Talk To Me

 

Talk To
The Hand

Talk To Me
Directed by
Danny and Michael Philippou
Australia A24 2022

Talk To Me is a refreshing new horror movie from Australia and the feature length directorial debut from the Philippou Brothers. The film stars the brilliant Sophie Wilde as Mia, who has lost her mother to suicide a couple of years prior to the opening of the film and who is trying to cope and just reconnect with life in general. She has a close network of friends who treat her like family as she’s a little numb to her father, who she lives with. One of the things she wants to do is try out, with her friends, a new phenomenon which has been doing the rounds in her social network. Namely, getting together in a group and... talking to a hand.

But not just any hand... it’s a preserved dead hand from a spiritualist (or a satanist, depending on who you believe)... and when you grip it in a handshake, you say “Talk To Me” and you’re instantly talking to someone who has died, sitting across from you. You then say “I let you in” and that spirit possesses your body (so the subject is pre-tied to a chair in order that he/she doesn’t run away when possessed) and you take on the personality and traits of that person. The trick... the caveat which is the obvious plot point leading to the supernatural shenanigans that ensue... is that you can only be in that state for 90 seconds or the spirit inside you will try to stay and hitch a ride, so to speak. And sometimes it can be a bugger breaking the grip of the host from the hand to ensure that time limit.

So there’s your basic plot set up and, of course, once Mia tries and then her friend’s younger brother has a go, who sees Mia’s dead mother (or perhaps not)... things get bad and, once Mia fails (like at least one other) to have her grip broken in time, she starts seeing her mother in reflections and starts getting instructions from her, which can be pretty dangerous for others at some point.

Now I’d heard good things about this and can confirm that it’s a pretty good slice of supernatural hokum which is obviously a real crowd pleaser. What I wasn’t expecting was for the lack of jump scare upon jump scare throughout the movie. I mean, sure there are some jumpy moments but it’s like the Philippou Brothers have not gone to that ‘modern American school of horror movie making’ which everyone else theses days seem to have spent some time with. And it’s not wall to wall score (or wall to wall atonal and raggedy ambient sound design, for that matter)... everything is done with a mind to giving the characters room to breathe and consider what’s happening to them, letting them develop as the story progresses. Indeed, the film is very good at showing the internal world of the characters too.... even when they don’t have one foot in the spirit world. The directors do this sometimes by blurring out people and conversations in the background so that you can see them and you can just make out words and fragments of conversation, but the concentration of trying to hear what is going on pitched against the main visual of a person lost in thought, serves to push that inner struggle into the foreground... which is a nice way of doing things. I have seen things like that done in movies before, of course but, the way it’s used here is pretty useful and well executed.

What this means, of course, is that the film is something of a slow burn before it gets to the scares. Which is why the directors have done exactly what David Lynch did with the first scene in Wild At Heart and Steven Spielberg did in the first scene of Jurassic Park (and what Bernard Herrmann insisted he do with his overture music on the opening credits of Brian De Palma’s Sisters, for that matter)... which is show you just how bad things can get once the horror starts happening. So the opening of the film, set at a party, shows a really surprising double stabbing which is very strong... and jump starts the audience on the journey, pulling you in and allowing yourself the luxury of meeting the characters because you know something scary and, quite possibly brutal,  is eventually going to happen to them.

And the style of the shots is a little less frantic than most modern horror movies too. There’s obviously a lot of camera movement and there are some nice, jolting (but still quite smoothly tracked) moments when a person gets possessed but, there are also a lot of long held static shots in the movie, again so you can spend time with the characters without feeling propelled into the next fright already. And this approach can sometimes, well, kill a horror movie stone dead but, it’s done with a deft touch here and the script and performances are interesting enough that you won’t want to be leaving Mia's world in a hurry. And, in fact, there’s not much danger of that because, while stuff does notably happen to people other than the film’s central protagonist, the point of view stays with her for the majority of the story with very few deviations from that modus operandi.

And, yeah, I really liked it. The only caveat being that, after a certain incident right near the end of the film, you will have no problem figuring out what the final shot of the film is going to be... but again, it doesn’t matter because it’s a pretty good ending. So, Talk To Me... is nicely made, nicely performed, engaging and possesses a gripping, spooky atmosphere... definitely a strong recommendation from me, then.

You Can Call Me Bill

Captain’s Log,
Captain’s Tree

You Can Call Me Bill
Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe
USA Exhibit A Pictures 2023
London Film Festival screening, 7th October 2023

Documentary film maker extraordinaire Alexandre O. Philippe’s You Can Call Me Bill is, as the director himself put it in his introduction to this UK premiere screening at the London Film Festival, not the William Shatner documentary you were expecting. Indeed, if you are expecting a blow by blow account of William Shatner’s personal history and the various roles which have made him a modern icon (of a sometimes dubious nature but, hey, that image of him is exactly what I wanted to dispel by coming to see this thing) and serviced by various actors and studio producers who have worked for him than, I’m afraid, you are going to be out of luck...

I mean, put it this way... apart from various clips from some of his film and TV work (plus clips from stuff he’s not even in), where you will naturally see other actors in archival footage... William Shatner is the only human being you will see in this film. And, tedious as that proposition sounds, it’s certainly not a dull movie (far from it) and, you will come out of it with a sense of knowing something about Shatner as a human being... rather than the grandiose celebrity personality he’s become. No, this film is all about Shatner as he is now, looking back on a few moments in his life but ultimately, at 92 years of age (as at time of this screening), as a man who, despite being in the best of health for someone his age, knows he will certainly be shuffling off this mortal coil sometime very soon.

And that’s what this film is mostly about... death, the nature of the universe and a human being’s place in it. The film is split into chapters and, certainly, certain parts of his childhood and acting life are talked about by him but, it’s more about where he is in his life right now and how he chooses to reflect on that life and, more importantly to him, his place in the universe and what comes with death. And I say this coming out of this screening with very much the idea that Shatner is not especially religious or, certainly, a follower of one religion... more that he’s open to the great adventure of life and death and is, curious about what, if anything, comes next.

The other big vibe from the movie is that Shatner is very much into nature and, for example, his statement that he wants to be a tree... and he’s given instructions for his ashes to be placed in a forest with a redwood planted on top of him, so his cremated remains can nourish the growing tree. He loves horses and dogs and forests... and so on. So, one of his concerns is that the population of the planet is killing it off somewhat quicker now.  So he’s very eco friendly in his outlook these days. And also, another concern about his personal impending doom is... he won’t get a chance to see his grand children grow older to see what kind of people they become.

All this is done using Shatner in a chair with what looks like two or three cameras trained on him... one held static and at least one other moving around him, so the director and editor can cut between the shots through Shatner’s monologues and responses to the interviewer’s questions (almost all questions and prompts not included but... I think I heard the director’s voice once in this) and give the whole film a more dynamic feel. Bringing a sense of movement to the stillness of Shatner’s wonderful and somewhat optimistic outlook on life.

But, as I say, there are other visual things going on. For instance, apart from the various clips from things like Star Trek and T. J. Hooker etc, which all were picked to mirror some of the sentiments of what Shatner is talking about as the view of a 92 year old man, you also get things like a beautiful static shot of a tree in a forest, which both opens and closes the film and which, honestly, reminded me of something my second favourite director, Andrei Tarkovsky, might have shot for inclusion in something like Solaris or Mirror. There is also recent concert footage of Shatner and an orchestra performing a musical narrative of his thoughts since he went up into space a couple of years ago.

And of that experience, which is touched on briefly towards the end of the documentary, you can tell that he had a very profound response to his short time in space, for sure. And as he reflects on the irony of the privilege of having the opportunity to go into space, I learned another thing about him I never knew...

I remember as a youngster in the 1970s, the reruns of Star Trek on TV was one of my favourite shows... I had the blueprints, I had the Kirk and Spock action figures put out by Mego... but I also remember wondering what the heck had happened to Shatner because, he wasn’t in much before Star Trek started up again as a cinematic franchise... or at least that was the way it seemed to me. I remember him headlining shows like Barbary Coast but I often wondered what had become of him in between. Well, the irony of his recent space mission for Shatner was that, after Star Trek was cancelled and he got divorced, it turns out he was completely broke or, as Shatner corrects himself in this movie, not broke in terms of being a broken man but... he had absolutely no money. So he and his dog lived in a small truck which he’d camp up in a field or whatever and sleep in at night. He recalls a day in 1969 when he was in the truck looking up at the moon and on his smallish TV set he had in the truck, he watched the moon landing. I bet if you told that unemployed actor looking desperately for work that he’d one day get to go into space himself, there’s no way he would have believed it.

