Violent Night

Slay Ride

Violent Night
USA 2022
Directed by Tommy Wirkola
87 North

Warning: Very slight scene detail spoilers.

Violent Night is the latest movie from Tommy Wirkola, the director behind three of my favourite, gory films of the last 13 years, namely Dead Snow, Hansel & Gretel - Witch Hunters (reviewed here) and Dead Snow 2 - Red Vs Dead (reviewed here). This film sees David Harbour from Stranger Things... see various series review links in the TV section of the index... the third Hellboy movie (reviewed here) and Black Widow (reviewed here) take on the role of Santa Claus... the real Santa Claus.

The film starts off with Santa hanging out and getting drunk in a bar on Christmas Eve, disillusioned with what the spirit of Christmas has come to mean and thinking that this might be the last year he does this. However, one of the houses he visits, a rich mansion belonging to the multi-billionaire grandmother of a little girl on his ‘nice list’, Trudy (played by Leah Brady), is having a Christmas gathering attended by the whole family, including Trudy and her estranged parents. However, a villain played by John Leguizamo (who’s always great as a villain but I wish they’d give him some proper ‘nice guy’ roles for a change), kills the security team in the mansion and his team hold the family while they break into the main safe. Santa gets caught up in the events and, before you know it, he becomes a brutal ‘action Santa’, intent on saving the little girl from harm and, due to various things that happen, as you kind of know will transpire, he ends up believing in the spirit of Christmas again and, of course, his important role in it.

And it’s a great movie, it has to be said. The whole thing plays out just like a 1980s action movie, it would be fair to say, with Dominic Lewis’ Christmas music infused score sounding a little like one of Michael Kamen’s old action scores for a movie like Die Hard (reviewed here) or Lethal Weapon. The only difference between this and an 80s action movie would be the ramped up brutality of the violence, which fully keeps up with Wirkola’s earlier movies, in terms of the goriness on offer, including the inventiveness behind it. For example, when Santa attempts to take out a thug with a Christmas Tree star through the eyeball and he’s still coming for him, there’s a definite nod to the face off between Odd Job and James Bond in Goldfinger (reviewed here). Looking for a way out of his situation, Santa notices the star is still plugged into the tree lights and flips the switch, electrocuting the guy and setting his head on fire.

There’s also some nice stuff, just a couple of moments, where this version of Santa’s backstory is explored from many centuries ago. Let’s just say that, if such a thing were around then, he would definitely have been on the ‘naughty list’, with the aid of his favourite hammer skull crusher. What’s more important though, is the beating heart of the movie in both the relationship between Santa and the little girl and, also, the hard side swipes at the greed driven commercialism that Santa is, in fact, aiding... in his delivery of the Christmas spirit. Also, although I’ve not seen the Home Alone films myself, there’s a nice homage to these in one sequence in the movie which I think will resonate with people who liked those flicks.

I have two things which are less easy to forgive but they certainly aren’t deal breakers. One is the ‘science’ behind Santa’s supernatural magic not being exactly consistent in places. However, Harbour delivers a certain ‘get out of jail free’ line in regards to the ‘Christmas magic’ which just about manages to cover the inconsistencies in the script and, since it’s such a joyous movie... I’m gonna go with it. What’s more worrying though is the sound mix. One of the more enjoyable lines of the movie, one which featured heavily in the trailer, in fact, is so overwhelmed by the Christmas song playing in the foreground that it’s barely audible. I mean, I guess it could have been the sound system at the cinema I was watching it in but... yeah, I suspect not.

Still, all that being said, fans of 1980s/90s action movies and those still happy enough to maintain the myth of Santa and the spirit of Christmas should find a lot to love in Violent Night which, in spite of the obvious, unorthodox surface detail of the genre, actually buys into the spirit of the season a lot more than it detracts from it... which is what I was hoping for when I saw the trailer and, fortunately, that’s exactly what I got. I hope this one does well at the box office and, yeah, I can’t see this one doing badly at all. This one’s a definite crowd-pleaser and has all the earmarks of being a franchise starter. I’d be surprised if a sequel to this one wasn’t already being prepped and I hope we see David Harbour back in this role again soon. Well worth a visit to your local cinema, for sure.

Call Girl Of Cthulhu

Crafty Love

Call Girl Of Cthulhu
USA 2014
Directed by Chris LaMartina
Midnight Crew Studios

Warning: Some details of specific
scenes in a spoilerish manner.

Ha! This is a fun movie. It’s one of those “this was okayish” recommendations I saw strolling through in a conversation by two of my followers on Twitter so, since the title of the movie, Call Girl Of Cthulhu, was obviously referencing H. P. Lovecraft’s Eldritch creations I thought I’d give it a go... even though I’d already seen another comedy horror inspired by his writings, The Last Lovecraft (reviewed here) only a couple of years before.

This one follows a similar plot to that one, actually, with a group of Cthulhu worshipping cultists (pretty much tentacle heads) who are after something which they need to summon ‘the Ancient Ones’ and bring about the end of the world, with a group of reluctant heroes headed up by main protagonist Carter (played by David Phillip Carollo) trying to stop them and simultaneously figure out what the heck is going on. Carter is a virginal artist who’s obsessed with pornography and who accidentally stumbles on a call girl called Riley (played brilliantly by Melissa LaMartina), who happens to have (although she doesn’t realise the significance of it), a specific Cthulhuian birthmark on her backside. Carter goes on his first proper date with her, despite the misgivings of his flat mate Erica (played by Nicolette le Faye). A group of people determined to stop the cult get Carter to make a copy of a stolen book used to open a portal (I can only assume it’s supposed to be a version of Lovecraft’s infamous Necronomicon) but don’t know that he knows the same call girl who they have also been looking for, to try and stop the incoming apocalypse. That’s the plot and I won’t go into that any further...

But it’s a really fun film for sure. It’s one of those films where some of the humour comes from the main protagonist’s innocence in the face of suddenly being thrust into the entertainingly sleazy underbelly of commercially exploited sexuality but, also, the film entertains with its completely over the top levels of proportionately inappropriate goriness. And it really doesn’t hold back on either of those elements either. The gorinesss is truly outstanding in both its quantity and inventiveness but there’s also loads of nudity, which is something I’d expected the film’s producers to shy away from.

Some of the special effects (which all looked practical to me, as opposed to CGI... but I may be wrong) are pretty good while others look really cheap, do-it-yourself ‘amateur hour’ and, although I’ve no doubt this is partially due to budgetary reasons, I have to say that I suspect that some of this stuff was left the way it was to help aid the humour of the movie... it does have a certain Heath Robinson kind of appeal to the effects.

As you would expect, there are a fair few Lovecraftian joke references scattered throughout such as Rick ‘The Dick’ Pickman who, due to some plot developments, grows a monster cock with teeth which threaten to kill his victims... and a nice moment where we see the that Carter (not Randolph Carter but, of course, that’s who he’s named after) has saved a special H. P. Lovecraft ‘Deep Ones’ branded condom for that someone special who comes into his life.

And there are lots of gory sex jokes too, such as a man being given a golden shower by the title character after she’s been ‘Cthulhu’d up’ only to have his face melting off from the experience... or a nice moment where the porn model on Carter’s computer suddenly reveals her breasts to be twin snapping monsters that come out of his screen and try to eat him.

The actors in this are all great too, especially the three leads I’ve already mentioned who have certainly realised that they need to give a certain tongue in cheek style, heightened performance to make some of this ridiculous but, it has to be said, hugely entertaining material work. I’ve read that people think this movie has some bad acting in it but.... no, I think it’s very much a deliberate, stylistic choice being made here and I think some people may be trying to take this material too seriously... which is something the cast and crew definitely are not. They are all having a lot of fun with it, I suspect and that comes out in the performances and just made the film all the more enjoyable.

So yeah, a shortish review for Call Girl Of Cthulhu but, only because I can’t find much of anything bad to say about it and I thought most of the artistic decisions in the presentation were spot on, truth be told. If you like Lovecraftian tentacle horror with a fair amount of nudity and absolute buckets of fake blood then you should find yourself having a good time with this movie. A good ice breaker for an all nighter screening too, I would think.

The Monster

Dwarf Spirit

The Monster
aka I Don’t Want To Be Born
aka The Devil Within Her
aka Sharon’s Baby
UK 1975 Directed by Peter Sasdy
Network Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: This one has all the spoilers.
If you don’t want to know, don’t read.

