Resident Evil - Welcome To Racoon City

Valentine’s Knight

Resident Evil
Welcome To Racoon City
Germany/Canada 2021
Directed by Johannes Roberts
Sony Pictures

I’ve got quite a lot of time for the previous live action franchise based on the Resident Evil computer games, I have to say. However, they’re not sacred to me, perhaps primarily because they let me down somewhat. The second of the six was quite disappointing but the third, fourth and fifth ones were all, like the original movie, way better than that. Alas, the sixth and final one was a real franchise killer in that the plot twist, which would have been obvious in any film to spot, completely betrayed the continuity of the preceding five films and basically contradicted the motivation behind the events of the second movie. Thereby rendering both it and the whole franchise suddenly useless and nonsensical. Yeah, I think there are a lot of fans of the franchise that went completely nuts at how bizarrely, badly written the storyline of the sixth part was. You can read my reviews of those original six films here, here, here and here.

So, it’s time for a reboot with Resident Evil - Welcome To Racooon City. A reboot that was announced, I should probably add, while the sixth film was still playing in cinemas. So, yeah... I guess they knew it was a franchise killer even then.  

With this one, director Johannes Roberts takes it back to the roots of the game. As in, it’s a return to the horror elements that the early games in the series on which this was based are best known for. The original film series had taken a few key elements from the original stories in the games, kept the zombie body count element and then pushed it to its logical point... or rather, one of a couple of logical points. That is, it turned it into very much an action franchise with big guns and explosions and a few added horror elements. And I was fine with that and I guess a lot of other people must have been also... considering it ran for six movies.

With Welcome To Racoon City though, while there are certainly some big explosions and scenes of rat-a-tat-tat gunplay, for sure, it’s mainly not an action picture. Instead, the director slows things down and moves the camera around in a more exploratory manner, allowing the creepy atmosphere of a mostly deserted city (more like a small town, actually, I would say) to come forth. This one is obviously based on the first two games and, as such (and almost coincidentally, it seems to me), it also takes elements from the first two movies. So, the mansion house which leads into the underground Umbrella Corp complex is included, mostly in the final third of the picture and there’s a lot of just trying to survive the decaying town of Racoon City, as the population slowly ‘go zombie’ with the T-virus they’ve been infected with.

The cast of characters including many favourites from the various games such as Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen), Chris Redfield (Robbie Amell), Claire Redfield (played by one of my favourite up and coming genre actresses Kaya Scodelario), Wesker (Tom Hopper) and Leon Kenedy (Avan Jogia) are all cool and have good chemistry together, I think. Also, the creature effects in this one are handled a lot better than in, say, the second Resident Evil movie, where one of the big ‘man in suit’ creations was a huge let down.

And there’s some nice cinematography with some much brighter colours which really work in the darkness (the film is pretty much all set over one night) with occasional more subtle palettes sneaking in if a scene calls for it. This is coupled with some slower paced, leisurely camera movement and a director and DP who know how to calm things down to not break the atmosphere. For instance, sometimes they will wait for a character who is out of focus to wander into the focus of a shot rather than bring the camera in straight away to sharp focus on them, which is nice. Also, the use of verticals to separate screen elements is something this director uses from time to time with a nice bold choice of leaving two thirds of the frame in darkness around a doorway, for example, to focus the collective eye of the audience where he wants it, by deliberately withholding the detail of the periphery. Nice.

Another thing he does... and I personally first became conscious of this technique when I first saw Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho... is to give time checks to the audience with some very specific times as the movie progresses. There are a few reasons for this kind of tactic but the documentary feel that Hitchcock was going for is definitely one of them. By that I mean that telling us the time is 11.17pm subconsciously fixes the time frame in your head as being something real and therefore more believable, because, otherwise, you’d round it up every time, right? The other thing this does in this specific film is ratchet up the tension because it’s established fairly early on in the picture that the Umbrella Corporation are going to destroy both their old labs and the entire town at 6am the next day. So, yeah, we keep getting time checks until, the last one of 5.59am suddenly ticks over on screen to the 6am deadline.

And, yeah, it all works. It’s not exactly a scary film but it is genuinely much more atmospheric than the previous films in the first series and it also brings in little elements from the early games like the zombie crows, which is nice. It’s also nice that it’s set on the 30th of September 1998, which is the same year I think the original game was first launched (I had a Playstation version of... I think it was Resident Evil 2 but, I wasn’t much good at solving the puzzles and got frustrated at the limited ammunition they gave you to get past zombies with). So there’s some nice moments of ‘old school’ technology such as Claire Redfield using a VHS machine or nice touches of humour when her brother asks her, “What the fuck’s a chat room?”.

And I have to say, although I don’t think it did very well at cinemas (well, gee, I guess you shouldn’t have released it during a pandemic guys... maybe just stop releasing films for five years until we’re out of this, the audience will still be there, if they didn’t die from the real life C Virus), I'd have to conclude that I really had a good time with Resident Evil - Welcome To Racoon City and I would certainly be up for a couple of sequels if somebody would green light those please. My only two complaints are that, a couple of the screen transitions seemed a little sloppy on their timing and, well, good lord people, how long does it take for a crack police team to realise you have to shoot a zombie in the head to kill it. Apparently forever, if you go by most of the characters here. But, yeah, those minor grumbles aside, I thought this slow burn of a movie was pretty great and a refreshing spin on the Resident Evil live action franchise. Fingers crossed for a sequel.

Abbott And Costello Meet The Mummy

Klaris Cliff

Abbott And Costello
Meet The Mummy
USA 1955
Directed by Charles Lamont
Universal Blu Ray Zone A

Abbott And Costello Meet The Mummy was the penultimate film that the two stars made together but the last one they made for Universal Pictures. They were still big stars enough, though, that when they are yelling each others names out through the picture, they are still yelling “Abbott” and “Costello”... even though, according to the end credits, they are playing characters with entirely different names.

The film is technically a continuation, in some respects, of the original Mummy franchise but, for some reason, the name of the title creature has been changed from Kharis as he was in the previous four films to Klaris in this movie (and is played by Eddie Parker, who used to be stunt double for Lon Chaney Jr when he was bandaged up as Kharis). Perhaps the background continuity to the other films in the series was not strong enough for writers to use the same character but, then again, this is The Mummy franchise we’re talking about. Any pretense of continuity from film to film stopped making sense long before 1955.