And that’s me done, I think, with this rather unexpected but certainly interesting and enlightening look at the modern acting legend that is William Shatner. There are some funny moments in the film, such as when he addresses how alien the impressions of him with his broken sentences sounds and then relating it to a story about him asking Edward G Robinson about the odd delivery he’d noticed from him in his movies... but mostly the film is a somewhat surprisingly optimistic look at impending death and how one chooses to live a life. You Can Call Me Bill is a really nice little tribute to the actor and, if it doesn’t give you all the specifics of his career or his marriages or whatever else you were expecting... it does give you a sense of the man himself as he feels about things now, which is a nice thing to have as a... hopefully somewhat premature but ultimately fitting, epitaph. If you are a fan of Shatner or are just curious about where he’s at as a person these days, then this movie is definitely worth a good look.

Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway

Holy Three Stigmata!

Jesus Shows You
The Way To The Highway
Spain/Estonia/Ethiopia/
Latvia/Romania 2019
Directed by Miguel Llansó
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Yeah... I suppose this has spoilers all through it. In a way.

Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway is the second feature film by Miguel Llansó, the director of the equally surreal Crumbs (reviewed by me here). Like that earlier feature, the bombardment of various seemingly conflicting or contradicting elements on the audience seems to be the order of the day but, also like that earlier film, once you start to glean and uncover parts of the underlying roadmap, a fairly linear or, at least, penetrable through line on the narrative starts to slowly emerge.

The film had me from the start when the opening title appears over time as an old 1982 ZX Spectrum loading screen, as it would have loaded up from a cassette. We are then flung into the world of the far future where Daniel Tadesse, the male lead of Crumbs, returns in this one as CIA agent D. T. Gagano, partnered with Agent Palmer (played here by Agustín Mateo). After an agent who has been connected to Psychobook, which is something which somehow controls the majority of the future world, has her eyes demolished by a Russian virus, it’s up to Agents Gagano and Palmer to enter Psychoville with their low tech VR headsets, in a series of missions where they can find and trace the source of the virus... which is being distributed as a slimy substance at one point.

Now Gagano just wants to resign from the CIA and stay with his oversexed girlfriend Malin (played by the sensational Gerda-Annette Allikas... this is, bafflingly, her only movie credit). However, when the two agents go in, entering an environment where their masked avatars (of Robert Redford and Richard Pryor) are filmed in a way that is reminiscent of stop motion animation, they come face to face and get into a fight with an Irish accented version of Stalin. On their second encounter, Gagano goes into a coma and is trapped in this alternate reality. A reality where Batman is a fascist president named Bat-Fro, who sends in his subordinate Mr. Sophisticated’s king fu warriors to bring him the Ark of the Covenant... which is actually the very first laptop to enter psychoville. Bat-fro is costumed exactly as Adam West in the old TV shows and, indeed, an old Batman Equal Pay PSA advert starring West, Burt Ward and Yvonne Craig from 1973 is shown playing on a TV set at one point.

And if this all seems fairly mad to you... there’s lots more pop culture references and all of the actors have been deliberately, badly dubbed in English language to mirror the kind of bootleg and international prints of various exploitation films from the 60s and 70s. With some insect men who shoot laser beams from their eyes thrown in for good measure, of course.

Let me just take an aside here to say that the Arrow video contains a relatively short visual essay on the influences of the film and I actually watched that extra (I rarely have time for the extras these days) because it sounded interesting. Alas, the person putting it together correctly identifies that the basic plot structure (or at least as it’s presented to the audience in the most obvious layer) hails from spy movies but he seems stuck on Eurospy films being the influence when, frankly, lots of spy movies have the kind of stylistic qualities inherent in the movie, expecially from the 1960s. And, frankly, citing Our Man Flint as a Eurospy film (it’s an American movie, people!) and, even more alarmingly, incorrectly identifying Bernard Lee as playing ‘Q’ in the Bond movies (he plays ‘M’ guys!), kind of kills the credibility of the piece. Yeah, we can all see he’s referencing Kung Fu movies but, probably not the ones you specifically cite and while I can see it would be worthwhile mentioning the luchador movies such as those made popular by Santo and Blue Demon, it seems to me they’ve kind of missed the point with the obvious homage to knock off superhero movies when you’re not talking about the Filipino and Turkish (among others) superhero movies of the 60s and 70s. So, yeah, was looking forward to the visual essay but I wasn’t impressed, especially when the narrator completely fails to mention the obvious, all pervading influence on the movie... Philip K. Dick.

Okay, so the terrific and chaotic visuals and story strands knitted together before your eyes should all start to come together when, at one point fairly early on in the movie, you find out the full name of Agent Palmer is Palmer Eldritch. As in the Philip K. Dick novel The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch. Indeed, at one point in the film the viral substance which seems to be opening paths to new realities has been synthesised by the Jesus character into candy, directly referencing one of the two drugs used to gateway into different realities in the novel, Can-D and Chew-Z (with the Z being pronounced in the American way to make sense of the second term). Furthermore, when Jesus first properly appears in the narrative, the story almost nods to the idea of Mercerism, central to Dick’s famous novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? And when you realise that the director is referencing Dick and his way of putting characters into alternate realities they had no knowledge of, such as in A Maze Of Death, Ubik and others of that ilk, then the on screen shenanigans of Agents Gagano and Palmer seem relatively easy to decode. Like you’ve just been handed a primer. At some point from then on you realise that all three layers of reality represented in the movie (as barriers between the two layers break down and create a third netherworld between the two) are all just one single alternative reality to an experiment going on at MIT. Except, there’s a little Easter egg towards the end of the picture, referencing the main viral villain, which suggests that even this final reality may well be a false reading.

Whatever the underlying reality, though, Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway is a chaotic, maelstrom of surrealistic, alternative worlds with lots of fun and bizarre imagery, quite unlike any other film I’ve seen to date, including the director’s previous movie Crumbs, which is an entirely different brand of ‘What the heck?’ than is on show here. It’s one of those films I could easily revisit over and over again and certainly one I’ll be introducing to various film buddies at some point. Why this didn’t get a huge cinema campaign and a shot at the box office over here other than a single, one off screening at Glasgow Film Festival, is a complete mystery to me. People need to be exposed to more films like this, especially in a country where we have quite a diverse range of people living here who would be in more of a position to recognise and understand the visual influences and tropes on display here than some other international audiences, I suspect (and probably more so, for sure, than the expert commentator on the visual essay was able). Anyway, if you love film and want to see something you may well not have seen before then, Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway is the one to watch. But watch out for those 8-bit music saturated end credits... if you have any leanings toward epilepsy then you might want to give those end titles a miss.

Fishnet

Fishnetscape
Navigator

Fishnet
by Kirstin Innes
Black & White Publishing
ISBN: 9781785302138

Just a quick shout of a review, really, to an interesting book I saw floating by on my Twitter timeline one day and looked interesting enough for me to have a look. Fishnet, by Kirsten Innes, appeared to be a thriller set in the world of sex workers. The reality is a little more complicated than that but it is certainly set in that milieu and, I’m pleased to say, it’s very positive of that particular profession, at least in the light of the respect, intelligence and choices of the women (and men) who work in that industry. It was obvious from the start that Innes had done her homework in bringing the characters in the book to life and portraying their struggles with both authority, in the form of a building company which is scheduled to knock down their sanctuary... where the sympathetic central protagonist of the book, Fiona, works... and, of course, the somehow still in this day and age attitudes of people outside their profession unable to understand it and behaving, often unintentionally but still as damagingly, in a derogatory manner to both the lifestyle and the people who adopt it.

The book is not really a thriller but it does have a mystery at its heart and many of the encounters that make up the story take the form of an amateur investigative procedural to give it a clothes horse, so to speak, to hang the main linen of the story on. Fiona’s sister has been missing for seven years and the last time she saw her was when she showed up at her door with a newborn babe, Beth... and then she ran away in the night, leaving Fiona and her parents to bring up the child without her.