I’ve been wanting to see I Don’t Want To Be Born aka The Monster aka The Devil Within Her aka Sharon’s Baby for some time now and regular readers of my blog can probably guess why... yeah, that’s right. One of my favourite people in the world, Caroline Munro, is in this one. So when Network brought out a Blu Ray edition of the film last year, I was very keen to get my hands of a copy (thanks @cultofthecinema and a Merry Christmas 2021 to you too). Now, although it’s been released under the title The Monster by the company, I’d only ever heard of this as I Don’t Want To Be Born. Trying to find it under any of these titles on the IMDB though (at time of writing) proves a bit of a slog. You’ll find it listed there under the completely ludicrous title, Sharon’s Baby. Why is that a ludicrous title? Well for starters, there’s no character called Sharon in the movie so... yeah.

Okay, the film starts strongly with a pregnant Lucy, played by Joan Collins, screaming her head off as the credits roll and Dr. Finch, played by Donald Pleasence, tries to extract her baby from her. The kid puts up quite a tussle and it’s at this point that Dr. Finch exclaims to his assisting nurse (played by none other than a very young Floella Benjamin), that it’s like the baby doesn’t want to be born. Something which, later on in the movie, he’s reminded of when someone says that, um, it’s like the child never wanted to be born. All I can say that, even at the first utterance of this, I was pretty sold on I Don’t Want To Be Born as being the one, truly genuine title for this film. I mean, I’ve talked about the non-existent Sharon but, did I also mention the baby Lucy gives birth to is a boy? So, you know, calling it The Devil Within Her is a little over the top if alluding to the child and, if it’s not, then it’s certainly only in Joan Collins character for about two minutes before it’s born into the world. Born into the world and, apparently, half scratching Lucy’s face off and looking like it wants to drink more of her blood. So, yeah, this is not the best delivery the good doctor’s seen in recent years.

Okay, so Lucy’s husband Gino, played by Ralph Bates attempting to do an Italian accent, collects gal and sprog but it’s not long before the little tyke is causing a ruckus and, eventually killing people. Lucy’s friend Mandy, played absolutely brilliantly and naturalistically by my heroine Caroline Munro (it’s got to be one of her best performances... she doesn’t just hold her own with Joan here, she acts her off the screen), can’t really suggest much in the way of help but maybe her boyfriend Tommy (played by John Steiner, with a brilliant cockney accent here) whom she works for as a stripper, may know what the answer is. Well, Lucy remembers it might be something to do with when she used to work and sleep with Tommy at a strip show too, where she rejected the advances of Hercules the dwarf (played by George Claydon) and so said little person put a curse on her.

Meanwhile, Gino’s sister Albana (played by Eileen Atkins), who really is a sister with her nun’s habit and holy ways, recognises something amiss with the little darling child. Maybe it’s the fact that it manages to somehow go on a killing spree and do things like chop Donald Pleasence’s head off with a couple of well placed blows with a garden spade... or that time it killed its dad, Gino, who has apparently ‘gone missing’. At the end of the film, after the toddler who shouldn’t be able to even crawl yet has chased mummy with a knife and stabbed her to death, Sister Albana exorcises the demonic spirit from the baby... which also somehow affects Hercules (who somehow was manifesting as the child... not sure how that works), causing him to die of a heart attack on stage at the strip show, due to having his dual spirit exorcised from the kiddies body. It makes about as much sense as anything else in this movie but, well, here’s the thing...

Call it a guilty pleasure, if you like, but I really had a good time with this one. It’s not the fact that Sasdy’s use of camera movement to wander away from a honed in set up to pan somewhere else (which I’m sure I’ve seen him do in some of his Hammer films) or his interesting compositions are all that special. It’s not even the acting which, was quite good from some people and not great from some others... honestly, Caroline was the best thing about this movie for me... and it’s not even super cool Ron Grainer’s wildly catchy but, let’s be honest here, mostly inappropriate score for the movie (which I would love on CD please record companies?). It’s the fact that it’s such a wildly ambitious idea to have a killer baby going on the rampage before CGI was even a thing. I mean, this is literally, you see a knife coming at the camera or a spade coming down towards camera or a window or cot bashed apart and then... cut to cute picture of a completely immobile toddler to somehow show that it was the baby committing all these crimes. It’s just so wildly funny... I hate to say it but, it’s hugely entertaining because of how silly the execution of the premise is (and there have been much better killer baby movies done in the intervening years, of course).

But there you are... a film with some strange influences at work in its genetic make up... intentionally or not. So obviously trying to ride the wave of The Exorcist but, also, that Grainer music is played through in a way almost against the visuals and running as an accompaniment rather than an illustrative score... much like Italian groups like Goblin or Libra might provide for a giallo or horror movie. I thoroughly enjoyed... hmm... I’ll refer to it as I Don’t Want To Be Born... and Caroline Munro looks absolutely stunning in this, as well as being at the top of her game. So, there are good reasons to have this title but, for me, it’s just a fun experience.

The Letters

 

Accentuate
The Positive

The Letters
Directed by Robbie Walsh
Ireland 2021

One of the perks/curses of writing a review blog is that sometimes a person involved with a film, usually a director, will trust you enough to give you a preview screener of their work in order to get an honest review. It’s something I’ve started shying away from just recently because, well, I really don’t have a lot of time on my hands but, when writer/director/actor Robbie Walsh approached me on Twitter about his recent feature The Letters, I grudgingly (very grudgingly, I have to admit) accepted. Glad I did because, sometimes when you’re approached out of the blue like this, a cinematic gem comes to light and this is definitely a nicely put together movie about, it turns out, a very troubling real life issue happening now in Ireland.

Okay, so the background of this movie is that, a few years back there was a huge scandal when it turned out thousands of women in Ireland had been given false test results on cervical smears and been told they were fine when, in actual fact, they had the beginnings of cervical cancer and were dying, without being caught early enough to be able to try and prevent this with treatment. This film is a fictional account of three such women, characters who have received false negatives and then found out, later on down the line when it’s too late, that they have advanced cancer symptoms.

The film opens with a curious sequence of a ballerina on stage, cross cut from behind her, stretching the full length of the frame and from a front view. For the front pov, the director puts her in spotlight against a dark backdrop and she takes up the left hand side of the screen. As the shots from the different views switch back and forth, the credits for the movie appear in the right hand side of the screen, complementing the dancing, spotlighted figure. It’s a curious and possible surreal introduction to the film but once you get to the finale of the movie, this scene makes perfect sense in the context of the last five or ten minutes of the story.

Well, I say story but, it’s more of a character study of the three fictional characters (and I suspect some of them may well be fictional composites of real women) and the way they are negatively impacted by their situation. So first up, after the credits, we have the majority of the rest of the movie shot in a moody monotone, looking a little washed out and neutral a lot of the time. I asked the director if that was a deliberate move to not emphasise the blacks and whites and, yeah, it was a way of helping imbue the scenes with the necessary sense of a chaotic nightmare in relation to the bookend scenes of the movie (which is perhaps a hard proposition to explain if you haven’t had the benefit of having seen the film but, trust me, this makes perfect sense too).

And chaos is certainly what we get when we are introduced to the three main characters in little, ten minute sections. So the first character is Sam, played by Mary Murray, a woman struggling as a single mother of five kids and living with crippling debt, which needs repaying to loan sharks. During these sequences and also with other characters when they are feeling under pressure (which is quite a lot), the director utilises hand held camera to give the viewer the sense of being right there in the eye of the storm with them.

This is followed by a character called Cliona, played by the gorgeous Sarah Carroll, who is a worker at the healthcare centre which has given the false positives and who is ultimately scapegoated by her wretched superiors (one of them a minister, played by the director himself in one of the least sympathetic roles in the film) when the calamity comes to light. There’s something muffled about this character, contrasting with the outer glamour projected by her. It takes a while for a certain reveal to come to light but there’s a good reason why she lives her life in such an elabourate, self contained, struggle. She daydreams in colour and this also gives us an introduction, of sorts, as to the pertinence of the way the final scenes of the movie are shot. Actually, the early dream sequence is nicely pulled off as the sound design highlights a clock which is ticking in her office, the sound of which suddenly looms large in the foley during this sequence.