Anyhow, regardless of the title, Klaris the Mummy is actually only in it for a few minutes at the start of the picture and then for roughly the last ten minutes. All the rest of the screen action is taken up by Bud and Lou’s comedy shenanigans as they play two guys in Egypt who accidentally stumble on a double plot following a professor’s discovery of the tomb of Klaris. They get mistaken for the professor’s killers and also get on the wrong side of two different bad guy factions... one a nefarious woman called Madame Rontru (played by Marie Windsor) who wants the cursed medallion of the Mummy that Costello accidentally eats in a restaurant scene, which will lead her to the treasure of Klaris. And then there’s the leader of the followers of Klaris, who just needs everybody dead to the secrets of the mummy and to ensure its treasure are protected.

Anyway, even without the presence of Klaris for most of the movie, it’s a fine comedy vehicle for Bud and Lou and they do a lot of nice little sketches throughout. For example, there’s the usual buffoonery with Lou as he discovers both the living mummy and the dead professor but, every time he tries to show Bud, one or other of them has changed location and are no longer where he left them. There’s also a nice ‘lose the medallion’ sequence between Bud and Lou in a restaurant which is when Lou accidentally eats the all important medallion. And there’s a nice example of their classic comedy chemistry when word play around a pick and a shovel causes a lot of chaos.

I noticed that Lou is breaking the fourth wall even more here than in the last two pictures I saw with him in it and it’s very much a thing for getting the audience engaged in the pair’s routines. For instance, when he places the medallion as the top layer under the bun of a hamburger he makes a motion for the audience to be quiet so Bud doesn’t realise what is going on. It’s a nice touch and it seems to work really well for them.

The villains are a little nasty in some ways but it’s kinda telling that, when Klaris is no more and everyone is wondering what to do, Bud saves the day and gets all of them to work in collaboration in the next ‘get rich quick’ scheme. Which is a nice gesture and not something I remember seeing done too often during cinema’s golden era.

One nice thing was when I spotted a guy playing a newspaper reporter for about a minute near the start of the film. Well, not so much spotted as heard. The character is looking down for his shots and he has his hat pulled down pretty far but I thought I recognised the voice so I looked him up to make sure and, sure enough, the guy in question was, indeed, Donald Kerr in an uncredited role. That’s right, the guy who played the comic relief character of newspaper reporter Happy Hapgood in the Buster Crabbe serial Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars is once again playing a reporter in this movie.

Other than this, there’s nothing much more for me to say about Abbott And Costello Meet The Mummy other than there’s a nice, if predictable, running snake joke when Lou starts playing a specific musical instrument next to a basket. It’s an enjoyable romp which is a bit better, I think, than Abbott And Costello Meet The Invisible Man (reviewed here) but still not as strong as Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein (reviewed here). There are a couple of half hearted musical routines which threaten to stop it dead a few times but the comedy hijinks are eminently watchable and I’ll probably revisit this movie again in ten or so years time, I should think. Worth a look if you’re a lover of Abbott And Costello but, perhaps not an essential part of the classic Universal monsters canon.

Psychedelic Apes

Nuclear Dinos VS
Mushroom Deities

Psychedelic Apes -
From Parallel Universes to
Atomic Dinosaurs - The Weirdest
Theories of Science and History
by Alex Boese
Pan Books
ISBN: 9781509860524

Psychedelic Apes, advertised on the front of the book with the additional subtitle/strap line From Parallel Universes to Atomic Dinosaurs - The Weirdest Theories of Science and History, is one of those books I try and find every year which fulfils the criterion of a non-fiction book about something interesting that doesn’t have a filmic or comic book slant to it. Although, it has to be said, many of the theories which the book depicts in its entertaining fashion will be mostly taken, by the majority of readers, as not falling anywhere near the ‘non-fiction’ category either, I suspect. It is, as its cover spiel suggests, a look at some of the unorthodox and, therefore often entertaining, alternate theories put forward by scientists over the years. I think I saw this one fly by my Twitter timeline and, looking at it, the author Alex Boese has a few books on his CV, all with equally provocative titles which I shall probably have to look out for.

Okay... now I was pleasantly surprised when I started reading this, since I am inexplicably known to certain acquaintances as having somewhat unorthodox views about things myself, that Boese has really gone out of his way to not ridicule the various theories and hypotheses which he explores here. Instead... and he says as much in his introduction... he has allowed them room to breathe and brought in the arguments for and against the various ideas he’s chosen, out of the many wild theories that exist, treating them with a certain respect. In doing so, I actually found myself not only not being able to disprove many of the theories inherent in the book but, also, as I went along, began to have more of an understanding of certain branches of science. More on that in a minute but for now...

Following an introduction where, among other things, he makes clear to the reader what scientists mean by theories and hypotheses... one is supported by a set of evidence, the second is not (although I now believe, after having read this, that evidence may well be a subjective element of the equation). The book is nicely laid out in five big chapters called 1. Cosmological Conundrums, 2. A Pale Peculiar Dot, 3. It’s Alive, 4. The Rise Of The Psychedelic Ape and 5. Mushroom Gods And Phantom Time. Each chapter will then house a brief, one to two page introduction as to the thematic link of the chapter before then being split into seven subsections per chapter, each one detailing a theory in a few pages, most of which are doing exactly what it says on the tin, so to speak. However, one thing he also does is include one theory, in each chapter, which was ridiculed by the scientific community for many years/decades/centuries before certain articles of evidence (and perhaps fashion, who knows?) caused a major flip flop in thinking and those particular theories are now actually accepted as the true way of things.

So yeah, he covers quite ridiculous sounding ideas such as reality as a computer simulation, parallel universes (perhaps more popularly known these days, once again, as multiverses), an expanding planet Earth, the shadow world of hard to detect alien life forms on our planet, life on Mars, the ‘stoned ape’ theory (that argues quite credibly, in my opinion, that our hairy ancestors were driven by the ingestion of magic mushrooms which gave rise to humanity and various elements of an expanded mind such as speech), the systematic dumbing down of human intelligence from century to century (yeah, I think we can all see that one), the possibility that the dark ages didn’t actually exist, that Greek writer Homer was in fact a woman and that Christ was either Julius Caesar or, in one interesting theory, Jesus was actually a mushroom... among many others.

Perhaps my favourite one was an argument very hard to either prove or, indeed disprove, as it turns out, that certain dinosaurs did in fact have great intelligence and managed to wipe themselves out in a nuclear war. Yeah, this stuff sounds far fetched but, when you read why the people who explore these concepts (lots of these theories are come up with simultaneously by more than one person, often not in collusion), there are actually some very logical, sound basis for their conclusions.  

