death. It’s quite a bad performance. Yeah, that's him pictured above. Just the still says it all, doesn't it?

Then, after meeting the main protagonist of the military base, his future love interest and the said future love interest’s young daughter (her mum’s a war widower)... it’s straight down to business as our brave crew of scientific explorers try to work out why some of the local sea water is slightly radioactive and why one of the recovered bodies from the earlier incident is all swollen up and bug eyed in death. And what’s that gooey slime that’s been covering everything at the various “scenes of the crime”? The local coroner can’t work it out... then again, the local coroner keeps his sandwiches in a frozen body drawer and can’t work out why nobody else wants a nibble, so it’s fairly safe to say that this strange phenomenon is a little beyond his knowledge.

Pretty soon our crew of intrepid heroes are back on the job and two scientists go back to the spot and dive down to investigate. They recover an egg before one of them is aggressively eaten by a centipede creature with bug eyes. The other one is chased back to his boat where the rest of the crew, including our main protagonist, manage to fend off this beast with various sticks and pointy things. When they get back to land, the egg is put in the scientists lab for study and, like in another giant sea creature movie a few decades later, all the neighbourhood beaches are closed (I’m looking at you Spielberg).

The egg in the lab actually furnishes us with two things. One is the chance to watch home movies of molluscs or, if you like, snails, while the stern but fair scientist tells us how these are the creatures which have been mutated to giant form as radioactive water seeped into an underwater fissure when it was shaken loose by the earthquake I mentioned at the start of the film... letting loads of creatures free to prey on tasty human snacks around the area. Unfortunately for the stock footage of snails and the supporting narration of the scientist, it should be fairly clear to any viewers of this movie with eyes located in their actual heads, that the giant monsters in this movie look absolutely nothing like snails and are in fact, in no way related. But we’re told they’re exactly the same so I won’t labour the point.

The other thing the egg in the lab gives us as a gift is the opportunity for more up close and personal shenanigans later on, just when our heroes thought all the monsters were killed off. You see, you know something is going to happen as soon as somebody questions the studies the scientists are doing on the egg, shortly after it is taken there. “Won’t it hatch?” is the question put to our main scientist. To which he replies something along the lines of... “No, It’s okay as long as the temperature doesn’t go up and this knob stays set below here, the egg won’t be able to hatch.” There you go... talk about tempting fate.

Meanwhile, the underwater sea caverns are sealed up but, it turns out the monsters have shown up via a secret passage and are hiding there, coming onto land to pick off people to eat when they’re feeling peckish. The question is, where is their entrance and where will they appear next.

And the film continues in this vein.

Actually, the film’s quite a nice, relaxing watch it has to be said. There’s some good unintentional comedy to be found throughout including a weird, almost “written as a gag”, moment when the police captain is telling the main protagonist (who is played by Tim Holt and who looks the dead spit of Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat) how a big stakeout turned out to be an event where nothing happened and likens it to the patrolling cars he has looking out for the monsters who are roaming the state. Cut to two officers patrolling in a car remembering how their situation right now is just like that stakeout where nothing happened. This is so stupid that I wonder if the writers actually meant to try and get a laugh out of the audience at that point? They needn’t have bothered, this film has a lot of laughs hidden in it, to be fair.

However, before I mock too hard, I do have to remember that one scene, where you know an elderly lock keeper is going to be slimed to death by a stray monster at some point in the picture, actually did make me jump as the mollusc struck the man down quick and definitely pre-empted future horror movies where something suddenly attacks from the side of the screen and makes your heart miss a beat. I had a genuine jump scare from a 1950s B-movie... so that’s kind of interesting. Similar to “the bus” in the Val Lewton’s Cat People to be sure, but with less noise and more visual startlement!

And, of course, Heinz Roemheld, the original Flash Gordon title music composer, completes the full on mutating mollusc mania with heavy stabs and stingers. Brooding, underwater menace doesn't get much better (the score can be picked up from Monstrous Movie Music here).