Then we meet Mary, played by Kathleen Warner Yeates, the third of these fictional victims who lives with her mother Bridgette, played by Ann Russell, in order to care for her while she goes through dementia. Like the other two characters, for different reasons, she is living a chaotic and intense life. The director continues to use handheld camera to highlight especially difficult times and also, the other thing he does, is to have a low frequency pulse-like soundtrack cue come in to highlight particular moments of stress with the characters. This works pretty well because the majority of the film is left unscored.

After these three introductions, the film starts crosscutting between the groups of characters to chart their daily horror and things become especially powerful when the film suddenly goes to black screen and a voice over recording of one of the real life women dying from this misdiagnosis is used on the soundtrack for a minute or two. This is followed by an equally grim montage of the three women receiving their letters telling them that, actually, they are in serious trouble. This is quite a devastating few minutes and, you’d be right if you’re thinking the film is not an upbeat, feel good movie as the three main characters cough and splutter their way to three slightly different versions of oblivion (one of the characters taking another character with her). That being said, art doesn’t have to be upbeat, especially with this kind of ‘mirror to society/Loach by way of Bergman’ treatment of what is, after all, a very serious slice of subject matter. And, it has to be said, the film does have many moments of sheer beauty to it, not least of which is the alternative viewpoints of death seen in the closing minutes of the movie. This does, it has to be said, include a parody reconstruction of a famous painting which has become almost something of a cliché in terms of its use throughout cinematic history but, Walsh manages to pull it off quite well here, using it to add to the final product rather than detract from the underlying issues of the piece.

And that’s me just about done with The Letters. I’d like to thank the director, both for allowing me access to it and for making such a wonderful, socially conscious confection. The three lead actresses give absolute powerhouse performances in this and my biggest takeaway from the picture was that this one needs to get more exposure. It’s a well made movie about a very serious and concerning issue happening in Ireland right now and more people need to see this and learn about what’s been going on. If you can get the opportunity to see this one, definitely give it a watch. Nicely played. 

The Sandman

The High Cost
Of Dreaming

The Sandman
Directed by various
UK/USA August 2022
Series One - Eleven Episodes

Well then... so they finally adapted one of my favourite comics, The Sandman, to a television format. Well, I say it’s one of my favourite comics and, that much is true but, I’ve only ever read the first couple of story arcs and assorted stand alones so... let’s just say I’m a big admirer of the comics (which I am now reading again, hopefully in their entirety) without being any kind of authority on them. And, it has to be said, as someone who has a special place in the heart for these particular four colour wonders, I was extremely worried just how much they were going to screw it up. Certainly, some of the casting choices were extremely concerning to me when announced. I hate this bizarre, tokenism cultural reappropriation that seems to be going on in everything right now and, certainly, many pasty, white characters have been cast as black here and, similarly, some males characters have been recast as female.

So, for example, my favourite character from the comics, the iconic looking Death, is played by black actress/writer/producer Kirby Howell-Baptiste and I figured that would be a calamity. However, one of the things this reminded me was, sometimes, it’s possible (and switching mediums, perhaps necessary) to change things but, as long as you keep something of the spirit of the character intact during that transition, then you’re onto a winner. And I have to say, not only does Kirby Howell-Baptiste look the part (skin colour aside... she still manages to look something similar to the character), she absolutely knocks it out the park with her ‘low-key powerhouse’ performance as Death. She had my heart in minutes, for sure.

Now stuff like these appalling kind of casting issues are all over this series and, surprisingly, these don’t actually deter from the spirit of the comic and these characters in the slightest. And even changing the great John Constantine to a female character, Johanna Constantine (of which there are now two in The Sandman TV universe because of this casting change), played by the extraordinary actress Jenna Coleman (as both versions of Johanna, for the record), is much less problematic than I imagined... I’ll have a little more to say on her a bit later on.

Now I’m sure the great Neil Gaiman has had something to do with the writing and development of this show so, the various changes (and there are many) can perhaps be looked at as a genius writer revisiting his earlier work and just tweaking it slightly, with the benefit of hindsight (and to make it work in another medium, for sure). And much as I hate ‘George Lucas style’ revisionism to a work, which is a little like what’s gone on here... I think they all did a wonderful job.

So, yeah, the TV version of The Sandman is not only absolutely brilliant, it’s also very true to the heart of the source which... is probably a very difficult thing to pull off but, yeah, they somehow managed it. This show deserves all the awards. Now, I’m not going to go into the story content here... if you’ve never read these brilliant comics then you’ll want to go into this show absolutely fresh (and then maybe read the comics after) but it’s a show which, like its source, is a series of brilliant ideas and concepts strung together in a heady, dramatic cocktail of supernatural and mythical shenanigans which is hard to resist... because they did it so well. Luckily for me, the first series adapts the first two story arcs plus a few stand alone issues... and it’s all the ones I’ve read. Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death appears in the version of my favourite ever issue (to date), The Sound Of Her Wings and, it’s absolutely brilliant... I’m hoping that the powers that be will star the same actress in the first Death comic book mini series now, Death - The High Cost Of Living (please?).

Tom Sturridge plays Dream/Morpheus, the titular Sandman and, while he doesn’t quite look like the more stylised version of him in the early comics (maybe not as pale or spiky enough) he does kinda look like a young Neil Gaiman and, honestly, he does absolutely brilliantly as Dream here. Very much a cipher of a character but also a character which, already in the show, you can see is being changed from his experiences with humans. After a few episodes I turned around to my dad, who I was watching these with and said, “... you know, this guy would make a good Elric!” and it’s true. If anyone thinks to do a TV or movie version of Michael Moorcock’s brilliant Elric Of Melnibone stories, Tom Sturridge is obviously the man to go and see.

Okay, some of the changes I was not a fan of but that didn’t hurt in the long run were... hmm... okay, let’s see...

A lot of the DC character references are gone. So the 1930s Golden Age comic book version of The Sandman, referenced in the comic as being inspired by Morpheus’ imprisonment in one panel on a page, did not make it into this. Similarly, the great David Thewlis plays John Dee but I don’t think he’s once referred to as Doctor Destiny, his alter ego as a villain in the Justice League comics. And he also doesn’t have a neighbouring prison cell next to Jonathan Crane, aka The Scarecrow from Batman, in Arkham Asylum as he does in the comic book version either. Also, while Thewlis is the perfect piece of casting for this character (I would never have thought of that... brilliant choice), his actions seem more tempered. ONE SENTENCE SPOILER WARNING... he doesn’t kill the woman who goes out of her way to give him a cross country lift in her car after they have a long, pleasant conversation, as he does in the comics either... which I personally thought was a mistake but, I guess they thought the character wouldn’t garner enough sympathy with a modern TV audience for what comes later if they’d have gone through with that (I’m guessing).

Which brings us to another important change... Jenna Coleman as John Constantine. Really? Okay, so, presumably to not cross threads with either the John Constantine TV show or Keanu Reeve’s big budget Constantine movie (and the sequel which may well be going ahead now, after all this time), they’ve turned John Constantine into a woman, Johanna, not to be confused with her/his own ancestor Johanna (who also turns up in an episode played by the same actress). And, much to my gobsmacked shock, Coleman absolutely rocks it in this role. Now, I loved the Constantine movie and I love the work of Keanu Reeves but, my main criticism of that film (which I also loved, just not as an adaptation) is that Reeves plays a down on his luck, blonde, dirty raincoat wearing Liverpudlian (I think he’s from Liverpool, right?) as a rich, black haired yuppie person who, frankly, is nothing like John Constantine. Which is why I was amazed that, not only does Jenna Coleman rule this role, she also plays it just like the John Constantine in the comics. I mean, she channels John amazingly well and I would love to see a spin off series about this version of the character as well, it has to be said.

Okay, I’ve probably written much more than I was expecting to without even going into the plot but, honestly, if you like brilliant ideas, of which there are many on display, then The Sandman is one heck of a TV show and it gets a big recommendation from me. Two of the stand alone comics (again, two of my favourites) turn up as a special double bill bonus Episode 11 at the end and, yeah, I was wondering how they’d do Dream Of A Thousand Cats credibly... the solution was, as an animation, of course.  And there you have it. Can’t wait for series two to come out and this whole show, every episode, was an amazing experience (and the way they do the ‘story fight’ between Morpheus and Lucifer is very inventive for a kinetic visual medium... it’s just right). Definitely don’t waste anymore time if you’re on the fence about this... a perfect show with a perfect cast, it turns out. Absolutely loved this and I just hope Netflix will consider releasing this on Blu Ray at some point soon (not to mention a proper soundtrack CD please).