Now, okay, I found myself unable to argue with many of the theories on offer in here but, as various scientists have obviously argued vehemently against them... and considering they argued just as emphatically over the years against theories which they are now accepting as truth... I had to conclude that some of these theories were an actual possibility. Not only that, though... 

 As I was reading through it became abundantly clear just how many accepted ‘truths’ of science concerning history and the nature of our reality actually had as little or no evidence to support them either. My faith in science was completely rattled by this tome because it seems many of the theories we hold dear are just popular guesses. The fact that Boese pointed out that the entirety of chimpanzee history of the past is based on just three found teeth didn’t help restore any faith in the concept of scientific proof as I read through. Neither did his revelation (to me) that most of pre-history (and even closer history) is pieced together by guesses which are the equivalent of somebody trying to piece together the plot of a long lost movie with only a few frames of film to build up a picture from. It’s shaky at best and, frankly, it never seems to be at its best from what I can make out.

So yeah, all in all I’d have to conclude that Psychedelic Apes is a pretty entertaining but also somewhat enlightening, surprisingly. It’s not what I was expecting it to be and my already slightly open minded state is now permanently ajar for any rogue theory with any kind of corroboration which comes along, frankly. I can’t recommend this one enough, especially since it’s all done in ‘laymens’ terms and isn’t remotely clouded by scientific jargon or obstacles. I shall, indeed, be reading more of this guys work in the future. 

Gamera 2 - Attack Of Legion

 

Shell Shocked

Gamera 2 - Attack Of Legion
aka Gamera 2 - Region shurai
Japan 1996
Directed by Shûsuke Kaneko  
Daiei/Toho Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, Gamera 2 - Attack Of Legion is the second of the 1990s reboot series, again as featured in Arrow’s mammoth Gamera - The Complete Collection boxed edition (and in one of the two, smaller reissues of that collection now, I believe). And, yes, if you’re wondering why the monster aliens in this film are called Legion, it is that exact biblical reference that seems to get used as a crutch for evil in many movies.

And this is a real legion of foes as they are basically flying crab/grasshopper looking aliens who are a hive mind, controlled by a bigger soldier version who is the guardian of a giant seed pod which these specific beasties are trying to launch from the Earth into space, to make more of their kind. Which will also wipe out humanity, obviously. The military prove useless against these things and so, once again, everyone’s favourite, giant sized flying turtle, Gamera, steps up to the plate, so to speak, to three times do battle with these creatures.

Now I don’t pretend to understand all the monster science that gets bandied about in the film, the aliens mania for collecting glass and silicon is all explained along with their obsession with building hive pods in major cities but it all just seems like window dressing to me and I especially didn’t understand Gamera’s rebirth after the aliens pretty much kill him and, nor did I understand the golden space rays which allowed him to open up his shell and deliver his death stroke at the end.

That being said, the film is nicely paced and structured for the main human leads to build up the weight of the plot and the director more than builds up the resourcefulness and lethal capabilities of the aliens. It’s almost a third of the way through the running time before Gamera even turns up. Included in the humans, Steven Seagal’s daughter, Ayako Fujitani, returns as the unsolicited ‘Gamera whisperer’ from the last movie, in what amounts to an extended cameo of a support role where she is established and used for a few important scenes although, as I said, I totally didn’t understand the power of the vigil she kind of heads up, which leads to the re-animation of the once defeated Gamera.

Gamera himself is much redesigned from his last appearance. He no longer looks like the cute defender of Earth and looks much more like a bestial monster. I felt less empathy with him this time around for sure. Also, the first few times we hear his roar it seems to have been altered quite a lot, sounding much more like a cross between his original voice and something more Godzilla-like, although he does seem to re-find his classic voice before the end of the film. Ditto with Kow Otani’s score, which is not as fun as the Showa era movies but certainly fits the film well with a more modern sensibility... however, there’s one sub-theme which occurs more than once in the last third of the movie which does, I feel, bear more than just a passing similarity to one of Akira Ifukube’s Godzilla themes. I guess modern audience’s expectations dictated that kind of approach to the music as much as anything else.

The action footage is fine though, with some spectacular lightning style effects as the big Legion soldier generates power from between its mandibles and fires at Gamera. The editing never threatens to lose the audience or leave them behind as to what is going on during the action and, also, Kaneko does a couple of those striking, sideways wipes in the non-action scenes which work really well. There are also some fairly grim or, at least, substantially darker moments in the film... such as when Gamera’s blood splashes all over a skyscraper from which of the human protagonists are watching the kaiju battle and then slowly drips down the windows.

All in all, although I don’t have as much to say about this entry into the franchise (yes, it’s a very short review, I apologise), Gamera 2 - Attack Of Legion is a fine installment in the series although, I have to say, still not as engaging as many of the early Showa era films but, nevertheless, a huge box office success in Japan on the year of its release. A solid monster effort but, as I said, lacking the fun and cuteness of the earlier films, perhaps.

Sex And Lucia

Penetration &
Interpenetration

Sex And Lucia
aka Lucía y el sexo
Spain/France 2001
Directed by Julio Medem
Palisades Tartan DVD Region 2

Warning: Look, to try and get this one
straight in my head as I review it, I think
it’s going to have to have some spoilers...
for which I apologise.

Sex And Lucia is one of those movies I managed to miss in the cinema when it came out back in 2001. Years later I found a DVD of the movie going as part of a ‘£3 when you buy something else’ offer in Fopp records and now, a few years after even that, I’ve finally caught up with the film, not realising I’m not entirely unfamiliar with this director’s work, actually... although, barring one other, I haven’t seen much else by this director since the 1990s.

The film sets things up with an uncomfortable telephone conversation between Lucia and her long term lover, a published but tormented writer, as she is trying to balance her waitressing job while fearing for his life through an act of suicide on the other end of the line. When she gets home she discovers him gone, a half heard phone call from the police confirms her suspicions that he is dead. Then she goes to an island that  he always loved, to come to terms with what’s happened but then starts to travel back in her mind to how she met him and we start to see a series of narratives around the writer, his fictionalised (or is it) account of the narratives and the various women in his life who weave in and out of the story.