And it’s a very interesting way of doing things as the writer takes six long sections and structures them under repeat mini titles to relocate either time shifts (flashbacks and so forth) or the central character’s dealings, split between her personal life on the investigation and her colleagues at the building company. So, for instance, chapter one will be made up of a repeat cycle of cross cuts between subsections labelled either CITY and VILLAGE, chapter two would be BACK and FORTH, chapter three would be PRIVATE and PUBLIC and so one. Further adding to these, almost John DoS Passos style (if I’m remembering my USA Trilogy correctly), are little bursts of information that interrupt the narrative as Fiona feeds her growing obsession with the girls’ sex worker blogs, her inklings of her own shifting sexuality and her growing sense of camaraderie with the girls and the seduction of the lifestyle in which they work.

And, yeah, I wasn’t sure at first because the lack of ‘hard thriller’ territory from the start kind of threw me but... it didn’t take that long for me to realise, for instance, that the central premise of the missing sister, pursued quite vigorously by the central character herself, was not what the book was about. Even though it also has a mild ‘espionage’ angle to something Fiona is doing at one point. But at the same time, despite my initial reservations, I found myself quite drawn into the world in which Fiona begins to explore. This is despite the main narrative refraining, for the most part, to be specifically sexualised and maintaining a more, solid observational approach to the various women that Fiona encounters on her own personal odyssey.

Now, it has to be said, there are a few clichés explored in the book. For example, I knew exactly where Fiona was going to end up as a person by the end of the novel and there were a few dramatic points in the book that some readers will definitely see coming. However, saying that, because of the unwillingness on the writer’s part to fall into a specific trap of allowing these various plot points to become the raison d'être of the actual scenes in which they turn up... almost in a laid back manner... it kind of doesn’t matter if you see certain story beats coming from afar because, it’s more about the writing, the structure and the attitude to various professions and people which are, in actual fact, the core of the novel. At least that's the way it seems to me.

What this means, in case you were wondering, is that I still found myself thoroughly gripped by the character of Fiona and her relationships with the various people, including her young ‘daughter’, more than anything else in the novel. So, yeah, I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed Fishnet and, well, I’m sorry it’s such a short review this time but thank you so much to the author for portraying the majority of the sex workers here in a positive light... or perhaps, more importantly, in a respectful light (after all, some escorts can also be terrible human beings, as much as the next person). It was just nice to see that profession normalised and written about with a certain amount of knowledge about the subject (see Innes afterword about how she researched this one) and with a sympathetic eye. Glad I bought this one, for sure.

The Creator

AI Sir

The Creator
Directed by Gareth Edwards
USA 20th Century Fox 2023
UK cinema release print.

Gareth Edwards is one of those directors who, well... I usually tend to quite like his films but find there’s often something which disappoints and prevents them from being a great movie. I saw two very different trailers for his new film, The Creator, over the last couple of months... one was very much based on story and the plight of the central characters and the other one was more of an action movie kind of trailer. The first one disappointed me with its clichéd plot somewhat and the second one made me think... well, some of the robots look pretty cool. So I figured I’d give it a go and just not expect too much from it.

Which was probably the best attitude that I could have gone in with because, despite what some may justifiably call weaknesses in the basic DNA of the movie, for me this was the film by Edwards which is truly great. By which, perhaps I mean, it’s definitely his most accomplished and entertaining movie to date, as far as I’m concerned.

The plot follows a military character in Earth’s... relatively close... future. It’s been many years since the AI beings, such as robots, allegedly nuked Los Angeles and the US government (and various other powers... but not all) banned AI. But not in Thailand where humans and AI live in peace. So America goes to war with the AI, using their super weapon and obliterating AI and AI sympathisers. The main protagonist Joshua, played by John David Washington, who has a robot arm and leg, is undercover trying to find the enemy’s genius professor/creator and he’s been trying to do this for a number of years, by latching onto the alleged daughter of the target (played by Gemma Chan). And in that time the two have fallen in love, got married and she’s pregnant with their child. However, she and the baby inside her get killed when Joshua’s American team attack the place where they are living and wipe almost everyone out.

Five years later, after Joshua is still recovering from the psychological issues of losing her, he gets recruited in to find a new super weapon that this professor has created, which can allegedly wipe out the US superweapon and turn the tide of the war on the AI resistance. And I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, if you’ve seen any of the trailers, that the superweapon turns out to be an AI in the form of a little girl, played by Madeleine Yuna Voyles. However, once he finds her (after most of his unit have been wiped out), Joshua goes on the run with her, trying to keep her alive (or is it the other way around?) because he belives she can lead him to his wife... who is alleged now to still be around in the land of the living and in cahoots with the enemy. At which point the film becomes a road movie as the two bond with each other and he comes to realise that maybe AI are not just machines which you can terminate and turn off but, instead, have something approximating a soul and sense of self awareness not dissimilar to human beings.

So, yeah, to be fair, it’s a movie which is, really full of story clichés and, there are a couple of ‘twist’ reveals which most audience members will see coming fairly early on in the movie (like maybe five or ten minutes in). But, that being said, this in no way spoiled my enjoyment of it because, honestly, it looks absolutely stunning, has some gritty and suspenseful moments and whizzes by at a cracking pace.

Now, the look of this world really is a potpourri of many different science fiction elements which, if you’ve read, watched or ingested it in whatever media the genre has been living in from, say, the late 1920s to the early 1970s, you’ll be very familiar with. In other words, there’s nothing really new here in terms of the film’s acquirement and refashioning of old genre concepts... but, again, it’s done so well and, the film is nothing if not eclectically post-modern in its regurgitation of this material and it does it in such a convincing and entertaining way that, I couldn’t help but fall in love with it. And, in terms of that kind of stuff, it would be true to say that the director tips his hat and says to his audience ‘look, I know you know all this stuff but go with it, it’s fun’ by using the company motto of the Tyrell Corporation from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (reviewed by me here) quite blatantly within the first couple of minutes of the film. And, as one of my favourite critics pointed out in a podcast, the resulting world building is first class here.

One of my favourite moments was the return of the idea of walking bombs... or running bombs in this case. I’m not talking about just sentient bombs here, as in John Carpenter’s early 1970s movie Dark Star... but proper walking bombs which I don’t remember seeing, albeit in a much more expressionistic and beautiful way, since the annihilants seen in the 1940 theatrical serial Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe (reviewed here). The versions in this movie are both ‘cute’ and brutal, running through enemy lines at full pelt until they come to a stop and just explode. There’s a wonderful suspenseful scene during a battle sequence in the movie which deploys these creations and an equally wonderful visual reveal when Alfie (what Joshua has named this ultimate AI weapon in the form of a girl), steps in to lend a hand against these things. And, frankly, it’s nice to see this concept back again after so long (I guess there was probably a sidewayds variant of these in Screamers too, if I remember correctly... based on Philip K. Dick’s short story Second Variety).

Lastly, after a great last shot where the changing expression of Alfie’s face pretty much invites the viewer to bring their own baggage with them about their thoughts on AI consciousness and its nature, I waited around for some of the credits because I wanted to find out who wrote the music. I was surprised to find it was Hans Zimmer. Now, I love Hans Zimmer and always go to his concerts when I’m able to but, this is such a different score from him. It’s not as flashy or sweeping as his usual stuff for movies which are, to be fair, often inherently of that nature anyway. Instead it feels much more focussed on stepping back and allowing a more intimate musical landscape for the film, which seems like a much more appropriate choice for this kind of story. Alas, the score is not, at time of writing, available in a proper CD format so, it’s unlikely I will get to hear any of it away from the movie unless he decides to add it in on one of his future concert tour play lists, it would seem.

And that’s me pretty much done on The Creator. For me, this is Gareth Edwards best movie to date and I will certainly be looking to pick this one up on Blu Ray at some point in the, hopefully near, future. I absolutely loved it but, please, don’t anyone make a sequel.

Sherlock Holmes Faces Death

Another
Fine Chess

Sherlock Holmes
Faces Death
USA 1943
Directed by Roy William Neill
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilers.