The Case Of The Curious Bride

Making It Legal

The Case Of The
Curious Bride
USA 1935
Directed by Michael Curtiz
Warner Archive DVD Region 1

The Case Of The Curious Bride, the second of the Warner Brothers movies based (lightly enough for th original author to actually hate them) on the famous Perry Mason novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, once again stars Warren William as the famous legal hotshot. But already, by the second film in the series, it’s a very different kind of movie from the first one. It also has a very famous director in the form of Michael Curtiz, who would direct many popular (too numerous to mention them all) Hollywood classics in his career such as Yankee Doodle Dandy, The Commancheros and, of course, Casablanca. I’ll name a couple more of this director’s movies in a little while when they become very relevant to one of the minor actors here, just a step up from an extra, in this movie towards the end of this review.

Okay, so I said this was a very different kind of Perry Mason and I certainly mean it. The film pretty much transforms the story and characters into a very frothy, funny romp, starting off with a scene where Mason practically takes over a restaurant in order to prepare a meal. And it’s almost as if the scriptwriters are trying too hard to make it witty and funny and... they don’t let up all the way through. It’s not quite like watching The Marx Brothers at work but it is a little inappropriately handled for a Perry Mason adventure, I would say. It even has a scene where Mason’s detective assistant ‘Spudsy’ Drake accidentally subjects Mason and himself to tear gas and the two have a touching scene where they are crying for comic effect. This movie really is skating on thin ice but... yeah... it just about gets away with it, I think.

And talking of ‘Spudsy’... he’s played by Allen Jenkins, who played the disgruntled police detective in the previous movie (eagle eyed veterans might also remember him as the original version of Goldie Locke in at least one of the early Falcon films). We also have a new Della Street already, this time in the form of actress Claire Dodd. She does alright here though, at least as good as the last person and ably assists Perry when she can, as he gets involved with an old flame who is now married to one person and who was married to another who was legally dead for four years except... now he’s turned up again. However, he doesn’t turn up for very long as he’s soon bumped off for real and she is now the prime suspect. The corpse in question is played by an actor who would soon be even more famous than the director and, okay, I’ll get to that in a minute.

What’s really interesting here is the amount of crude but persistent camera movement in this movie, which seems a little out of place for its time, this close to the transition from silent films into talkies... maybe this was when the equipment started getting quieter to move about again. Anyway, there seems to be a lot of dollying up to characters like a kind of ‘do it yourself’ zoom shot and, also, there’s some very nice footage of a low key car chase where the car behind is shot from the back of another car with a very dynamic set of sweeping camera movements. This really does seem ahead of its time for 1935.

The shots seem to get more elabourate as the film wears on, too. There’s a really odd shot where Della is looking into the camera longingly after Perry has left and the shot just holds for way too long before she suddenly freezes altogether and the frame seems to push in like a zoom into the camera. Not long after this, the director starts using something similar to transition from scene to scene. So, for instance, he’ll dolly out of a shot at the end of a scene and then it will blur and dissolve into him dollying into the exterior of a building, acting as an establishing shot, which will in turn dissolve out as he dollies into the next scene within that location. So, yeah, a very specific visual language is being established by Curtiz as the film progresses. It’s distracting but interesting and I wonder if he was just experimenting with what he could get away with here.

Okay, so I’ve mentioned the comedy and I’ve mentioned the convoluted camera moves... let’s talk about the corpse of the murdered ‘former’ husband. Well, we see him for a few seconds with a sheet over him without getting a look at his face. Luckily, a flashback revealing how he died takes place in the last five minutes or so of the film where the character gets into a fight and then gets accidentally pushed back onto a broken glasss before we see the life fade out of his eyes. He has no lines and he’s on screen for maybe not much more than a minute but this is the fourth little part for an up and coming Tasmanian actor the world would soon know more of, namely, Errol Flynn. I can only assume the director met him while working on this movie and he would, that same year, direct him starring in what would be his break out role from extra to star, Captain Blood. The two would work on many more movies together such as The Charge Of The Light Brigade, The Adventures Of Robin Hood and Dodge City. So, yeah, this movie is worth watching just to see the start of this famous director/actor working relationship.

One last curious thing which I should possibly mention is that, this being a Perry Mason story, there is no courtroom scene in this one at all. Instead, Perry throws a party for a number of guests at short notice (why the heck they all came is anyone’s guess) and unmasks the real culprit (who he will go on to defend after the film is finished, we are told) at the party. So, hmm, don’t know if this was the case in Gardner’s original novel but, I’m guessing not and it seems strange to me to have a film about a famous lawyer and not have any time in court. Still, even for all it’s faults, The Case Of The Curious Bride was certainly an interesting movie and I had a good time with it. I’m looking forward to watching the next one to see if they decided to carry the tone over from this one or not. As always, I’ll let you know.

Black Panther - Wakanda Forever

Lying Subs

Black Panther -
Wakanda Forever
USA 2022
Directed by Ryan Coogler
Marvel/Disney

Warning: Spoilers in the second half of this review

Okay... the good stuff first because, it has to be said, I had some issues with Black Panther - Wakanda Forever. However, that didn’t stop me enjoying the movie way more than the first one. I’ve got nothing against former star, the late Chadwick Boseman in the role, I thought he did a good job but, it has to be said, the first Black Panther (reviewed here when I was in a more forgiving mood), was pretty dull and surprisingly repetitive, for the most part. It was a bit ‘meh’ and I’ve only watched that one twice (once at the cinema and once on Blu Ray) so, yeah, it wasn’t that good. I’m delighted and more than a little surprised that this second, direct follow up (as opposed to the many indirect follow ups), is actually immensely entertaining as a stand alone cinematic delight. And that’s perhaps all that matters.

Also, forgive me for not mentioning the character of Ironheart much here (played in the movie by Dominique Thorne) but she’s a relatively new character in the comic books and I have no personal experience of her... I guess she’s around to pick up the mantle of Iron Man in word and deed and, fine, if they can’t get Rob Downey Jr back in the MCU then, that’s the way it is, I guess.

It’s well directed (again, as a purely cinema excursion, as opposed to adapting characters from the comics) and jostled along at a pleasing pace.. although when Shuri (played once again by Letitia Wright) tours Atlantis (but not Atlantis by name anymore, in this ‘adaptation’), the film does stop dead and get deathly dull for just a while. Similarly, when she goes through her dream visitation, it’s equally less engaging than the rest of the movie but, at least that sequence is over quicker. I would say, however that there are a few big negatives, two of which angered me greatly but which, despite popping me out of the movie to reflect on my fury for a few minutes, didn’t taint the viewing experience as a whole.

There are also a couple of traps the movie fell into which were pretty obvious. First of all, they’ve been trying to keep the identity of the new Black Panther a secret and, honestly, I don’t know why they bothered. It was obvious, when Boseman left this mortal coil, who would take over in that role and, sure enough, the character you are totally expecting to inherit the mantle in this movie pretty much does. The other thing this film did was to kill a character from the previous one off at a certain point and, I would be surprised if nobody saw that coming as it was the obvious dramatic beat needed to motivate another character into their ultimate destiny. So, yeah, don’t go to this movie expecting any surprises, that’s for sure.

Okay, onto the really negative stuff I still feel angry enough about to mention then... and we are now getting into spoiler territory people, so stop reading if you don’t want to know. 

 So we have a prologue to the movie where the emotional stuff about Boseman’s Panther is mourned. It seemed almost like a plug in and didn’t do much for me but, since I know a lot of the audience for this film were pretty upset when Boseman passed (rightly so, I’m sure), I’m guessing these sequences meant something. This is followed by a nice segue into a tribute to Boseman as part of the Marvel logo. Which was nice. What’s not so nice is the next inter-title of the movie which proclaims that we have moved on... and I quote... “One Year Later”. Except, after a day has passed in the story, we then find a character referring to the date as being exactly one year later. What the heck? So the subtitles here totally lied to us... it should have read “364 Days Later” because, frankly, a year had not yet passed. I felt really angry and completely lied to at this early point in the movie. Now I know Marvel has a track record within the franchise of getting their dates and times mixed up and just plain wrong (Spider-Man Homecoming anybody?) but this is literally a time mistake in the same film and it would have been so easy to correct it by just putting the right subtitle up there. Absolutely crazy. I felt really let down at this point. If you can’t trust the written narrative then what can you trust (it takes me back to the days of the Museum Of Moving Image where, despite me complaining on several visits, they had a photo from Blade Runner labelled up as being set in the year 2020 instead of November of 2019)?