The writer is Lorenzo, played by Tristán Ulloa. The four women... well, three women and one little girl... are Lucia (played by Paz Vega), Elena (played by Najwa Nimri), Belen (played by Elena Anaya... who I knew from Wonder Woman, reviewed here and this director’s own Room In Rome, reviewed here) and Lorenzo’s young daughter Luna (played by Silvia Llanos), who he only meets for the first time quite a while into the narrative.

The film is a beautiful example of different interpenetrating story lines, as each of the narratives which you are watching cross cut in the most bizarrely coincidental of ways until, by the end, you realise that even though most of them don’t know it until they’re at the finishing post, that everyone in the narrative is actually connected to each other as the story strands transcend the audience’s initial perceptions of how the time settings of each tale are playing out. It’s a deliberately chopped and fragmented look at the narrative and it must have been hard to keep everything working in this way... but it does work and the sense of things coming together one after the other is part of the charm of the film, it has to be said. This includes a massive perception switch near the end... a trick played on the audience which is heralded quite a few times as the structure of the writer’s account is discussed and, although I could kinda see it coming from a long way off as a result of that, it’s a nice moment because it helps the film find a resolution of sorts. It’s also, perhaps, saying that some narratives can retain an illusion of flexibility to head towards something which is not, entirely, unlike a Hollywood ending, it has to be said.

The film is beautifully shot and colour palettes sometimes offset each other (I suspect I’ll pick up an underlying design scheme matching the story structure on a second watch) with very early scenes, for example, favouring warm browns and reds which are immediately contrasted, when Lucia arrives at the island, with largely washed out blues and icy whites.

Another thing which makes this absolutely hypnotic is the amount of wonderful performances by all the key players. They all work together absolutely brilliantly and it all helps maintain the illusion of a story which feels like it could suddenly go in any direction with scenes of tragedy and devastating loss making strange but comfortable bed fellows with scenes of joy and laughter.

There’s also a fair amount of nudity and sex and I was kinda surprised that the DVD I bought is actually uncut, now I’ve seen it. It’s been given a standard 18 rating over here but some of the sexual content is usually only reserved for an R18 certificate (which means something is only allowed to be sold in a sex shop... unless that’s been changed recently but this is an old disc now). For example, the use of erect penises and things being done to them is rarely allowed in commercial cinema over here (I was originally going to call this review Writer’s Cock but then decided against it for... a couple of reasons). Apparently the original US release of this was censored by two minutes.

Perhaps my only real criticism of the film is the score by Alberto Iglesias. For some reason this just felt a little anemic next to events on screen and I felt the music distracted rather than served the drama in this case. It’s rare for me to say something that critical about a film score, to be honest, so... yeah, I must have really hated that aspect of the film, I guess.

All in all, though, I would certainly recommend Sex And Lucia to pretty much most ‘friends of film’, both to ardent cinephiles or semi-casual viewers like myself. There’s a lot to love about this movie and, honestly, Paz Vega is particularly cute as the character by whom we are introduced to the initial threads of the interwoven story components. Definitely check this one out if you get the opportunity.

Alyce

Red Queen

Alyce
aka Alyce Kills
USA Directed by Jay Lee
Lionsgate 2011 DVD Region 2

Warning: Full story spoilers reside within.

I can’t remember if I picked Alyce up at FrightFest or ordered it for a very low price online but I must have read something good about it somewhere. I have to admit, I bought this one thinking it would be a horror movie but it’s actually not, it’s more of an adult themed drama. I mean, it nearly pushes over into the serial killer genre of thriller but, since a lot of the murders committed by the title character are spur of the moment decisions, I think it kinda side steps that category too, to be honest. In the same way, I guess, that Scorcese’s masterpiece Taxi Driver is not a serial killer movie. Maybe we can agree to label this one up as a psycho-drama?

Either way, the film is not quite what I expected and, although I thought it had a problem or two, it’s actually a pretty good movie. The basic story is as follows (don’t read the next two paragraphs if you’re worried about spoilers)...

Alyce’s and her best friend Carroll go for a night out but, as it’s beginning, Carroll finds out her boyfriend has been cheating on her and the two go off to get roaring drunk. They return to Alyce’s apartment and almost ‘get it on’, as they say but Alyce is disappointed that Carroll isn’t really serious about starting up a lesbian relationship with her at this point. Instead, they go to see Carroll’s drug dealer and get wasted on ‘E’ and more booze and, when they are completely high on the stuff, they decide to get even higher by climbing to the roof of Alyce’s apartment block. Things go south very quickly then, at high speed, as Alyce inadvertently pushes Carroll from the roof of the building, is traumatised and returns to her apartment. The next morning she gives the police an alibi but then finds out that Carroll isn’t dead, just so smashed up with her shattered jaw and bitten off tongue that she can’t even talk (although it’s obvious she’s more than a little angry with Alyce).

So, to help get over things (and contribute to her losing her job in the process), she starts trading sexual favours for drugs from Carroll’s drug dealer and, after a while, the psycho switch in Alyce’s distressed head gets flipped. She returns to the hospital to smother Carroll and, after a while, kill’s Carroll’s ex when he comes to her apartment... then his new girlfriend when she does the same and then, finally, she goes all ‘Travis Bickle’ on the drug dealer and his entourage. That’s the basic story right there.

The film is very good for most of the time and, in part, that’s down to the excellent performances of lead actress Jade Dornfeld in the title role and Amara Zaragoza as Carroll. The first 20 mins of the film is literally just the two of them ‘girly bonding’ and, well, it doesn’t get boring because it just seems so natural. I can’t help but think some of this dialogue must have come from improvised rehearsals because the authenticity of the lines and the way the actresses deliver them is fantastic.

The direction and cinematography are superb too. Considering they pull no punches on the grittiness, goriness and language of various situations... such as Alyce trying to dispose of the boyfriends body by cutting it up and bashing it about in her flat using knives, hammers, baseball bat, microwave, liquidiser and hacksaw etc (and then tries to do the same for everyone else, with a certain level of bloody detail which is outstanding)... the film looks really beautifully lit and framed. I admit to being a little less shocked and more jaded than the director might have liked for his prospective audience but I did appreciate the details of her cutting the flesh off the hand until there’s nothing left but the skeletal remains etc. They did that well. But, it’s Dornfeld’s matter of fact and sometimes quite humorous attitude during those scenes that make them work.