So what can I say. If you’re not a fan of sci-fi and horror B-movies from a time when radiation mutated, rubber beasts walked the studio lot, then this is not going to be your favourite movie anytime soon. If however, you’re happy to watch such intellectually challenging fodder as The Giant Claw, The Mole People or Earth Vs The Spider, then this movie is better than some of the similar features that were being made at the time and it’s therefore definitely worth you taking a look if you get the chance. They really don’t make ‘em like this anymore.

Man of Steel

Zeal Before Nod

Man of Steel
2013 USA/Canada/UK
Directed by Zack Snyder
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: Some big Kryptonite nugget sized 
spoilers lurking in here later...

You know, in some ways, I owe Superman a lot.

When I was two or three years old, I was encouraged to read via Superman and Batman comics which my dad or my uncle would pick up from the stand, long gone I imagine, at the Angel, Edmonton in the very early seventies (1970 in fact, I suspect). These comics, along with Green Arrow/Green Lantern, World’s Finest, Shazam!, Justice League Of America, Daredevil and The Amazing Spider-Man and also the annual Christmas time reprints in such tomes as The Batman Bumper Book, The Superman Bumper Book and, wait for it, The Superman and Batman Bumper Book, were pretty much how I learned to read and by the time I got to junior school I was already out-reading all the other kids in the class (and writing epic length tales of imaginary spaceway heroes in some lessons too, from what I can recall). I particularly remember the cover to one specific Superman comic I read which, unfortunately, was the only comic which didn’t survive my childhood because I just read it too much and it finally fell apart. But the cover was so good to a kid my age... Superman VS The Electronic Ghost of Metropolis. It would probably cost an inappropriate amount of money these days if I were to track it down in the chance I could read it again but that cover will always live on in my memory.

So Superman meant a lot to me and I remember how thrilled I was when I used to watch the reruns of the old George Reeves The Adventures Of Superman show when I was a kid... and even the old Superfriends cartoon show. And I still have my Superman reels for my old 3D viewmaster somewhere about, I’m sure. When the first of the Christopher Reeves movies came out at the cinema, many years later, it was an event almost as big as the Star Wars movie of the previous year. All the kids loved both that and the sequel and I even got on well with the third in the series at the time... barring one scene which totally enraged me... but that’s another story.

Years later I discovered the old Max Fleischer Superman cartoons from the 40s and was absolutely blown away by the visual sophistication of these which, I believe, are the most expensive cartoon shorts ever made. I remember when a film some years ago called Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow was released into cinemas and I also loved that for being able to so perfectly invoke the spirit and visual feel of those Fleischer animations.

As the years have gone by I’ve rewatched all the old George Reeves shows on DVD and, more importantly for this fan of the last son of Krypton... about seven or eight years ago I now acquired and watched on DVD the very first live action Superman theatrical serials from 1948 and 1950, starring Kirk Alyn in the title role, who will now always be my favourite live action Superman, I think.

Now, as far as the new Man Of Steel movie goes, it has to be acknowledged that I really wasn’t looking forward to it. Two reasons for this, actually... one was the fact that every trailer I’ve seen for this movie was... well... a bit rubbish. Two was the fact that, in their wisdom, the producers decided to get rid of Superman’s red pants. To explain to all my international readers (and thank you all so much for coming on here and reading, you’re all very much appreciated), I am English. In the UK the term pants is not what we call trousers as it is in the US, apparently. Over here it means underpants, or Y-fronts or... um... I dunno... men’s knickers. It’s long been a jokey but undeniable fact that Superman wears his underpants, the wrong way around, over his trousers. Funny or not, though, it’s always been an integral part of his costume and, along with one or two other minor but equally unwelcome tweaks to the uniform, these basic “no brainer, you don’t change these things” elements have been unnecessarily tinkered with in this movie. So even going into the screening I knew this was not going to be a proper Superman movie. No red knickers... no Superman!

But... I trusted Zack Snyder as a director and he’d not let me down in even the most challenging movie properties before this. He took liberties with Watchmen, to be sure, but certainly not as many as with Man Of Steel and I thought, even though it didn’t have the fake alien squid monster (which it really should have) it still kinda worked as a movie. Dawn Of The Dead, a reboot of one of the classic zombie movies, was also really cool (and works better when you realise it’s really not a remake of the original in anything but name and location similarities). I even thought Sucker Punch, a much maligned movie on its initial cinema release (don’t worry, a film that good will be rediscovered and lionised to classic status in approximately 23 years time) was a brilliant and highly cinematic experience (reviewed here). So on the strength of these I went along to see Man Of Steel anyway.