The other thing was the introduction of Namor... aka The Sub Mariner... into the Marvel universe. They totally screwed this up in many ways, it seemed to me. Now I’ve got nothing against the actor playing him here, Tenoch Huerta Mejía. I thought he did a good job with the role and gave it a certain depth of character to Marvel’s first comic book anti-hero, who made his debut in Marvel Comics No 1 in 1939. However, Namor was never a complex, three dimensional character. He was more of a hot head, unthinking person who got into scrapes for all the wrong reasons and his dialogue was never that well thought out, especially back in the 1930s and 1940s. He was never this eloquent, expressive or well thought out in his speech and... yes, I know you have to change things to make them work well in a movie but, this just seemed like a betrayal of the character.

Also, I felt like we’d lost the rich legacy of the character by introducing him in a Black Panther movie. When the character was re-established in the silver age of comics incarnation of the Marvel universe in the 1962 Issue 4 of Fantastic Four, it was an absolutely brilliant reveal to his character. As the inheritor of the mantle of Namor’s former frenemy, The Human Torch, burned the beard of a hobo’s face away and revealed him as the long, lost character from the 1930s. I would have loved for Marvel to bring him back in the same way cinematically, perhaps in their upcoming Fantastic Four movie and, let’s face it, what’s the point in having a post 1960s version of the Sub Mariner if he isn’t constantly trying to get into the Invisible Girl’s knickers? This is the version of the character I wanted to see... not this, admittedly well acted, more sophisticated version of the Sub Mariner. Again, not Tenoch Huerta Mejía’s fault, he does well with what has been written for him here... it just felt totally wrong for fans of Namor.

The other slight yawn of a plot point was when they turned Martin Freeman’s long standing ally into a fugitive from justice. It was nice seeing him again as the character but it really achieved nothing in terms of contributing to the overall story and, I can only assume that this is Marvel laying a bit of groundwork to reintroduce the character in more of a ‘superhero’ role later on down the line. I guess we’ll have to see.

However, other than the crippling negative elements of the film, which I just pointed out... yeah, pretty good movie. It entertained and I mostly had a good time with it. Looking forward to seeing where they go from here, in a way (although not in terms of Namor, it has to be said). If you’re into the Marvel movies and liked the original Black Panther, then Black Panther Wakanda Forever should certainly score some points with you... not least because it’s a far superior movie than its predecessor, for sure. Give this one a look if you are into your superhero movies, is my advice on this one.

The Devil’s Hour

Perception
Committee

The Devil’s Hour
Directed by various
UK October 2022
Six Episodes

Okay, so The Devil’s Hour is a new thriller series out from the UK and I am going to try very hard to write this one without spoilers. Mainly because, once you know the answer to what’s going on... you know... and a lot of people will probably get there themselves without my help. Also, though, because it’s a brilliantly executed rendition of a currently popular movie trope but it’s done with a certain amount of skill, enough to properly pull it all off quite effectively.

Okay, so I can give you the main premise because it will tell you absolutely nothing about what this show is about. You may remember the magic time 3.33am, popularised in modern cinema by films like The Haunting Of Emily Rose, as the time when a person is woken by the devil or some demonic force due to the time’s representational mockery of the three who are... in religious mythology... the father, the son and the Holy ghost. The idea here is that the show’s central protagonist Lucy Chambers, played by the always brilliant Jessica Raine, is awoken from nightmarish dreams and... lets call them flashbacks... at exactly 3.33am every night (okay, morning) for pretty much the majority of her life. She is separated from her husband (played by the Cineworld Adverts Phil Dunster) and lives with her strange son, Isaac (played astonishingly by Benjamin Chivers). Isaac has no emotional response to anything in his life, is susceptible to the commands of others, feels no pain and sees things which aren’t there. He is going to a child psychologist played by Meera Syal (one of many he’s seen) but no breakthroughs are being made. Meanwhile, a detective played by Nikesh Patel is trying to find a man who is abducting and killing people. These two worlds collide when Isaac dissappears for a while (found by Lucy’s seemingly schizophrenic/dementia ridden mother) and the man behind it all, Gideon Shepherd (played by the great Peter Capaldi), is making like Hannibal Lector as we crosscut between a future interview between him, Lucy and the detective... and events as they happen.

And that’s all I can say other than, the title and the premise of the show are obviously there to make the audience believe that this is some kind of horror concoction but, as I suspect most people will realise by the second episode in, this main hook of the 3.33am (which may be better written as 33rpm in terms of the ultimate explanation for everything, it seems to me, as a visual metaphor) and the choice to shoot the story in the visual and audio language of a horror film, is really just a red herring. It’s a bit of misdirection to, perhaps, try to stop the audience from guessing what’s really going on too quickly.

Certainly, it’s in one sense a police procedural show but, also has strong, dominant elements of another genre but I don’’t want to say too much. What I will say about the story however, is that it’s amazingly complex and the execution echoes that. The editing is so good on this with various bits of crosscutting between dreams, reality and so on and... yeah, that’s good because it really has to be. Hats off to the writer here but I suspect a lot of the final cut was partially shaped, more so than most shows, in the editing room to enhance the twists in the story.

So, yeah, can’t say too much. It’s well shot although, pulling out a directorial signature style is hard given that the show has multiple directors. But I can talk about the actors because, well, they are amazing. Jessica Raine is someone who my regular readers may remember from both her appearance in the Doctor Who episode Hide (reviewed here) and, perhaps more importantly, from her turn as producer Verity Lambert in An Adventure In Space And Time (reviewed here). She is absolutely the backbone of this show and really carries things... especially since Capaldi’s appearances, which you might at first think take place in her dreams (and probably they do, also... it would make sense), are fairly limited for the first four episodes. Nikesh Patel is equally great, given a gift of a character who hates blood and the aftermath of the violent crime scenes he has to go investigate (which becomes particularly poignant in one instance... but shh... spoilers). Patel takes this gift and really runs with it, making another credible character to help carry parts of the story. And as for Benjamin Chivers... well, he’s so good that even I was misdirected by his incredible performance (I assumed a grown up version of his character was also appearing in the series at the same time as he... but that wasn’t quite the case... although see the end of this article for further speculation). Now, it has to be said, that once the explanation you kind of see coming is explained by Gideon, with the help of a knotted shoestring (although it’s a nice spin on a popular concept, it has to be said), I felt a little left in the dark about Isaac’s character. It made sense up until a certain point but nobody, it seems to me, explained the ‘why?’ of that character... but that’s one of the strengths of the show. It doesn’t try and spoon feed you all the explanations so much and there are things left unsaid which will bring your own deductions to, I’m sure.

And then there’s Capaldi, of course. He plays Gideon pitch perfect and, by the end of the show, you will have to decide as to whether he is an evil person or, as he believes (and so do I, to an extent) a good, righteous person. Certainly he kills people and does horrible things to them and, yeah, with a role written like that you need someone as good as Capaldi to be able to walk that tightrope and make the character real and somewhat sympathetic. He once again proves why he’s such a great performer and, I was pleased to see, the quality of the acting by Raine and Patel means he managed to be a powerhouse without actually stealing the scenes from under them. Everyone holds their own beautifully in this and it was a pleasure to watch something so well made, to be honest.

Added to this, we have a pretty good score by The Newton Brothers which, alas, is only available so far as a horrible electronic download rather than on a proper CD where it belongs so, yeah, doesn’t look like I’ll be able to revisit this as a stand alone listen anytime soon. A shame really.

Now it seems some web sites think there will be a follow up season.* While I thought the ending of this was brilliant and really quite final, the nature of the basic premise, once revealed, means that all the cast of characters can return for future shows for sure. I’m just not sure why they’d want to do that because, it seems to me, to be a one trick pony in that respect. Brilliant trick as it is. But I’m not complaining either way... lets see what happens. All I know for sure is that The Devil’s Hour is one of the best things to hit TV screens over the last few years and it’s got a lot of power to it, plus a lot to recommend in it (I absolutely loved one ‘throwaway’ shot of a mobile phone... you’ll know it when you see it... to create a sense of time setting). And so I do... absolutely recommend this one unashamedly. Definitely worth some time.