Sherlock Holmes Faces Death, the sixth of the fourteen Sherlock Holmes films comprising the series of movies about the fictional detective -  continued by Universal after the initial two by Fox - was based loosely on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure Of The Musgrave Ritual and, like the previous five in the series, features Basil Rathbone as Holmes, Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson and Mary Gordon as housekeeper Mrs. Hudson.

This one takes place in a manor house, Musgrave Hall, which has been turned into a convalescence home for patients suffering from mental afflictions, due to their experiences in World War Two. As such, we find Doctor Watson on the scene before the first crime is even committed, as he is a consulting physician who visits the home on his rounds. However, when one of the family members is wounded by a stab in the neck, he calls in Holmes and, when the two arrive at the place, before Holmes even gets through the door, the two of them discover a dead body (the first of a few corpses) under a pile of leaves. It isn’t long before Holmes, Watson and a returning Denis Hoey as the even more obstinate and bumble headed Inspector Lestrade, are trying to piece together the words of the traditionally recited family ritual... the Musgrave Ritual... and trying to follow the clues using such methods as a human chess board on the checkered floors of the house, to find out what is really behind the string of murders.

And, as usual, it’s a delightful romp with a few interesting things of note as the film wears on.

For example, in an early and mostly superfluous scene which is a bit of dramatic window dressing (or padding if you like), a man in one of two pub scenes accidentally puts his hand through some glass. For a black and white movie of the 1940s, I found it odd but refreshing that we were allowed to see a mass of blood covering his hand... not a phenomenon I would associate too much with pre-1960s, Hollywood movie making. Incidentally, the eagle eyed among you may notice that, in one of the two pub scenes, the young sailor saying “Blimey!” is none other than a very young Peter Lawford.

Dennis Hoey is great as yet another comic foil for Holmes and he actually says two ‘very Lestrade’ like things which would become almost an amalgamated catchphrase for him in the series, if memory serves. In this one he exclaims both “Why, if it ain’t Mr. ‘Olmes!” and also “Why, if it isn’t Dr. Watson!” literally within ten seconds of the first utterance. Which definitely brought a smile to my face. Also, when reconstructing the steps of an unconscious victim, Holmes pronounces... “We must search her mind!” which I thought was a pretty striking turn of phrase.

Another striking turn of phrase, for me at any rate, was Nigel Bruce’s wonderful delivery, dismissing various silly speculations about the various ghostly legends at Musgrave as an expression to rival one of my favourites, Shilly Shally, as... “Hokey Pokey Penny A Lump.” The complete meaning of the phrase is now, it would seem, lost to obscurity but certainly popped up in a song in the 1920s referring to the slogan shouted for the selling of honeycomb ice cream... perhaps meaning cheap. Although, how this becomes a derisory term for the naming of nonsense is beyond me. What isn’t beyond me is that I think this phrase should definitely be brought back into the common parlance and I shall try and sneak it into as many conversations as I can for now. It’s a good ‘un!

The acting in this one is superb, as usual and a special shout out to Halliwell Hobbes as the dipsomaniac butler Brunton. He has a lovely scene where Rathbone’s Holmes is trying to interrogate him and he’s convincingly blotto during the sequence. He does it so well and against Rathbone’s blank expression that I suspect that both the actors had real trouble keeping a straight face through the scene. I’m sure that when the director called “Cut” they must both have been in peels of laughter.

One last thing... when the first victim tells Dr. Watson of how he was stabbed in the neck by a perpetrator unknown, the camera eye flashes back to the scene and we see him attacked for the benefit of the audience. However, when he is later revealed himself as the murderer and his story of how the wound was inflicted proves to be fabricated to throw suspicion from himself, it becomes clear should any of the audience remember by this point, that the camera POV shot from earlier was certainly lying and showing the audience something that never happened. Certainly not the first or last time this trick has been invested in to divert attention but, I have to wonder if this was, indeed, one of the earliest?

And that’s me done with Sherlock Holmes Faces Death. Another brilliant and entertaining entry into the series from a franchise of films I’ll continue to watch into my old age. A wonderful sequence of films, for sure.

Obi-Wan Kenobi

Daft Vader

Obi-Wan Kenobi
Airdate: May - June 2022
Lucasfilm

Warning: Spoilers but, who cares? It’s hard to spoil rubbish.

Obi-Wan Kenobi was originally scheduled to be a new Star Wars prequel movie... you know, one of those “A Star Wars Tale” movies like Rogue One (reviewed here) or Solo (reviewed here). However, due to Solo failing at the box office, the film was rewritten and reworked as a TV show (is my understanding). In regards to Solo, one of the better Star Wars movies to be made since the Disney buy out, it seemed pretty clear to everyone except Disney, surely, that the quality of the film was not at fault for it’s failure at the box office. Just bad Marketing/scheduling. The Star Wars films had been released one a year for a few years but, following on from one of the worst Star Wars movies ever made, aka The Last Jedi (reviewed here), audience enthusiasm was at an all time low so, yeah, I would have thought common sense might have told you not to release another Star Wars movie just a short five months after that one. I think anything in the brand released then would have met with the same financial ambivalence, to be honest.

But, anyway, instead we have the new TV show which, I wasn’t that fussed about but, since the high quality of the first four episodes of The Book Of Boba Fett (reviewed here), I was actually slightly hopeful for it. Well, let me tell you that this series sees a return to the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi by none other than Obi Junior, Ewan McGregor himself, still trying to do an accent which gets close to Alec Guiness at times. So, yay, we have Ewan back and... that’s it really. His inclusion and acting in this is literally the only good thing about this show.

We also have Hayden Christensen back as Annakin Skywalker aka Darth Vader, giving the myth a bit of spin about how he feels he did kill himself (just to make the lie told by Alec Guiness in the original Star Wars - before it was even A New Hope - just that much lighter). We could have done without him, to be honest. A flashback to a training fight we never saw actually has Hayden looking much older than he did years after that fight would even have taken place and about the only good bit he did have was when he’s peeking out from behind Vader’s half shattered helmet.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Obi-Wan Kenobi has the title character being hunted by Sith-style inquisitors, highlighted by actress Moses Ingram as the one surviving ‘youngling’ from the retro fitted slaughter of all the kids by Annakin in Revenge Of The Sith (reviewed here) and, to do this, she kidnaps young Princess Leia as bate. So Obi-Wan has to leave Tatooine and relinquish his watchful eye on ‘young Skywalker’, left with the Lars family, to go and rescue her in six episodes of mayhem which almost threaten to contradict the already told future continuity of the franchise and, as my friend correctly identified, it really didn’t need to be made. It’s just a piece of padding to get viewers to Disney+ at this point. I mean, to be fair, most things don’t need to be made but this one is just another exercise of filling in gaps that nobody needed filled and, to boot, doing it in such a careful way to not try and change too much about the final destination that, it doesn’t actually add anything to the canon. It’s like it’s redundant even before it gets out of the starting gate.

I started off quite intrigued because Kenobi’s life on Tatooine, as we see how he’s been living, is actually quite interesting... but he’s soon off on an adventure and all the good work done in the opening half an hour or so is immediately blown out of the water. He’s off on his space romp but, somehow, manages to bring none of the gleeful optimism of the Kenobi character as seen in the prequel trilogy. You can kinda understand why, perhaps but, then think of the carefree but confident character as portrayed by Guiness, which only takes place around ten years after this story... and you can see the mismatch.

And, while I’m on the subject, yeah McGregor is totally the right age to play this character at this point but... one wonders how he gets from looking like someone who still looks in his 30s here... to 60+ Alec Guiness in just ten short years. Blimey, those Tatooine summers must be really hard on the body.

There are also some token cameos thrown in, such as the return of Emperor Palpatine and, bizarrely, a really unnecessary and ‘definitely looking like it was just tagged on with no thought of actually meaning anything’, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance from Liam Neeson as the force ghost of Qui-Gon.