There are some nice moments where the director gives us a window into where Alyce’s mind is at, for example, by having her masturbate to disturbing images of war and misery on the news channel of her television but, ultimately, the beauty of the way everything is presented kinda undercuts or dilutes any possible disturbing aspect of the film, I thought. There is a hint in the first half of the film, when Alyce starts seeing Carroll’s vengeful ‘pre-ghost’ in her head, when I thought the director was going to take us into full on horror film territory but, alas, that whole little sub-plot kinda gets dropped in the second half of the movie.

One of the things that I didn’t understand was that, despite the name being spelled differently in the title, the writer/director slips in a lot of Lewis Carroll references. So a guy will be giving her a choice of pills/drinks, she is referred to as living her life fallen down the rabbit hole, she has a cover version of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit playing on her car radio and, of course, the groan inducing moment when you discover Carroll Lewis’ surname. This theme kind of drops out halfway through, though it does briefly re-emerge when Alyce is cutting up one of the body’s and says the ‘off with your head’ line. Again, though, I’m not sure where the director is going with this because the film isn’t really much of an analogy or version of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass novels, at least as far as I could tell. So, I confess, the links weren’t strong enough for me to take that stuff all that seriously.

The film isn’t particularly scary, I’d have to say... even though there’s one moment where the director homages the famous ‘bus sequence’ from Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur’s original 1942 version of Cat People. The original scare was and, still kinda is, quite a brilliant moment but, alas, a similar scene here doesn’t have anything like the same impact, it’s sad to say. Although, having said that, I did appreciate the reference being there in the first place.

So, a flawed movie perhaps, in terms of that kind of stuff but very successful in other ways. I especially liked the opening 20 minutes or so before the violence started and kinda liked the way the violence was filmed when those kinds of scenes did inevitably come. Alyce probably isn’t for everyone but, if you are interested in a standout performance by the actress playing the title role and some, somewhat off-beat moments you don’t necessarily see coming, then it’s worth giving this one a go. Also, lovers of gory movies might find the level of detail in the more bloodier scenes worth a look, if you’re that way inclined. Especially at the low prices you can get it for on the Amazon marketplace where the postage is probably more than the cost of the film (97p for a used copy, at time of publishing this review, seems like a good buy to me). Take a look some time because, whether you buy into the narrative or not, it does weave its own little atmosphere which may not be easily found elsewhere.

Doctor Who - The Three Doctors

Real 3D

Doctor Who
The Three Doctors
UK Air date:
December 1972 - January 1973
Four Episodes.
BBC Blu Ray Zone B

And so it came to pass it was time to crack open the Doctor Who Season 10 Blu Ray box set and, the first story in the box is the much loved fan pleaser The Three Doctors. This show must have been a nice Christmas present when the first episode was first broadcast in the holiday period between Christmas and New Year in 1972 and it was the programme’s ten year anniversary story. Of course, only the last three episodes were in it's 10th year and in January... the show itself wouldn’t reach that 10 year marker until November but, nobody seemed to care much and it’s an entertaining story.

This one tells of the Timelords on Gallifrey trying to save themselves and the rest of the universe by teleporting in previous incarnations of The Doctor to help himself fight the threat of the famous, 'missing presumed dead' Timelord Omega, who sacrificed himself many centuries before to give their race the power to master time travel... and who now lives in a black hole of his own making, out for revenge.

This was the first time in the history of the show that two or more incarnations of The Doctor had met each other and, to date, this has only happened four other times (not counting CGI trickery of half glimpsed running feet etc). This marks the first time that Patrick Troughton’s wonderful second Doctor would appear in one of these crossover stories (also his first time in colour) and he would go on to do the same in 1983 and 1985 (although his 1985 appearance, reviewed by me here, is perhaps best left forgotten). Also, because of the failing health of first Doctor William Hartnell, a small ‘limbo’ set was constructed at his home and his few brief scenes, roughly one per episode, were relayed as communications to Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee’s Doctors by video screen... the excuse being that the timelords didn’t have enough energy to fully transport him to rendezvous with the others.

And for an obvious, celebratory gimmick episode it’s actually quite well written, at least in terms of dialogue and the story isn’t too bad either. The show also features the then current Doctor’s companion Jo Grant, played by the inimitable Katy Manning (this would be her last season until she returned for two episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures opposite Matt Smith’s Doctor in the next century), Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge Stewart (played impeccably, as always, by Nicholas Courtney, who again made his swan song in a story from The Sarah Jane Adventures) and also a bigger part than normal for John Levene as Sgt. Benton (this is due to the part originally being earmarked for Frazer Hines to reprise his role as Second Doctor companion Jamie but, alas, he was busy doing Emmerdale Farm at the time... or Emmerdale as it seems to be known as today).

The chemistry between all the players is very strong and the humour coming from the dialogue is great. This one has probably one of my favourite scenes where, at UNIT HQ in the first episode, where the situation is already dire, the Brigadier asks The Doctor if there’s anything he can do to which Pertwee’s Doctor asks him to hand him a carbon rod. When the Brigadier does this, Pertwee uses it to stir his cup of tea... good stuff.

The really good decision the writers made in this was to not have the two primary Doctors, Troughton and Pertwee, who are present for all the episodes... get on with each other all that well. Just because you’re both the same person doesn’t mean you will agree on things and a great source of the humour and entertainment of this story is the constant bickering between the two of them, both put in their place by Hartnell at one point who calls his ‘replacements’ a dandy and a clown. Yep, there’s some good writing here. Such as the explanation of why so much stuff is pulled into the black hole when Omega is just after The Doctor... “Rather like taking a pill with a swig of water.” There’s even a joke reference in this, made by Katy Manning, to The Beatles song, I Am The Walrus.

I also liked the breakaway sets that were whisked away into the ‘quarry’ landscape of the planet in the black hole and the way bits of man made items are scattered about seemingly randomly in surrounding landscape... UNIT HQ even gets completely transported as the cliff hanger ending of one episode.

The special effects, though, are... not great. The electronic jelly that beams everything back to the black hole is a pretty rubbish looking video effect and the iconic gel guard monsters are actually quite awful and unconvincing suit creatures when you see them moving around. Quite disappointing for monsters who were never used again but whom everyone seems to remember (they even made it onto Weetabix cards, if memory serves).

Omega himself, a completely masked up figure, looks fairly impressive, a little like a golden pre-Darth Vader type presence. Alas, camera angles being what they are, especially when restored to Blu Ray, when the creature is revealed to have been eaten away with, as much of a surprise to him as to everybody else, nothing actually inside the suit, the illusion is ruined a little later on when you can clearly see the actors eyes behind the slits in the mask at one point.