*As of the day this review goes up, series 2 and 3 have beeen announced, including the obvious returning cast members. Really not sure what more that they can add to the story (apart from the possibly obvious true identity of Isaac) but, have at it.

Confess, Fletch

Etch A Fletch

Confess, Fletch
USA 2022
Directed by Greg Mottola
Miramax

Once upon a time there was a movie called Fletch. It starred Chevy Chase as the title character, Irvin Maurice Fletcher, or I M Fletcher (pronounced, I Am Fletcher) and it was based on the first book of a series of Fletch novels (including prequels), written by a truly great writer called Gregory McDonald (now sadly deceased). Me and my late, great best friend Kerry loved Fletch and quoted it as often as we could. It was the first but, not quite the last, time I liked Chevy Chase in anything and, as a result, I acquired and read all of the Fletch novels available (which included the one this current film is based on) and picked the others up as and when McDonald wrote them. They were all absolutely brilliant (apart from, maybe, Carioca, Fletch, which I could never get on with for some reason) and we were all chomping at the bit for a proper sequel.

Fate was not kind to the legion of Fletch fans because, in the film company's infinite stupidity, the direct movie sequel, Fletch Lives, was not based on one of McDonald’s books, being completely a studio concocted adventure. And it showed. It was, alas, pretty awful (asides from Harold Faltermeyer’s wonderful follow up score) and, yeah, I think it must be the combination of terrible, unwitty dialogue coupled with yet more outrageous disguises for Chase to don (which were never a part of the novels and which they should have ditched for the first film too), which killed the franchise stone dead. There was talk of it being revived over the years, most notably when the great Kevin Smith was going to write and direct McDonald’s first prequel, Fletch Won, to star Jason Lee. That would have been awesome as Smith is one of those writers who would have completely understood how the dialogue and characterisation would have worked... the novels are all about the dialogue and the odd, subtly done surprise twist, as far as I’m concerned.

Which brings me to the new adaptation of a Fletch novel... Confess, Fletch. And, wow, the audience finally got the sequel it deserved.

This one stars John Hamm as former investigative reporter Fletch, dabbling around the art world and, on the surface, attempting to find some stolen paintings so that his new fiance, Angela (played by Lorenza Izzo), the daughter of a count, can find the painting required to pay off the ransom on her kidnapped father. But, as complicated as that plot seems... there’s always just a little more twist with a Fletch story and, like most of the novels, you won’t properly begin to see the real picture until the  evolving post-mortem of an epilogue, where all the pieces finally fit together. And that’s all I’m saying about the plot because, by the very nature of the style of story telling involved in these books/films, I need to keep this one spoiler free.  

Now, I’m going to address the elephant in the room for fans of the novel right away here. I was angry about the exclusion, from this movie, of the second most important character in the book, the eccentric Irish Detective Inspector Francis Xavier Flynn. He’s a force to be reckoned with in this novel and was popular enough that, after appearing and making a difference to the way events run in this story, spun off into his own series of Flynn books by MacDonald. Here he’s replaced by two equally likeable police characters who, it has to be said, are mostly portrayed as incompetent whereas, if memory serves, while Flynn seems like he’s incompetent to Fletch in the novel at first, he comes into his own and brings his own spin into giving the movers and shakers enough rope to hang themselves... and others... with. And I was annoyed he’s not in the movie but, it turns out, there are legal issues with using the character in this film (which I hope are beyond the stupid one of just paying more money for the character) and so... it had to be done without Flynn.

Normally I would be calling this an unforgivable crime (which, to be fair, it is) but I have to cut the writers, director and performers some slack here because... absolutely everything else about the style and atmosphere of the novels, they got right. Admittedly, they’ve felt the need to update Fletch to an era of emails and cell phones (not right) but the dialogue is clever and the spirit of the piece is well and truly intact. It was an absolute joy to watch this.

The actors in this are great too. I’ve got no idea who John Hamm is and I don’t remember him from anything I’ve seen but he’s almost perfect for Fletch. By ‘almost perfect’ I mean he delivers his lines well and has exactly the same ‘laid back to the point of being deceitful’ attitude of the character (who nobody ever really listens to well enough to get any of his jokes). I love the way that, like the books, half the stuff he says to people goes by them without them noticing it. So, yeah, Hamm does an absolutely gorgeous job... but... at 51 years of age he’s just too old for the part and looks it, to be honest. That’s the only problem I had with it but, I’m willing to overlook that because a) it’s not his fault and b) he’s absolutely fabulous... although I’d get any sequels done quickly because I do not want to see a 60 year old Fletch running around in this kind of story. Oh.. and a quick shout out to another person I never heard of, Ayden Mayeri, who really knocks it out the park playing a character called Griz. Stellar work lady!

And, he’s backed up by some great actors doing some wonderful performances...  Kyle MacLachlan’s germophobic art dealer is good, John Slattery as Fletch’s former boss at the New York Tribune is excellent and, wow, Marcia Gay Harden does a wonderful turn as Fletch’s possible future mother-in-law, The Countess. And it all goes towards cementing the perfect formula of the novels... these are not comedies, as Paramount found out when it went into full comedy mode for the bizarre sequel Fletch Lives... these are comedy thrillers. That is to say, straight thrillers with a very strong sense of humour, not least of which is found in the dialogue and thought processes of the titular character. Which is exactly what we have here and which they really managed to nail.

So yeah, I loved Confess, Fletch and, if you liked that original first movie and, especially if you liked MacDonald’s fantastic series of books, you will probably love this one and go into it with the right kind of expectations. I’m very interested in seeing how this does at the box office because, frankly, I think we might find the audience for this kind of solid movie has probably not got a lot of  crossover with the young target audience who go to the cinema... so I hope they look at figures for streaming and, please give us a Blu Ray release of this one (not to mention a proper CD edition of David Arnold’s wonderful score... damn thing’s only available as a stupid digital download at present). So, yeah, great movie, don’t miss out.

The Case Of The Howling Dog

Mason Gets
A Case On

The Case Of
The Howling Dog
USA 1934
Directed by Alan Crosland
Warner Archive DVD Region 1

Okay, I’d best make a confession. Not only have I never read any of Erle Stanley Gardner’s popular books about the much loved law room warrior Perry Mason, I’ve also never seen any of the movies or TV shows based on his books about the character either. I mean, sure, I’ve seen the odd ten minutes of the early Raymond Burr TV shows here and there, as my dad likes the character but, I’ve never really cottoned onto him until now. I bought my dad a set of the six, original movies which were, as far as I know, the only ones made in the US for cinema release... the various TV shows kinda carried the legacy of the character after these. And, well... I thought I’d watch this with him to see what the fuss was all about.

So The Case Of The Howling Dog is the very first screen adaptation of one of Gardner’s books and, unlike those books and future versions (from what I understand), Mason is already a very successful lawyer commanding a huge law firm and large set of offices. Here’s he’s played by Warren William and he’s also aided by his perpetual secretary Della Street, played here by Helen Trenholme in her only shot in the role. I believe that, later on in the books and also the films, the two characters get married.

The plot set up has an unusual hook of a neighbour’s police dog troubling a guy who moved in two months before. He hires Mason to take care of his will and also to try and arrest the guy who he believes is making the dog howl. It all gets very convoluted with Mason getting embroiled in a plot which involves two wives and two husbands (one of whom is initially Mason’s client) and the woman later suspected of shooting one of the men, who Mason is also, because of his contract with his initial client, in a position to defend. Of course, there are a couple of more murders before the story is through and, I have to say that, while I was kinda expecting the way the story played out in the film, it’s a little more restrained and unusual than many of the film series with running characters I’ve seen from this time period.

For instance, this is not rough and tumble movie where the main protagonist chases and fights his way to the solution of the case, picking up helpful clues along the way. Mason is a lawyer and doesn’t get involved with all that malarky, by the looks of it. This is not The Saint, The Falcon or even the Charlie Chan film series in terms of how these are put together. However, in spite of this, the film doesn’t get boring and Mason does do quite a lot of, well, shall we say skillful manipulation and staging of the facts which, I must say, I really wasn’t prepared for. It’s not that he’s fabricating evidence so much as creating new evidence which is just the right side of that distinction to discredit other observations and throw things into doubt... so, yeah, wasn’t expecting that so much. Nor was I expecting his clients, who he is defending, to lie to him either but... well, yeah, this is not familiar territory for me.