Besides... I wanted to hear what Hans Zimmer was going to do with the score.

Now, I took my folks out to see this and frankly, the cross section family assessment of this movie is as follows...

Dad: That was a terrible, terrible, atrociously bad movie.
Mum: It was a bit long winded and could have done with being a lot shorter. Not very good.
Me: It wasn’t completely terrible. It was way too noisy. There were no red underpants.

So... well there you have it. But let me give you a little more about what I thought of this noble intentioned monstrosity.

Well, firstly, it’s like no Superman movie you’ve seen before, even though it’s practically a remake of the opening half hour of Superman The Movie and most of Superman II. After a spectacularly realised set piece that shows the rebel General Zod and his cohorts defeated and Jor El (Superman’s father) himself becoming a fugitive on his own planet before the baby (Kal El) is finally launched towards Earth and Krypton destroyed... we are propelled immediately into a series of early “adult Superman” adventure sequences with him performing various, low profile, super-powered rescues. It would be fair to say that the director hits the ground running but, frankly, as spectacular and as enjoyable as the early Krypton scenes are on a purely cinematic level, they really are inappropriate to the subject matter, I felt, and would have been much better off in a Flash Gordon movie (for the record, I would love to see Zack Snyder direct a Flash Gordon movie, especially if it’s done in the proper time period). There’s an element of adaptation to this movie, whether you like that or not, and this “interpretation” of Krypton was beautiful but just not what was needed, I feel.

Also, another problem for some will be the eliptical way in which Snyder tells his tale of Superman. It’s, quite appropriately, much more like a comic strip, jumping backwards and forwards in time so we can get to the action as well as seeing his defining years on Earth at the same time without slowing down the high level of energy on the screen (this film is nothing if not pacey). It’s another example of Hollywood wanting to have its cake and eat it at the same time but, for the majority of the film it really kind of works and I was certainly buying into this technique for a while. However, if you’re a complete novice to the legend of Superman and unfamiliar with any of the previous versions (and there are many who are these days, I promise you) then you may have a hard time following the back story is my guess. The crash landing of young Kal El’s space capsule on Earth, for example, is never even shown... we just have to take the implication which, if you don’t know the story, may be a bit of a leap, is my guess.

There are some good things about the movie, though...

Superman could never fly in the early comics... he could leap tall buildings in a single bound though and this later developed in the strip into the kind of high flying ariel stunts we are used to associating with the character post-1930s. This new version pays homage to this in its “first flight” sequence and it’s  a really nice nod to those origins. It reminded me of a similarly successful scene in the much maligned John Carter movie, when the title character in that film (and Edgar Rice Burroughs original source novel) has to learn to cope with extra muscular activity in a gravity a lot lighter than on his home world (review here). So this was all good when it comes to Man Of Steel. Although, he didn’t have red pants on, of course, so... it wasn’t really Superman.

The performances are all superb, although many of the characterisations are quite off. It’s not the fault of the actors, presumably, if they’re being written like that in the script.  Larry Fishburne makes a surprisingly cool version of Perry White and Ma Kent is brilliantly played by Judge Hershey herself, actress Diane Lane. The title character, played by some guy I’d not heard of called Henry Cavill, really looks and acts the part as far as he’s allowed, although he does look extremely worried all through the movie. Also, losing the kiss curl (and that’s been done before many times too) is a big mistake. It’s not just a kiss curl you guys, it’s the "S" symbol. It’s as much a part of the Superman costume as his red underpants... oh, wait.

Hans Zimmer’s percussion heavy score, too, is excellent but quite noisy. Not as memorable as some of the Superman scores in the past but certainly he’s had a good go at it and I look forward to hearing the score CDs when they finally arrive in the post.

Anyway, yeah, there are some nice things about the movie but... the number of bad things happening maybe outweighs all that.