Despite all this, though, the show does have a few interesting moments such as the brief humanising of Darth Vader (which completely compromises his effectiveness as a villain in the later films, to be honest) but they struggle to find a solution to the biggest problem with the show and the beautiful legacy that Star Wars once was. Namely that Obi-Wan Kenobi is a really dull, ineffective and, I dunno, almost ‘by the numbers’ attempt to cash in on a series of films which were very special and inspirational to people both in the 1970s and the 1990s. The light seems to have faded much faster from the franchise than even I expected it to do when Lucas sold it on to Disney and, to be honest, I really wasn’t expecting Disney to be able to handle what they’d acquired that well but... yeah, the Star Wars brand no longer sparks an ‘Ooh’ of anticipation when I hear that something new is in the works. Now I just shake my fist at the moon and yell for Disney to let it die a more dignified death, to be honest. Can’t recommend this one but, you know, Ewan McGregor is always pretty watchable.

Expend4bles

Expend Thy Foibles
While Ye May

Expend4bles
aka The Expendables 4
Directed by Scott Waugh
USA Millennium Films 2023
UK cinema release print.

Warning: I’ve tried to write this with no spoilers but the way I try to dance around a certain scene might give things away when you see the movie... although you’ll probably figure that one out long before it’s revealed anyway.

Well now... I was really looking forward to seeing the fourth in The Expendables franchise, known at present by the silly title Expend4bles although, I notice on the IMDB they’ve already changed the listing to The Expendables 4 so, maybe the not-so-hidden numeral in the title is just for us audiences in the UK. However, the film has had a lot of bad word of mouth on Twitter and one of my favourite critics, Mark Kermode (the only person I know who, like me, loved Meg 2 - The Trench, reviewed here) really shredded it, citing a bad script and some terrible and confusing action editing... I’ll address all that in a minute but, well, let me say just this up front...

I loved Expend4bles right from the start and kept waiting and waiting for it to go sour on me... and kept waiting... and kept waiting. Heck... I waited until the very end for the movie to start becoming unwatchable and it never did. I had a blast with this movie.

Now, I quite liked the previous films in The Expendables franchise, it has to be said. I thought the first one was great and I liked the second one even more. The third movie would have topped them all except, the violence was deliberately watered down and, well, it was brilliant apart from having the edge taken off of it. Well the producers of this one took note of the audience reaction to the toned down viscera of the third and have brought it back for this fourth installment. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not talking Rambo IV levels of violence here but it’s not backing away from it either... to the point where the marketing for the film, at least in one of the US trailers, has used it as a selling point about how the filmmakers have listened to the audience and have loaded this one with the expected levels of violence. It’s maybe less than I was expecting but it’s appropriate to the kinds of violence depicted so, I’m certainly not complaining.

Okay, we have some of the old gang here who are now in all four films to date... Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren and Randy Couture, all doing their thing and acting the heck out of this. It’s broad acting but, it’s just right for the kind of film it is and I didn’t see anything in here which differed from the level of the performances in the previous movies. They’re doing what they do best and, guess what? They’re doing it well.

They’re joined by a bunch of newcomers, of varying ages and generations, most notably Megan Fox (who maybe seems a little too glamorous even in her fighty/stabby scenes but, again, I’m not complaining), Levy Tran (I could have done with more of her character in this), the brilliant Iko Uwais (from The Raid movies), the amazing Tony Jaa (who was maybe a little wasted, there should have been more action scenes with him in this, I think), 50 Cent, Andy Garcia and, in a strange role in terms of... let’s call it meta-continuity... Jacob Scipio. Now I’m pretty sure Antonio Banderas was probably asked to come back from his stint on the third movie and that this script probably had his character written in on an earlier draft. Instead, we have Scipio playing, unless I misheard, the son of Banderas’ character in the third movie... playing this character in exactly the same way as that original character would and serving exactly the same function in the group so... yeah, sometimes I believe you can see the history of the origin of a film hidden within its final release print and, I suspect this is one such occasion.

Okay, so the film starts off with a double bang... with an attack on an army of bad guys from a different army of bad guys headed up by Iko Uwais... followed by another scene featuring Stallone and Statham doing their ‘banter and action’ thing back in their home town (following Megan Fox dumping Statham’s character but, don’t worry, she’ll be back). We then, post titles, we get the group sent on a mission colliding with the first part of the pre-credits and, somewhat in Expendables fashion, the mission ends in failure and... well, something happens which affects the course of the rest of the movie. Kinda. I’ll try and address that without spoiling it soon. The rest of the film is about finding out the identity of an old enemy of Stallone’s Barney character, who seems to be tied up in the ongoing plot about stealing detonators to nuke part of Russia and make it look like the US has done it. It’s also a revenge mission... kinda.

Anyway, let me address the main criticisms of the film first. No, it isn’t terribly written. Some of the dialogue is, indeed, not to my taste but it’s all fairly appropriate to the characters saying some of these lines and, generally, I had no real problems with it.

Now, about that action editing. Yes, it’s fast and furious in its cutting but, surprisingly, it in no way gets confusing and I found I could follow the flow of it perfectly. And I say that as someone who can get easily confused by modern action editing. Frankly, there’s a lot worse out there. I could think of several slices of Michael Bayhem and various other action movies where these kinds of sequences... which are, after all, the bread and butter of such films... are just completely incomprehensible. Not so on this movie, for sure... again, I followed it fine.

My only slight problem was that there are no surprises in the movie. That ‘thing’ they do at the start of the film which I’m trying very hard not to spoil here was questionable in the first place... especially when you see the state that the ‘thing’ is left in. After a while, because the movie plays that sequence very close to its chest... I was almost convinced that they had done... ‘the thing’ after all but, no, I was right to trust my instincts. The thing is redacted by the end of the movie in no uncertain terms and is timed as a reveal in exactly the kind of deus ex machina way you would expect. Secondly, the other so called twist of the movie, the identity of a certain person... well, let’s just say that this person was very easy to unmask as soon as a certain character was introduced. So no surprises there either.

So, yeah, the one weakness of the film is that the audience can see the so called twists coming from a long way off but, luckily, in this kind of film that makes no difference as it’s what the audience is kinda wanting to see, to be honest. So I’ll say it again... I had a great time with Expend4bles and will certainly be grabbing the Blu Ray when it comes out. While also looking for news of when Expend5bles goes into production... one can hope.

Crumbs

Trail At The
End Of The World

Crumbs
Spain/Ethiopia/Finland 2015
Directed by Miguel Llansó
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B
Second disc in Arrow’s Blu Ray set
of Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway

Warning: Very mild spoilers, of a sort, kind of...

Well this is a strange movie, I’m glad to say. I realised that Crumbs, the first feature by Miguel Llansó, was included on the second disc in Arrow’s presentation of Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway (the same director’s second movie). Being as I suspect that any reissue they do of this one will probably not include the Crumbs disc, I decided to watch the trailers for both movies to see if they were my kind of thing. Those two trailers were ticking all the right boxes and so I bought this limited edition version of the release while I still could. So glad I did.

The film starts off with the information that we are in a post-apocalyptic, future version of our world. A devastating war has left the remaining humans interested in surviving only for any kind of future generations. The population has dwindled to almost nothing and a few people are scattered in this landscape, trying to just enjoy their days and maybe find some meaning.

Not that meaning is in any way forthcoming in this surrealist melange of broken people and the lionisation of ancient artefacts. The back story, which is in itself a quote from something else, seems to be a frame to hang together some almost logical story beats into something which, in all honesty, defines categorisation and takes you to a point, perhaps, where the attempt to find something more clearly defined in the story content might leave you clutching at straws... or at the very least clutching at various pop culture objects in an attempt to make sense of it all.

We have two main protagonists in this movie, which is almost a surrealist road movie in some ways, although the quest which seems somewhat central to the future of the two is cross cut with the incidents which make up the days of one of the two who is left behind, waiting for her man to return. These two are Candy, a hunchbacked person of small stature played by Daniel Tadesse and Birdy, played by Selam Tesfayie. Candy spends his days scavenging the wasteland for artefacts which Birdy can use in her found sculptural art works.

However, the spaceship left over, apparently, from the war... which hovers in the skies all day and night and has a large arm with a giant hand coming out of the top of it... has started to show signs of activity. Candy notices that a version of Santa Claus is living in the underside of the machine in the bowling alley (which keeps activating by itself) so he goes on a journey to track down Santa so he can get his wish for him and Birdy, reserving a seat on the spaceship before it takes off. On his way he encounters a mouse masked Nazi, a horse backed bandit, a train driver and various other people and objects such as the local witch, played by Shitaye Abraha, who gives him a clue as to where to find Santa. Of course, when he finds Santa and confronts him in his deserted, lion decorated theme park, Candy has to peel off his clothes and reveal that he is really Superman... but this doesn’t prevent Santa Claus from hitting him with a bicycle. Of course, this encounter is watched by Birdy as she looks through the mechanism of the bowling alley.