The film rolls along at a fair crack and, about twenty minutes before the end, the trial of Mason’s defendant starts. Now, another of my expectations dashed was the assumption that there would be a lot of court room drama in this but, barring a couple of quick adjournments and the discovery of two more corpses just around the corner from the trial (which seems a bit bizarre in terms of placement of the action), the courtroom scenes are over pretty quickly. There’s a slight rumple which I didn’t quite understand in terms of legal distinction at the end of the movie but, well, in the end the defendant goes away unscathed and with a new lease of life... and a new leash too, courtesy of a dog which Mason brings in for his client at the end (the howling dog is shot by... a person I won’t reveal here).

So, yeah... The Case Of The Howling Dog is not my usual kind of picture but I enjoyed it right enough and I’ll probably watch the others with my dad when he starts going through them. So look out for more Perry Mason movie reviews on here sometime, relatively, soon. Apologies for the short length of this review but, yeah, I really don’t have too much to say about this initial entry.

Who Is Bill Rebane?

Acid Rebane

Who Is Bill Rebane?
UK 2021
Directed by David Cairns
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

After mostly enjoying my experiences with low budget film-makers courtesy of Severin’s Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection (the index of reviews of all the movies in this set can be found here) and Arrow's own He Came From The Swamp - The William Grefé Collection (reviews under titles in index), I thought I’d give Arrow’s next ‘low budget/big box set’ production a go in the form of a film-maker I wasn’t familiar with at all (or so I thought), so I took a gamble with Weird Wisconsin - The Bill Rebane Collection in the hopes that, like those two prior box sets I mentioned, the gamble would pay off. The set collects together six of the director’s pictures alongside a brand new documentary and, like those former box set experiences, I plumped to watch the documentary, Who Is Bill Rebane?, first so I could get an idea of what this guy was all about.

The film starts off with one of two very small clips of famous film critic and director Mark Cousins who is asked where he places the work of Bill Rebane and his one line, quizzical response, gives the documentary its title.

I wasn’t exactly overwhelmed by the quality of this documentary, as I had been on those other two box sets but I don’t think it’s the fault of the writer/director... who supplies a kind of intensely driven, almost poetic voice over narrative to link the various clips of talking head interviews of people who are either deeply appreciative of Rebane or who have worked for him in some capacity or another (usually lots of capacities, I guess, since these kinds of low budget films usually have everyone pitching in to do everything they can).

Born in Latvia in 1937, young Ito Rebane managed to survive the Russian invasion and war, somehow, moving with his family to the USA in the 1950s, when he changed his name to William Rebane. He invented a 360 degree film projection system called the Cinetarium which was ahead of its time somewhat and which failed to garner much interest or be in any way successful. His first film was shot in stages as money ran out, meaning characters dropped out halfway through and prompting, in one instance, an actor playing a character who was already dead returning to play that character’s brother for the next segment of the film. The film was eventually ‘ballasted out’ with even more inserts added in by the Godfather of Gore himself, Herschel Gordon Lewis and released as Monster-A-Go-Go (it’s the first film in this set so, yeah, expect a review of that one here sometime soon).

After stupidly turning down the chance to make a picture for Sam Arkoff, Rebane moved to Wisconsin, which everyone interviewed for this film agrees is a very strange and off kilter place to live (they only decided necrophilia should be made illegal in 2008)... and built a studio there, where he made low budget movies which, sometimes gave good returns but, he rarely saw any of the profits himself. His wife was his producer and sometime assistant director and it sounds like he’d get his whole family involved on occasion. Perhaps the stark, driven but flattened quality of Who Is Bill Rebane? is such as it is because, from the sound of it, many of the films Rebane made dealt with big background ideas that rarely manifested themselves overtly in his films but were constantly talked about and which, it seems, often featured endings which were ambiguous at best.

Perhaps his most famous movie, The Giant Spider Invasion (not included in this set, sadly) is one of a couple of exceptions to this rule because, you do see a VW bug made up to look like a giant spider. It sounds ridiculous and, when you look at it... it really is ridiculous. I didn’t think I’d ever seen a movie by Rebane but, when one of the people being interviewed describes how well, against all odds, that movie played with cinema audiences and then described a scene about a lady accidentally drinking a drink made when a tarantula is liquified in a blender, I actually remembered the scene and recalled I’d actually seen this movie play at a cinema in Enfield Town, here in the UK, back in the late seventies as part of a double bill. And yes, I do remember the audience reaction for this scene being really big... I also remember not liking the movie that much though so, there’s that. However, having said that, I now feel the need to seek out a copy of the movie from somewhere and lay that ghost to rest.

Actually, one of the things this movie has highlighted is that some of the more interesting looking Bill Rebane movies, featuring monsters like Big Foot and a swamp creature, are not actually included in this set. However, it does have a few films with some interesting premises to them at the very least so, yeah, I am still looking forward to exploring these sometime soon.

And there’s not much more to be said about this. If you want to hear stories of how Rebane shot a private eye mystery which involved a talking bear played by a man in a suit (another one not included here and which I absolutely have to see) or how pop legend Tiny Tim starred in a slasher movie for Bill but also replaced all the light bulbs in his room in Bill’s house with 250 watt light bulbs and expanding the water bill with his 45 minute showers, then Who Is Bill Rebane? is definitely the place to find out about this stuff. It’s not the most entertaining documentary in the world, it has to be said but, it’s done nothing to dispel me from watching the six films in this set and I am suitably intrigued and ready to delve into the somewhat deadpan world of this weird Wisconsin director. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity

The Cleavage Of Zaroff

Slave Girls From
Beyond Infinity
USA 1987
Directed by Ken Dixon
88 Films DVD Region 2

It seems strange to me that a prestige label like 88 Films, no less, would release this movie in an open matte 4:3 aspect ratio but, at least I know I’m gaining picture in that method of transfer, rather than losing the sides. As a result of this decision, I made a mental note to be kind if I saw any camera booms entering the shots from the top, because that can often occur in open matte transfers, when extra picture information the film maker didn’t expect you to be able to see makes its way into the frame.

I don’t know what it was that drew me to watch Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity... maybe a sense of curiosity about Buzz Lightyear’s famous catch phrase. Possibly the prospect of seeing a finely crafted science fiction epic to stimulate my brain with its twisty, philosophical bent. Or maybe it was the vaguely ridiculous title coupled with cover art of scantily clad ladies with huge, photogenic features wielding unfeasibly large guns and being menaced by strange aliens and robots... all hovering above the strap line, “Big Movie. Big Production. Big Girls.” But mostly it was probably the ridiculously cheap asking price when I ordered it from Amazon four years ago (something which has since inflated to a figure close to the Infinity mentioned in the title, due to its out of print status).

We start off with a title sequence with some actually quite wonderful music composed by someone called Carl Dante. Nice music which is totally and deliberately reminiscent of Basil Poledouris’ amazing score for Conan The Barbarian, for sure, due to it’s orchestration. It even contains a little hint of Jerry Goldsmith’s klingon battle music from Star Trek The Motion Picture in it too and I have to wonder if those composers’ music was used as a temp track to rough cut the picture with.

The film continues quite strongly, it has to be said, with a prologue where a top heavy, scantily clad young vixen is being chased through a jungle by a not unimpressive, given the budget, alien monster with a gun wired to its arm. It closes in on the girl but, just before it kills her due to its ‘non-cleavage appreciating alien ways’, a man shoots it with his miniature laser crossbow and the woman is saved... or is she? Probably not as we can probably conclude from what this guy gets up to later in the film.

Meanwhile, on a starship, two chained slave girls called Daria (played by Elizabeth Kaitan) and Tisa (played by Cindy Beal)... who have absolutely no back story at all, I should point out... break loose from their chains through brute force and then, in the words of one, “reverse the polarity of their cuffs.” Hmm... where have I heard something like that before? They overpower their dumb guards and somehow manage to steal a smaller spaceship from inside the larger spaceship, winning their freedom. Their celebrations are short lived though, due to there being no inhabited planets nearby. Well, none, that is, apart from the ‘planetoid’ that pops up on some kind of beacon. They go to investigate and crash their ship on said planetoid. Then they find a castle with their new host Zed (played by Don Scribner), his two lethal robot servants and his other two guests... brother and sister Rik and Shala, played by Carl Horner and Brinke Stevens. However, after sneaking about in the castle after dark (plus some hot softcore sex action between Daria and Rick), Zed’s sinister secret is out and after Rik is killed on a hunt, the three women are released into the surrounding jungle and its ‘phantom zone’ filled with various zombies, giant spider webs (no spiders though) and the big alien wielding the gun from the start of the picture.