The plotting is atrocious, for example and completely relies on a ridiculous piece of “deus ex machina” towards the end of the picture which really is just a piece of technical sounding mumbo jumbo and which seems to make mockery of physics. I know I’ve bandied the “deus ex machina” term around a lot just lately in my reviews but, honestly, if Hollywood stops doing it then I’ll stop calling them on it. Sheesh! And for your information, I suspect deliberately creating a black hole over a big city on the planet Earth may actually do even more damage to the planet than Superman, Zod and his crew do. Not just disappear and... oh, don’t get me started.

It’s kind of fitting that a modern incarnation (minus red knickers) of a classic character who made his debut in a 1938 issue of Action Comics should be part of a film where the emphasis is solely on action... unfortunately, and this really surprised me from this particular director, the action sequences are edited together really badly. I couldn’t work out what was going on half the time, I have to admit. It was all going by super-fast and mostly super-incomprehensibly and I so won’t be taking my hard earned super-cash to another screening of this movie if I can help it. Although I’ll probably buy a reference copy on DVD when it hits later in the year (or when it goes in the sales). Seriously, all that over zealous energy was pretty much non-stop caving my brain in on a Friday night and making me go all sleepy. It really is a case of “zeal before nod” as far as this film is concerned.

Which reminds me... I was quite disappointed that Snyder didn’t use the famous line “Kneel before Zod” in this film. Unfortunately,he  didn’t succumb to the same kind of post modern referencing temptation that J. J. Abrams did in his latest Star Trek movie, it would seem (Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!).

There are a few more things that I think this movie could have done without changing. The “mild mannered reporter” incarnation of Clark Kent, for example, is saved for a reveal right at the end of the movie... which bothered me quite a lot actually. It’s also kind of annoying that Lois Lane is right in on the identity of Superman pretty much right from the start of the movie, when she accidentally gets embroiled in an incident in this version's equivalent of The Fortress Of Solitude and then uses all her reporter’s know how to track down her alien rescuer to the Kent’s home in Smallville. I suspect that, at DC, this might also be known as “pulling a Mary Jane/Gwen Stacey” in terms of watching what does and does not work at the box office. Although it seemed to fail on them as a ploy in the much panned but quite good Green Lantern movie from a few years ago (and reviewed here).

The one thing which really killed the movie quite a bit for me, though, was the death of gazillions of millions of bystanders. In Superman movies, innocents tend to not get killed, even during the big street battles with Zod and his crew in Superman II from what I can recall. Kal El would simply not tolerate not being able to rescue someone. It’s just not on and would do a lot of psychological damage to him, I think. During this movie there is a reign of destruction against the Earth which sees literally millions of innocent people dying. In the old Superman The Movie version from 1978, the character even breaks the director’s vision of “verisimilitude” (and annoyed us Superman fans no end) by having the man of steel magically take time backwards and heal the world rather than suffer anyone dying.  In this movie the gloves, and the red pants too, apparently, are off. Millions die and quite often due to the last son of Krypton himself  doing as much structural damage as the main “villains” of the piece. Superman loses his innocence and then compounds that by committing an act of murder at the end of the film when he chooses to end Zod’s reign of terror the only way left open to him. Superman makes the decision to kill and loses his “big boy scout” label in the process.

I think this was all very wrong and, frankly, if they wanted to make another Batman movie then they should have done just that. Superman is a different kind of hero to Batman... this is why they always work so well with each other. They possess strengths of character which fill in each other’s weaknesses. It’s a mistake to make one too much like the other... especially over the simple box office knowledge that bleak and vicious plays better than strength of morality in the cinema these days. It’s a shame but... there it is.

Okay, I’ve said a lot of negative stuff here but I don’t want to come down too hard on this movie. Lots of it was throughly entertaining and I don’t think a younger audience is going to be too concerned over the morality issues of the tale (even if there was a direct biblical analogy thrown into the mix in one scene). If you’re a fan of big budget action films then Man Of Steel might be right up your alley but if you, like me, have a big soft spot for the character, then you might want to have another think at whether you want to see this one. If you do though, and you find yourself wondering how Superman got into such a sorry state of affairs, just keep reminding yourself of one thing... “If he’s not wearing red pants, he’s not Superman."