And it’s an interesting and certainly entertaining movie. The pacing is very slow and the ponderous establishing shots of the colourful landscapes and locations in deep focus are absolutely beautiful. There are some amazing little sequences too. For instance, a local ‘fence’ character buys the ancient artefacts found by various scavengers, as they have become valuable currency in this dwindling world. Artefacts such as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle amulet, a plastic Max Steel sword (which Birdy gives to Candy to protect him) or a vinyl copy of Michael Jackson’s Dangerous album. A little while after such artefacts are found or lost, there is a beautiful sequence of each artefact spinning in slow motion in space, as the fence mis-identifies and mis-explains the history of the object in question.

If you do want to impose some meaning on the film then a sequence of ‘mistaken identity’ when Candy goes into a deserted cinema which has been showing the same movie non-stop for the last 40 years (it’s the so terrible it's good Turkish Superman, which I have seen and own and, yeah, perhaps one day I’ll review it for this blog). In a scene a little later, he is seen throwing away his Superman suit and it gives you pause for thought on the true history of the character, who has been telling everyone he is an alien trying to get back to the spaceship with his lover.

And that’s that. Crumbs is a wonderful surrealist movie with a certain level of emotional atmosphere to it, in spite of the way the ideas and scenes are threaded together in an almost throw away but mesmerising fashion. Recommended for anyone who is interested in the art of cinema, for sure. Oh... and if you want to find out the final fate of the spaceship, stick around until about half way through the end credits.

Doctor Who - The Crusades

Saladin Days

Doctor Who - The Crusades
Airdate: 27th March - 17th April 1965
BBC 1 - Region B Blu Ray
Four Episodes including two reconstructions

Oh dear... well, there was a reason why the BBC chose Series 2 for the debut Blu Ray collection of William Hartnell’s Doctor (hopefully it won’t be the last). The sixth story of the nine serials which comprise series 2, The Crusades, has two episodes ‘missing presumed wiped’ (as the saying goes), making this season the most complete of this era’s Doctor Who stories. And this one, for me, was a hard watch for various reasons.

Notable things include a famous actor and actress in key roles. So joining the crew of the TARDIS... Bill Hartnell as The Doctor, William Russell as Ian Chesterton, Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright and Maureen O’Brien as Vicki... are Julian Glover as Richard The Lionheart and Jean Marsh as his sister Joanna. The whole tale takes place in Palestine during Richard’s crusades and it’s actually quite boring... at least it was for me... playing around with political intrigue and cowtowing to regal entitlement (I really have no love of positions of authority, it has to be said).

Another interesting thing was, once again, seeing William Hartnell getting in on the action for a little bit of the first episode. Indeed, he knocks a Saracen Warrior unconscious and even attempts to indulge in some swordplay. Then we get what seems to have become a standard formula for the show, the TARDIS crew get divided with Barbara captured by Saladin, Ian (or Sir Ian as he is to become after King Richard knights him) going after her and getting into his own trouble... while The Doctor and Vicki keep themselves close to the King to try and assure things go smoothly for everyone. Which it decidedly doesn’t and the four travellers barely escape with their lives at the end of the fourth episode, which itself cliffhangers into the next story arc.

And, yeah, the overly talkie script, definitely took on the original mission statement of the show, to teach kids about history, is a hard slog but it’s proven even harder by the BBC’s decision to not do what they’ve been doing a lot of recently, for missing episodes... in that they have not commissioned new animations to go with the surviving soundtracks. Instead, they’ve fallen back on something they used to do which is to have the sound of the episode play while still photographs from the production are manipulated, to give a sense of what the accompanying visuals would have been.

Now, I’m not knocking that their is a certain amount of creative thought gone into the way the still photographs are manipulated. For example, different characters will be highlighted in close ups as they speak to mimic the cinematic syntax of cross cutting between two or more people in a conversation. However, it would, I think, be true to say that this does nothing to lift the story and, since it’s a relatively dull story anyway, the decision not to add animation is a poor one. Especially since, I suspect, it all boiled down to the BBC being too cheap to commission the animation of a mere two episodes. So, yeah, it certainly doesn’t do it any favours.

And I really don’t have much else to say about this one, I’m afraid. The novelisation, Doctor Who And The Crusaders by David Whitaker (who added a fair amount of stuff not seen in his serial from the same year) was the second novel to be released (after Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks) and also the last to be released until Target rereleased these first two, with this as their third, in 1973 (immediately following their first original release, Doctor Who And The Zarbi, based on the previous serial The Web Planet, reviewed here). I don’t remember much about it but I would certainly have enjoyed reading this one a lot more than the experience of finally watching it, I can tell you that. I suspect this is the one real weak link in this Blu Ray set and it’s telling that the BBC didn’t subject any of their special guests to have to slog their way through this one... it’s one of the few discs in the set which doesn’t have a Behind The Sofa extra. So, yeah, that probably says it all and I certainly wouldn’t recommend this story to anyone I know but, still, I’m very glad to have it and have the opportunity to finally see it, that’s for sure. Just wish they’d at least coughed up a little cash to animate episodes 2 and 4. And so onto The Space Museum... which I confess I’m looking forward to much more.

Play Misty For Me

Fatal Distraction

Play Misty For Me
USA 1971 Directed by Clint Eastwood
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

You know, I hadn’t seen this movie since I watched it on TV in the late 1970s. I don’t know why I never revisited before now because my impressions of it as a 9 or 10 year old were that it was a well made movie, despite my young reservations that it wouldn’t be because it was being directed by the main lead. So I remembered liking this one, even though I find Eastwood a bit hit and miss in terms of movies he appears in and also as a director. So it was a no brainer when I saw the Blu Ray going for £4 a few years back in Fopp records, for me to pick this one up and add it to the ‘to be watched’ pile.

Play Misty For Me was Eastwood’s directorial debut. He’s helmed a fair few movies now as opposed to just starring in them (and staring in them), although obviously not as many as he’s acted in for sure. This one starts off very strongly with an overhead, helicopter tracking shot which was something which became a cliché in 1970s and 80s cinema but this one is a little different because it starts out at the sea and creeps up on some cliffs to set up an establishing shot of Eastwood outside a cliff-side apartment. We join him briefly looking for someone who isn’t around and then he gets into his open top car and shots of him driving are intercut with the return of the overhead helicopter shot tracking his progress into the small town of Carmel-By-The-Sea (where Eastwood, many years later, would become Mayor). The music is jazzy and cool and there’s a wonderful looking font in bright green which really gives the titles a distinctive ‘old Hollywood’ feel... more on that atmosphere later.

He then turns up and takes over from his friend and co-worker as the local radio DJ. It’s established from early on that one of his callers is known for ringing up and asking him to “Play Misty for me”, at which point he obliges by playing Errol Garner’s recording. So the source of all his troubles in the movie is set up quite early on. Very soon after, he goes to his local bar, which features director Don Siegel (who, directed Eastwood in various movies including Dirty Harry and who also helmed the classic, original version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, which I reviewed here) as the bar tender. A girl is waiting at the bar who Dave, that’s Eastwood’s character, is told is impossible to pick up. So Dave and the bartender play this wonderful, completely made up, ridiculous game which is intended to spark interest in those watching. The rules of the game are that when an onlooking girl has joined Dave for a drink, he wins. It’s a fun sequence but the character needn’t have bothered because, as it transpires later, the woman waiting is the ‘Misty’ girl and she was there specifically to meet him and try to win his heart and attention. The overbearing fan is called Evelyn and she’s played here extremely well by Jessica Walter. After Eastwood’s character sleeps with her in a ‘casual’ manner, she suddenly becomes his clutching, stifling, true love... which is awkward for Eastwood, he is trying to reignite the flames with his recent ex-girlfriend Tobie, played here by Donna Mills.