About the Blu Ray... the transfer is pretty good but, for some reason the externally shot scenes, especially those at the beginning of the first episode, look fairly blurry and foggy still. I am guessing this is because the cameras weren’t quite in focus, maybe and, bearing in mind the way these episodes would have been received on first broadcast, probably nobody minded much. It wouldn’t look very different on those old TV sets compared to the rest of the footage, which on this new Blu Ray looks very sharp in comparison.

And that’s me about done on The Three Doctors. Omega would return in a different form for a Fifth Doctor story in the 1980s and the other thing that’s very important about this episode is that, as a reward for helping out the Timelords and saving the known universe, The Doctor is gifted with the components and memory needed to be able to control his TARDIS and travel in time again. His exile to Earth, brought in at the very end of the last Troughton episode and designed to make the show cheaper by not having to constantly make unrealistic looking alien sets, was over. Of course, this meant a very reduced role for the Brigadier and the rest of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (as it was in those days.. I’m not having any of this new Unified stuff, thank you very much) officers in the show but they wouldn’t disappear completely... not yet anyway. Overall, one of the more enjoyable stories and a cracking set of scenes with the Second and Third Doctors working together and bickering their way through the story. An entertaining celebration of a series which, I’m sure, had already run far longer than the show’s original producers had expected it to.

Memoria

Lost & Sound

Memoria
Colombia/Thailand/France/Germany/
Mexico/Qatar/United Kingdom/
China/Switzerland 2021
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Sovereign Film Distribution

Warning: Possibly very slight spoilers...
I’m not sure if there are, to be honest.

I’ve not seen a film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul before and this one, Memoria, which marks his first English language film (although half of it is in Spanish), deals with a character called Jessica, played by Tilda Swinton (one of the greatest living actresses), as she wanders around bits of Spain and Columbia in search of the answer to the mystery which is haunting her.

Now I’m going to try and write this review without any spoilers which is going to be both bizarrely difficult and easy to attempt in equal measure but, ultimately, having spent over two hours of my time watching the film, trying to tell an audience what it’s actually about may prove something like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

I will say straight up that the movie is shot in that beautiful, languid, relaxed and simple manner I adore, that I might associate with someone like the great Andrei Tarkovsky. Most of the shots are long and there’s not always a lot of movement, if any, within a shot... sometimes for a good few minutes. It takes its time as both Jessica and the audience is hearing, every now and again, a fairly distinctive audio thump when nobody else can. The director likes to use the juxtaposition of sounds which aren’t actually this thump to both wrong foot the audience and also establish a difference between the thumps in Jessica’s head and ‘real’ ones. There’s also no underscore on the picture to distract from the sound design, which almost takes on the personae of being its own character in the film (if that’s not too pretentious a thing to say... although I’m sure a few reviewers might take this tack). So any music heard in the film is diegetic as in, an on screen source for any melody is clearly established.

The problem with the film for me is something I half saw coming from very early on in the narrative actually... if this could be called a narrative... in that I began to think of the main protagonist as being a more malleable screen presence than I think I was, at first, supposed to question. But question it I did and so, when one main character who is helping Jessica build an audio interpretation of the sound she keeps hearing just disappears from everyone’s narrative except hers... I felt myself a little vindicated in my original suspicions. Ditto when her sister, who she has been visiting in hospital but once released, doesn’t remember a conversation that she had with her in bed once she gets out... although considering the nature of the mystery illness which has struck her down, this is partially explainable within a traditional narrative interpretation of events, I think. Her sister's memory seems somewhat questionable anyway.

However, my own discomfort with believing everything put in front of my eyeballs as narrative truth... with good reason it perhaps transpires... wasn’t in anyway comforted by the ending of the movie which everything is leading up to. It also doesn’t help matters when, during the second or third long static shot of the movie, a load of car alarms go off in the city from no visible prompt, helping to re-enforce the notion in the collective mind of the audience that something ‘unseen by many’ is clearly afoot.

But, as I said, the film does work towards an end game and it certainly shows, at least, the source of the sound Jessica is seeing (or possibly two sources, depending on your interpretation) which I can certainly see as being the main clue for various catalogues and listings to label this up as a science fiction movie. That being said, any hopeful revelations on this point are kinda lost in the aftermath of certain statements in a conversation Jessica has with a guy taking up quite a large chunk of the conclusion of the movie. In fact, it becomes clear that not even Jessica is really able to properly comprehend the explanation behind the chain of events that have brought her to this point in the... yeah, let's call it narrative then.

By this stage, it’s fair to say that I think the viewer needs to bring his or her own interpretation of events and personal baggage with them and not feel like it’s an illegitimate way to approach the film... otherwise, I’d have to say, I can see a huge chunk of the audience getting extremely cross with the movie... at least as many as I suspect will look on it as a work of genius. For myself, in terms of the story, I guess I’m half and half with it but, as a deliberately slow paced spectacle with a wonderful central performance by the always reliable Swinton, I think I’d definitely have to err on the side of future classic, although I suspect it might not quite get that place in cinematic history books.

So, yeah, all in all I’m glad I saw Memoria and I’m also glad that, here in the UK, it didn’t have the gnarly release pattern it has in the US... where it will play in only one cinema for one week announced just a few days before it plays, before moving onto another cinema for one week... with no future home video release in its future. So, in that way, I guess I have to thank Sovereign Film Distribution for making it... just a little easier to ever see over here. My final word on it is... well... apart from the fact that I only have a little of a handle on what the film was actually about (there are, I think, a few possibilities and as I said, I think it’s down to individual interpretation)... I think it’s no spoiler to say that the final narrative punch of the film (or maybe just a slow poke in the cheek rather than punch, it might be said), is not all that different from the first time I experienced the ending of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up. It’s not the same ending or at least as direct (and again, it’s open to interpretation and also has a definitive, single, science fiction shot in it) but it’s certainly not easy to forget either and it’s one of those films, I think, that will both divide audiences but also haunt them all for a while after being seen. So, personally, I think you should take that as a recommendation of a good movie worth trying to see but... you know... that’s all open to interpretation.