It turns out, you see, that Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity is actually a cleavaged up, busty remake of The Most Dangerous Game (aka The Hounds Of Zaroff)... a film which has been remade many times over the years, most recently as The Hunt (reviewed here). And, actually it’s not a terribly made film but the writing is very bizarre. In that it’s kind of rubbish and elabourate and unnatural sounding while, at the same time, you get a sense that it’s supposed to be this bad and that’s all just part of the writer’s plan. Which actually makes the film a lot of fun in the ‘so bad it’s good’ stakes, it has to be said. So yeah, a typical dialogue exchange might be, when Daria burns her hand getting them out of their cell on the slave ship at the start of the movie and, when Tisa asks if she’s alright, she quips back... “A little well done, perhaps.” And the villain is a little too much like he’s a schoolboy philosopher in some respects, coming out with lines like... “I’ve always found the female of the species to be the greatest challenge... far more crafty and cunning than their male counterparts.”

Also, although the special effects look quite low tech in some ways, they’re actually not too terrible either although, there are a few technical flaws in the movie. Such as when one of the gals hits an alien over the head with a big stick. For some reason not made very clear in any way, shape of form, this causes the alien to just explode out of existence... however, when he does this, an entire wall wobbles like you’re watching a movie equivalent of an old BBC episode of Blake’s 7. So, yeah, that’s not so good. And there are other things in the movie that don’t really make sense... like when Tisa goes back to look for a map dropped on the jungle floor because her cleavage wasn’t quite adequate to hold it in her bikini top by itself (should have given it to Daria). When she backtracks to look for the map, she is looking all around her cautiously without even once looking at the ground where, you know, you might think a dropped map may be located (she finds it eventually).

And, yeah, that’s mostly everything I want to say about this movie. Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity isn’t exactly high art but it’s an entertaining enough diversion for what it is and maybe that’s enough for a Saturday night. Probably better as a collective ‘movie night in with friends and booze’ experience, I suspect. The UK version of the film from 88 Films is probably the best version to get in terms of the DVD as the American disc is apparently similarly presented in an open matte transfer.

However, the UK disc wins out, kinda, by having an accompanying feature included called... hmm, okay... Famous T&A. This is literally a collection of badly cropped 4:3 clips of various actresses such as Ornella Muti, Ursula Andress, Brigitte Bardot and various others, in examples of their nude scenes. Starting off with Sybil Danning doing a reverse strip into a costume, she hosts the entire thing dressed as a Roman Gladiatrix and reading ridiculously written lines about the various actresses bodies over the course of the hour and a quarter. And I do mean reading. You can see she’s reading from cards in certain scenes for sure. Now, I would normally be up for something this rubbish and pseudo-sexy but, honestly, the 4:3 aspect ratio on this was a real turn off for me. If I want to watch various stars taking their clothes off, then I want to be seeing them properly framed in the correct aspect ratio, thank you very much. I mention this bonus film in passing here purely because I know some people will have some nostalgia for this kind of bosomy showcase, which may remind them of the old celebrity episode of Electric Blue from the 1980s. Ultimately though, it’s not worth purchasing the disc for this special feature alone... although I could understand why you may be tempted.

The Great Yôkai War

Monster Mash

The Great Yôkai War
aka Yôkai daisensô
Japan 2005
Directed by Takashi Miike
Shochiku Blu Ray Zone B
From Arrow’s Yōkai Monster Collection Blu Ray set

Once again, the Yôkai monsters are back... along with a whole host of new Yôkai (literally hundreds or possibly thousands in the scenes where they gather for ‘the final battle’ of the movie). This time around, however, they are set in contemporary times and the great and extremely prolific director Takashi Miike is setting the pace (I believe he’s just made a sequel to this movie last year) with The Great Yôkai War.

Now, Miike can be a bit hit and miss and the amount of visual information thrown at the audience in this one is huge and, to my western eyes, mostly bewildering. However, I believe the incredibly complicated story is revealed, in the end, to be a really simple tale after all, with a tsunami of energetic set dressing, so to speak. The plot involves a young boy who is chosen, in his village’s traditional annual festival, to be that year’s token Kirin Rider... who is supposed to retrieve a sword from Goblin Mountain to keep the ‘worked at’ peace every year. However, a very nasty demon who is enslaving many of the Yôkai and who is the living spirit of the ‘resentment humanity has earned’ by throwing out old things they think no longer useful, is leading a hate filled invasion of the world of humans and it’s up to the young, new Kirin Rider, along with some of his new Yôkai allies, to try and stop all of Tokyo (just for starters) from being destroyed.

Okay, so there are various twists on the plot dressing, such as a friendly rat creature and the return of various early Yôkai such as the snake necked lady Rokurokubi and the umbrella demon Karakasa Obake (with his long dangly tongue), not to mention the Kappa from Spook Warfare (reviewed here)... and also a gruesome process where the evil demons melt down the good Yôkai and merge them with resentful objects to transform them into evil, metal creatures... it all gets a bit Tetsuo, to be honest.

There’s also the bold colours that Miike can sometimes work with and the colour palette on this one tends to run to pinky mauves, reds and blues (other than a few shots of nature, I don’t remember seeing too much green in this one). Ditto for the sometimes striking frame compositions although, it all gets a bit lost here because there is just so much thrown at the screen, it seems to me. And a technique where he edits out many frames at a time to make these flash edits of someone, but they are still rooted in the same spot rather than walking away or to the camera, which kind of highlights the facial expressions as an overload of information on the part of the main protagonist. Don’t remember seeing that done before.

This is said by many to be a remake of Spook Warfare but I think that, although it shares some basic themes, such as the idea of two factions of Yôkai in conflict, it mostly does it’s own thing in this one. Even when one takes into account that the fragmentary, non-linear nature of some of the set up and first of the mini epilogues to the action could be seen as a distortion of the general plot (yeah, okay, I got there in the end but my brain had to wake up to decode this and try to make sense of it for a while).

The CGI effects of the evil demon’s metal monsters is interesting here because, although I can only assume this is all CGI, the monsters themselves look almost a throwback to the stop motion animation techniques pioneered by Willis O’Brien back in the 1920s/30s and, especially, to the ‘Superdynamation’ cinematic realms of Ray Harryhausen. Now, aping this technique with more modern methods isn’t anything unusual, I’ve seen this done before in films such as Blood - The Last Vampire (reviewed here) but it’s still nice to see this kind of homage/tribute to the special effects techniques of yesteryear and it’s far less dull than what might have been put up on the screen.

Other nice things on show here are an ‘on screen’ tribute to Shigeru Mizuki, who brought the Yôkai back to popular public consciousness in the 1960s with his manga based on the tales he heard from generations back and, indeed, he also has a small cameo in the film as a demon king. When the main lead goes to research a cute Yôkai that befriends him, he travels to the real life Mizuki Museum to get the information on the creature. There’s also a cool moment in the film when a giant demon-like thing flies through the sky on its way to destroy Tokyo and one of the people at ground level exclaims “Ah, it’s only Gamera.”, which did make me smile. I was also pleased to see the umbrella demon being used to float/fly another demon, as it was similarly utilised in Spook Warfare.

Some bits did fall flat for me though... 

 The use of an advertising jingle used to herald the fact that the evil demon is accidentally merging with an Azuki Bean which, given that “Azuki beans grow in love and peace!” as we are sung to, means his plans are scuppered. Similarly, an action sequence involving the main protagonists accidentally finding themselves riding on the wings of a jet plane, only for the screen to suddenly freeze with the caption “Don’t try this at home kids!” seemed a little pretentious and too much like a nod and a wink to an audience which might not, by this point, have found themselves too invested in the story line.

And that’s all I’ve really got to say on this one. I love Miike but The Great Yôkai War is not one of his films I could watch over and over again. There’s a lot of rich, visual, surrealistic creations on screen (and the reveal of the Rokurokubi is perfect) but the ‘throw everything in at once’ nature of the dense visuals means you are always just trying to take everything in to the point where, it has to be said, it becomes a bit of a dulled down experience. Still, it’s nice to see some of these monsters back and I certainly want to see what he’s done in the new one... although whether it will wash up on these shores is another matter.