From here on things get dark, as Dave can’t shake Evelyn’s persistent attentions and people get injured or killed, not to mention a scene where Evelyn deliberately slits both her own wrists so Dave won’t send her away and make good on his date with Tobie. If you’re wondering if this feels a little familiar then, yes, I remember going to see a 1980s movie called Fatal Attraction which was, pretty much, the same movie in different clothes. I think a few films have used this as a template now but I think this is probably the strongest version of this kind of tale I’ve seen. At least from the United States.

Eastwood does really well in this, I have to say. Not just as an actor, which you kind of expect by this point and he’s got a large, screen presence... but as a director. This is not in any way a stumbling effort, this is a very strong directorial piece and I can see why he was able to carry on directing stuff. Although there’s no one or two things which are absolutely stand out on this, it isn’t shabbily done and all the compositions are cleanly framed with people meticulously placed within the design. Because of this and combined with the jazzy soundtrack, the film almost feels like a throwback to a more ‘classic Hollywood’ time. I already mentioned the font used on the opening credits and that just provides another layer to the veneer of 1950s style to the proceedings. This one almost feels like what Hitchcock might have done with the same material ten or fifteen years prior to the release of this movie. Also, Eastwood shot the whole thing in a month and considerably under budget, is my understanding.

While Eastwood is pretty good in the role of DJ Dave, Jessica Walter’s performance in this is just amazing. She manages to ‘play crazy’ really well, coming off as normal a lot of the time at first but giving tell tale moments of psychopathic behaviour from very early on which blossom into full scale ‘murder maven’ by about three quarters of the way through. I’d say a lot of the movie is hinging on this performance work and she really is pitch perfect through this. The audience learns to be wary of her a lot quicker than Eastwood’s character does, I would say. She makes a fine nutter (sorry, meant to say she makes a fine sufferer of Borderline Personality Disorder).

If I had one negative thing I could possibly say that there’s a part of the movie, about three quarters of the way through when Evelyn has been arrested and taken into custody for psychiatric treatment, where the movie just kinda stops dead for a while. This involves a long, poetic love scene of Eastwood and Donna Mills making love in the forest (nowadays we’d call it dogging) set to a Roberta Flack recording of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face which, is okay... but then the film goes ito an extended sequence of various bands playing their sets at the Monterey Jazz Festival where Dave and his fellow DJ take their gals, which leaves a little clue as to the twist awaiting Eastwood’s character towards the end of the movie but, it’s mostly just people watching and enjoying the music as the camera explores the crowd.

Now, I was puzzled as to why this extended ‘break’ from the movie was here to be honest and I realise, on reflection, that this scene does serve an important purpose and I also suspect it might have been added at some stage as a ‘rescue’ moment. You see, the scenes after Evelyn has been arrested make up the denouement of the movie and can only take place once Evelyn has been discharged from psychiatric observation. If that had followed in sequence directly after her arrest or even after the love scene, the audience would possibly think the pacing of the movie was a little too fast to get there, is my guess. I think this long pause in the story is a deliberate thing to give the audience a feeling of some considerable time having passed, to make the final set pieces arrive at a more natural point in the narrative. So keeping the right tone almost by stealth, as it were. It might even have been added after a rough cut of the rushes highlighted this problem for all I know. And I don’t know... that’s for sure. But looking back on it, it really works for the film so... yeah, Eastwood really seemed to know what he was doing here.

And that’s my main take away from the movie I think. With Play Misty For Me, Eastwood proved, in no uncertain terms, that he was just as good behind a camera as he is in front of it. It’s a brilliant movie and one I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to anyone into the technical art of film. I possibly prefer his movie The Eiger Sanction to this one but Play Misty For Me is phenomenal and I hope they show this one in film school. It’s a neatly put together movie and I think the various imitations of it over the years, like the aforementioned Fatal Attraction, are a testament to the power of this one. Definitely a highlight of Eastwood’s long career, as far as I’m concerned.

Challenge Of The Masters

One Kick Pony

Challenge Of The Masters
aka Liu A-Cai yu Huang Fei-Hong
Hong Kong 1976
Directed by Chia-Liang Liu
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, so the sixth entry in the wonderful Arrow Blu Ray box set ShawScope Volume One is Challenge Of The Masters and it’s a pretty good, fairly simple movie. It starts off with a quite striking opening title sequence with Kuan Tai Chen as Master Lu Ah Tsai and a young Chia-Hui Liu (aka Gordon Liu) as the teenaged version of famous Chinese martial artist Huang Fei Hung... going through various training routines on a white background with each other. Liu’s various poses of energetic kung fu are used as movements to herald in the on-screen credits as the two dance around against big Chinese letter forms, the meaning of which are sadly untranslated on the subtitles... perhaps they make up the title of the movie.

Gordon Liu, of course, has had a very long career and, to the person on the street in the Western world he would perhaps be best known (though not by name, I suspect) as the person who played both Johnny Mo, the bald headed leader of The Crazy 88 in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volume One and Pai Mei in Kill Bill Volume Two (a character he’d fought against a few times, I believe, in various films over the years). The person he’s playing here, Huang Fei Hung, in a film which starts off at the Pai Competition in the Year Of The Wood Rat, before he learned martial arts (that’s what this story is about) has possibly been played on film more than any other character. Indeed, Kwan Tak-hing apparently played him at least 77 times in the years between 1949 and 1981. Even some of the music needle dropped into this Shaw Brothers production is a theme associated with the character from some of these films and it was apparently written into the score of one of Jet Li’s versions of the character in Once Upon A Time In China (which I guess I need to grab hold of and watch at some point now).

The film itself is, as I said, very simple in its plot. It revolves around a martial arts competition where people scrabble for Pai’s (which  in this film take the form of a bunch of scrolls) fired out from fireworks and whoever’s team take one or more home, shows that they are good at martial arts (if I’m understanding this rugger scrum of a tournament correctly). Hung’s dad will not teach him martial arts but, after he accidentally causes one of his fellow pupils to be injured ,saving him from a villanous kung fu school who pick fights with them and don’t want them to have any Pai’s, his father’s former master, Lu Ah Tsai, takes him on and trains him up for a couple of years. 

Meanwhile, another friend of the family, a police officer who has come to the town to find a murderous thief, finds said thief being sheltered by the rival gang. The thief is a master of the ‘sharp kick’ deadly kung fu technique and, with the assistance of his lethal, metal toe caps, he kung fu kicks the officer to death. Thus more motivation is built for Hung to finish his training so he can take on the villain (who is played here by the film’s director Chia-Liang Liu) and then compete for Pai’s in the next tournament. All goes to plan and things play out the way you would expect them to, with Hung mastering the fighting arts but also the arts of diplomacy and compassion, to end up with the two fighting schools reaching a peaceful co-existence together.

And, yeah, it’s the usual thing of watching human dynamo’s leaping, punching and kicking on screen at a fairly fast pace and its all good fun. Interestingly, the master teaches Hung using the style of The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (which is another film I need to get hold of at some point), with the old ‘tracing a circle around increasingly diminishing sizes of easily breakable China to develop the reflexes’ ploy and, at one point, uses one of the Wooden Men of Shaolin Alley fighting pole swinging machines, which he names as such as coming from the Shaolin Temple (indeed, this is presumably one of the same props from the 1976 film Shaolin Temple from Shaw Brothers, reviewed by me here).

As usual, asides from the obvious needle drop issues, the film has fairly high production values and the quick shooting schedules and restraints are not in evidence in the film on a visual level for the audience to notice... it looks great. Of interest to me was the fact that one of the characters uses a transparent Sesame Seed oil to make himself slippery in a bid to be able to squelch out from the grasp of his opponents in the Pai contest. I can only assume that this may be the origin/inspiration behind the oiled up fight featuring Jason Statham in the first of The Transporter movies.

So yeah, Challenge Of The Masters is pretty much business as usual for the Shaw Brothers in that it’s a tightly paced mix of kung fu action, humbling training exercises and Eastern philosophy leading to forgiveness and peace over violence. In other words, an entertaining production which is nicely put together. Another winner in my book.

The Bone Hacker

Hacking Restraint

The Bone Hacker
by Kathy Reichs
Simon & Schuster
ISBN 9781398510838

Warning: Some spoilers in here for sure.