The Gay Falcon

Lawrence
Flight n’ Gal

The Gay Falcon
USA 1941
Directed by Irving Reis
RKO/Warner Archive DVD Region 1

George Sanders made five movies in 1941 alone, which was pretty much par for the course in Hollywood of old. The first one he shot that year was his final appearance as Simon Templar in The Saint In Palm Springs (reviewed here). The series continued without him but Sanders’ final 1941 movie was the first of what was a 13 film series based on a Michael Arlen character called The Falcon... who was very much like The Saint, although he was more like a private detective. Indeed, the creator of The Saint, Leslie Charteris, who wasn’t best mates with RKO, tried to sue the studio as he saw the character as a cheap imitation of him (the results of the dispute have never been made public, as far as I can see). Hugh Sinclair carried on in the role of Templar in the series of movies based on The Saint character.

Now, it’s often said that The Falcon film series was 16 films long but that’s actually not true. The last three movies are based on another writer’s novels of a character also called The Falcon, although, for some reason, the series was still credited up as being Arlen’s character, even though it’s clearly not the same person. This would explain why the two Warner Archive DVD collections only cover the first 13 films. That being said, Sanders only played The Falcon in the first three and, in an interesting move... oh no... I’ll get to that interesting swerve in the series when I get to the third movie.

Anyway, Sanders was now heading up The Falcon series and, in a move to give audiences a more ‘saintly experience’, they also cast Wendy Barrie as his long suffering fiancé who is trying to get him to give up crime solving and other women. Barrie had already starred opposite Sanders in three separate Simon Templar movies, although she played different characters in each. The Falcon also has a side kick in these films, much like The Saint would often have a ‘stooge’ helping him out. In this film it’s Allen Jenkins playing ex-thief Jonathan G. 'Goldie' Locke. And another element which is interchangeable with The Saint films was the common practice of having a police inspector who gets things wrong and eventually accepting the lead character’s help to solve the crime... in this film it’s Arthur Shields as Inspector Mike Waldeck.

In the books, the lead character is actually called Gay Falcon but, in the first film here, he’s Gay Laurence (which changed to Gay Lawrence for the next two) and The Falcon is more of an alias (again, as in The Saint films). So yeah, if you watch The Gay Falcon it is pretty much like watching another Saint sequel, to be honest, although the screenplay on this one doesn’t quite have the same, well, written sparkling wit of Sanders’ former role.

That being said, it’s an entertaining enough watch although it’s a little light on action. I can’t remember if the series gets more action oriented as it goes on because, the last time I watched these would have been in the early 1980s on BBC2 at 5.40pm or 6.20pm on weekday evenings, when the re-runs of the Charlie Chan and The Saint films had run their course. However, light on action doesn’t mean it’s light on murders (there are three of them) and there’s lots of running around as both The Falcon and Goldie are both under suspicion from the police at various points in the movie.

Sanders pays it cool and his new female assistant (Nina Vale, for this one movie only) helps him get by the police while at the same time bringing down the wrath of his fiance, who inadvertently gets him into more trouble as the story goes on. Although I suspected the real villain of the movie, who is revealed in a twist near the end of the picture, I didn’t really see it coming until I’d remembered at the end of the picture, just before the reveal, that I’d considered this a possibility at the start of the movie... so that’s kind of good. The camera work is quite good too, with people being framed in the 4:3 ratio as and when they are needed in the shot and almost making up ‘too perfect’ photographic compositions on cue. There’s a lovely sequence, for example, where Sanders and Vale have broken into a hotel room and are waiting on the ledge outside the windows for the returning owner of the apartment to leave again. When that happens, Sanders re-enters the room but we stay outside as Sanders is perfectly framed in a middle slice of the screen with square petitioned window frames creating the space for the action on either side. There’s some quite nice stuff in the movie, for sure.

Paul Sawtell provides some appropriate but not too striking music here and the pace, even without much action, is fairly fast and, like I said, it’s an okay entry into the series which would run for quite a few installments. Each story ends with a kind of cliffhanger preview which may or may not dovetail into the next film in the series. I don’t believe the throwaway end scene of a lady in distress is picked up in the next one but I’ll let you know soon enough. I’ll be working my way through these pictures, revisiting them now after many decades and I’ll bring the reviews to the blog as I work my way through them. I loved these as a teenager and I’m sure I’ll be spellbound by them now. So I’ll make A Date With The Falcon again sometime soon.

Yours Cruelly, Elvira

Cassandra Complex

Yours Cruelly, Elvira -
Memoirs Of The
Mistress Of The Dark
by Cassandra Peterson
Hachette Books ISBN: 9780306874352

Wow, what a great book. I just want to give a quick shout out here to one of those rare autobiographies that come along every now and again that remind you that there are some nice people around in this world who, you know, haven’t let the gruelling pressures of the hardships they’ve somehow had to endure turn them into complete monsters. This is just such a tome and, given that Cassandra Peterson... aka Elvira - Mistress Of The Dark... has been pretty much co-writing her own material for decades, it really shouldn’t come as any surprise that she’s managed to write a memoir as  burdened with the weight of some heavy experiences and revelations as this one is, in a witty, poignant and vastly interesting manner. And to somehow make it an absolute hoot of an entertaining book, to boot!

I first became aware of ‘Elvira’, I think, around about 1988, when I was twenty years old. I saw the movie poster being advertised in some magazine (or possibly comic... or both) and instantly, somehow, recognised the iconic ‘boobs n’ hair’ image of someone who looked like either Vampira or Vampirella (or a thrilling combination of both) being burned at the stake. Now, the IMDB doesn’t list the movie as getting a theatrical release in the UK and, while I know I had it on good old trusty VHS at the time (since upgraded twice now to both DVD and Blu Ray editions), I’m pretty sure I did see it at my local cinema over here at the time (a cinema which is, alas, now a Tesco but, still, good times were had).

It was a film which nobody seemed to have heard of at the time, which I introduced a few people to, who then also became staunch supporters of the legendary lady. I met her once and got a photo signed by her in the 90s, or possibly just into the next decade, at the old London Film And Comic Con, back in the days when it was good and not many people went (which probably explains why she never returned to do it again... I didn’t have to wade through a huge queue of pre-booked visitors to meet her at that point). I also remember buying vinyl record albums of her at around the same time and reading comics too, including a black and white, biographical comic which started off highlighting how she got scarred by life-threatening boiling water burns as a very young child (not even two years old yet, I think?).

The full story of that accident and just how lucky she was to survive it due to various things all lining up at once is almost a forewarning of the way things seemed to have happened to her over her life... at least that’s one of the things I took away from this account. She goes on to explain the way things came into being in terms of her career and opportunities much later in the book but, there’s also a lot of dark stuff she went through and she captures a lot of it for the reader as she goes, chapter by chapter, through her life.