So the latest thriller by Kathy Reichs... my once regular Christmas read, now my regular August holiday read... is The Bone Hacker, the latest in a long line of novels featuring her forensic anthropologist and general bone expert Dr. Temperance Brennan. The version of the character to not be confused with the other incarnation of Temperance Brennan on the TV show Bones, who is based as much on Reichs herself as the Tempe in the books, with the two characters seeming to me to be like chalk and cheese.

In this one, everyone’s favourite bone lady finds herself away from her boyfriend Andrew Ryan and investigating some skeletons ‘as a favour’, which possibly connects to a case she is working on, in the Turks & Caicos Islands. But when the lady detective who asks for her help is found murdered halfway through the investigation, she finds herself working with another detective on the case which, at the end of the day, leads to something else again. All I will say in that regard is that I hope this is not the last time we see the character, nicknamed by his colleagues as... The Monk.

This one is another roaring thriller which travels at a rate of knots and was over and done with very quickly. As in, the gaps between the few times I could actually put it down were few and far between. And I think part of that ease of read and heavy pacing is because, like the best of the stories in the classic pulp tradition... of which I count pretty much all contemporary genre fiction... is because the books have become a little formulaic but, this is in no way a bad thing and its just a symptom, I would guess, of Reichs using the techniques that work for her to tell her stories in as quick and exciting a way as possible.

For example, she is still very much using that 1930s pulp magazine style mini-cliff hanger at the end of each chapter to move you speedily into the next to find out... what just happened. Usually it’s a statement of devastation or exclamation at some detail of the case which won’t be revealed to the reader until sometime within the next chapter... such as “His next statement shocked me.” And occasionally it’s a heavy piece of foreshadowing, perhaps the most extreme example would be the chapter that ends... “Musgrove didn’t make that meeting. By Saturday she was dead.” But, you know, it works so... no complaints here.

One thing I didn’t expect was a whole disaster movie style action sequence at the start of the novel, acting much like a pre-credits sequence in a movie, where Tempe, Ryan and a couple of their friends are very much in peril, in a boat caught in a mini hurricane with no life jackets and facing possible death. Yeah, okay, that had my attention and worked pretty well, I would say.

Other notes on this one would be... I was surprised that Tempe didn’t get The Monk’s reference to Rin Tin Tin at one point... Reichs obviously does because she came up with it but it always gives me pause for thought when the character deviates in knowledge from the writer. Another thing that kept me reading is the humour, such as the name of a boat being Cod Bless Us although, it has to be said, there was considerably less eye rolling on Tempe’s part in this book (maybe only three or four times as opposed to gazillions).

Either way though, when a writer uses quality sentences like, “The reprimand sent my molars reaching for each other.” then I’m always going to be hooked by the cleverness and confidence of the writer in charge of the story, for sure. And, I was surprised by the lack of reference to the other stories... I always say start off with the first book in a series and work your way up but, as far as The Bone Hacker goes, if you really wanted to, you could probably jump on board with this one without needing to know the background history of the characters, for sure.

Either way, if you’re an old pro at Temperance Brennan or a newcomer alike, I’ve got nothing but good things to say about this one, with my only caveat being that I recognised a certain cyber attack on one of the main characters around halfway through, a very long time before it was revealed as such at the end of the novel. But she took me by surprise in other areas so, all good as far as I’m concerned. Another great Tempe mystery and I’m already looking forward to next year’s novel. Keep ‘em coming.

The Nun II

Nuns Upon
A Time

The Nun II
Directed by Michael Chaves
UK/USA Warner Bros
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Some spoilerish territory covered.

I liked The Nun (reviewed here) and thought critics were way too harsh about that movie. It played like a horror romp rather than an unsettling or creepy movie... I think at the time I compared to it a late 1960s/early 1970s Hammer horror movie but with added jump scares and, yeah, I found it to be a lot of fun. So, I was looking forward to The Nun II until I heard a review by one of the more likeable UK critics on a podcast and... he kind of slated it. So, ultimately, I was going in with low expectations.

So I was pleased that, once again, I really liked this sequel and would love to see more from this set of characters. And, being as it’s part of The Conjuring Universe, I think there could well be chance of that happening at some point. Although, in terms of surprises, that’s also a double edged sword... yeah, I’ll get to that in a minute.

Set four years after the events in the first Nun film, in the 1950s, his one deals with the two human survivors from the first one... Sister Irene (played again by Taissa Farmiga, real life younger sister of Vera Farmiga, who plays Lorraine Warren in the main strand of Conjuring films)... and Jonas Bloquet returns as Maurice, who has ‘the nun’ inside him still as a demonic possession (not a spoiler if you remember some of the opening scenes in the first Conjuring movie). And then, of course, there’s Bonnie Aarons as the demonic nun herself, reprising her role from The Conjuring 2 - the Devil Made Me Do it (reviewed here), Annabelle: Creation (reviewed by me here) and, of course, The Nun.

This one see Sister Irene sent on a mission by the church who are trying to track the nun as she starts killing people off in certain countries and Irene, along with her new sidekick Sister Debra (payed by Storm Reid), has to figure out how to catch up with ‘the nun’ until they finally twig that Maurice is taking odd jobs at certain places where gruesome, demonic deaths are now occurring... not that Maurice is even aware he’s brought ‘the nun’ with him, of course.

Okay, so here’s the thing. I can understand why certain critics got bored with The Nun II because it has a very steady pacing of nundemonium set pieces with very little pause between each new set of scares. And it is still very much a ‘jump scare’ kind of movie, for sure. And, it’s not subtle... the demon goes straight for the throat each time, so to speak, wasting no time in killing off ‘persons of interest’ to it in no uncertain terms. Which, actually, in a way I found quite refreshing. There aren’t that many ‘you got a fright and I’m coming back to do that again to you later’ scenes... well, okay there are but there are a lot of ‘nun goes kill crazy and finish her enemies off quick’ scenes intermingled with them so, you really don’t know which, if any, of the characters is going to be picked on for a solid kill from one scene to the next. Although it does keep key characters alive for this one.

And, midst all the ‘camera keeping the audience focused on dead areas of the screen so it can frighten them from somewhere else’ mentality of the movie, which to be fair is standard for modern horror movies, there are also some nice ideas in here such as the demon nun casting her image in things. Two notable examples of this are... firstly, when she manifests as a dirty patch in some wallpaper. Despite grumbling critics, it doesn’t go on forever and, if anything, it maybe is a nice shout back to the original 1963 version of The Haunting (reviewed here) in terms of ‘haunted wallpaper’ but, let’s face it, it’s never going to be as unsettling as that highlight moment of the Robert Wise movie.

Secondly, there’s an absolutely amazing sequence when Irene finds herself in a back alley confronted by a big magazine stand rack. The pages on all the magazines keep turning in unison (at least fifty of them, I reckon) showing disturbing faces until finally, when all the pages come to rest, they make up a big image of the demonic nun. Now, admittedly, the scene then goes on to an attempt to misdirect the audience really poorly and obviously to get the jump scare but, that’s okay because, even though I could figure out exactly where the scare would be coming from and when, I still jumped at it so, yeah, it’s well done.

The one downside to the movie is that, if you remember the scene in the original Conjuring movie, you’ll know a specific character definitely can’t be killed off in this one... so it means there’s less surprise by the point when, without that baggage, you would expect them to die. So, yeah, a bit of a shame but, continuity should always win with this kind of thing, for sure. Incidentally, fans of that first movie may want to stick around for a mid-post credits scene in this one which features a nice cameo appearance.

All said and done, however, the film does what the first one did and throws a lot of demonic mayhem at the audience, literally including a few scenes with a terrifying goat demon representation of the devil chasing... well, galloping loudly... after everyone. And it’s a really good bit of creature design, I would say. It put me in mind of one of the demons manifested in the wonderful Hammer film The Devil Rides Out (review coming soonish) and one wonders how good a modern day adapation of that particular book would be.  

And on hand, through it all, we have Marco Beltrami’s excellent score helping lift the ‘action horror’ element and contributing to, what for me is, a pretty fun time at the cinema. So, yeah, don’t use this as a jump on movie, for sure but, my verdict on The Nun II would be... a worthy successor to the first movie and one I would recommend to horror fans especially. I had a great time with this one and will hopefully be picking up the Blu Ray when it hits the retail shelves, for sure.