And there’s a lot to take in as she goes from tragedy to fortune to tragedy again in small, perfectly formed installments... starting off with a dramatic opening when she is on her honeymoon and getting the call to audition for the role of a certain little ‘Horror Hostess’ for a TV station before flashing back through her memoirs, catching up with this moment a little over half the way through the book and after a bunch of amazing and, sometimes gruelling, stories.

Lots of great stuff here to unpack including her relationship with her parents and siblings, her early obsession with horror films and her love, as a young girl, of building those old Aurora model kits of Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy etc  (remember those?), her times as a ‘virgin groupie’ meeting various big bands and the bizarre time she hung out with Jimi Hendrix... to her obsessions with Elvis (who she stayed up talking to for most of a night when she was working as a showgirl in Las Vegas... a conversation which changed the course of her life), Ann Margaret, The Beatles and eventually landing her way to the role that made her fame and fortune.

On the way there are stars who were nice to her (I might mention Liza Minelli) and those who weren’t ultimately all that pleasant (I might mention Frank Sinatra and Tom Jones). And I love the way she humanises some of the celebrity people she meets by initially teasing them into the text by just their first names, so you take in what good deeds they might have done (or not), before she suddenly hits you with a second name and you realise just who it is she’s talking about. For instance, I’m not going to say who Bobby was, who pinned her boyfriend against his car because he was being abusive to her... you’ll have to read the book yourself to find out who that guy was... but it does give a solid, positive sketch of the man behind the name. I will say, though, that when she was taking acting lessons alongside two students, Lynda and Debra, who fast became friends with her... it gave me a little insight into just how Debra Winger came to be cast as Wonder Girl in Lynda Carter’s hit TV show Wonder Woman (reviewed by me here only last week).

So yeah, there are lots of celebrity stories such as hanging out in Rome in her teens and working as an extra on Fellini’s movies... but there’s also often a downside to these periods of her life, such as fleeing Rome after escaping captivity from some criminals who starved her for three days with not much expectations of surviving the experience.

And, of course, her time promoting her brand image Elvira in various shapes and forms over the years... including, of course, the two wonderful films she made and explaining how she modelled the famous Elvira wig (seriously, it took me years to twig that wasn’t her natural hair... I'm naive) on Ronnie Spector’s hairstyle. I also didn’t realise the number of films and shows various actors don’t put on their CV or, perhaps as importantly these days, the IMDB. For instance, I hadn’t a clue that she appeared as a showgirl in the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever. I also need to check out another new collection of memoirs she tips the reader off to, from the lady who road managed her and which is called The Opposite Of Famous, as soon as time and money will allow.

And there’s more... lots more, including of course the now famous revelation, with the publication of this book, that she’s been living with a female lover for the last 20 years who is finally able to support her emotionally in the way her husband never could (it seems to me). So, yeah, Cassandra’s Elvira brand has had a couple of prominent bumps along the way (many of them detailed in this book) but she’s in a very strong place right now, it seems... finally getting something which approximates the happy ending she deserves.

So, if you’ve not been taking notes, I’d have to say that Yours Cruelly, Elvira - Memoirs Of The Mistress Of The Dark is a sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious but certainly informative, candid and entertaining tome... I honestly wish it was twice the size so it didn’t have to end so fast. I’d recommend this one to most people I know in a shot but, for now, until I find out the next project she’s getting involved with, I shall continue to play my iPad simulacra versions of the Elvira pinball machines and gaze up, from time to time, at the shot of her on the wall by my bed, to read the message I asked her to inscribe all those years ago (when I had to remind her it was actually a direct quote from her movie... I think she remembers it better nowadays)... Revenge Is Better Than Christmas!

Revenge Of The Creature

The Giller Memorandum

Revenge Of The Creature
USA 1955
Directed by Jack Arnold
Universal Blu Ray Zone A

After the incredible success of Creature From The Black Lagoon in 1954 (which I reviewed here), a sequel was inevitable and director Jack Arnold returned for the gig. If you’re into your trivia, this one was released (less widely is my understanding) in 3D in selected venues and so this one counts as the very first time a 3D movie had received a sequel shot in the same process.

Now, although this was reportedly the most successful of the three Creature features in terms of box office receipts, Revenge Of The Creature is not nearly as good as the first movie and the quality does tend to go down in terms of the three pictures as they go forward (the posters on the next one in the series promised much but had a huge drawback and is the most disappointing of the series). There are almost no characters joining the returning director from the first movie in this one. We basically have the titular Gill-man, who we last saw floating into the depths of the Black Lagoon as quite possibly a lifeless corpse (played by various actors, at least one of whom was the same as in the first picture) and we have, for about the first 15 minutes but in a much larger role than he had in the first one, Nestor Paiva as Captain Lucas, who takes the two man ‘safari expedition’ into the same area that he previously encountered the creature.

The story line is not nearly as punchy as the original but actually delivers a lot more on the expectations of the original picture. That is to say, this time around it’s more or less a remake of the 1933 classic King Kong (reviewed here). So, man brings creature back to be experimented on, trained and exhibited at Florida’s Marineland (see some of my early Al Adamson reviews for more mention of Marineland) and, even though the scientists are a bit mean to it (giving electric shocks to obey the command of “No” or “Stop”), it develops a kind of fish-man equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome, escapes and then stalks the lead female scientist while she’s out having a good time with her new leading man. Of course, all comes right at the end and we’re left with a conclusion which perfectly mirrors the final shot of the last movie. That’s about all of the story I need to cover right here.

In terms of actors we have the human ‘almost-villain’, who is a much lighter character and is the one responsible for bringing back the creature to civilisation... Joe, played by John Bromfield. We also have the leading lady Helen, played by the charming Lori Nelson and the real leading man, Professor Clete, played by John Agar. These last two, even though they spend a lot of the movie trying to shock condition the creature, thus ensuring the audience are fully sympathetic to the Gill-Man’s plight, are actually pretty sympathetic characters so we can completely root for John Agar as he runs around Florida with the police in a desperate attempt to retrieve his girlfriend from the clutches of the creature.

And, it’s an okay film but, like I said, nowhere near as good as the first movie. I’m not sure if there was any new score written for this one as a lot of it seems to be tracked in from the first movie, including the use of that three note creature theme probably even more often than in the previous installment. It has a certain mood or atmosphere that the first one doesn’t have which, due to the differences in the plot and the stalking of the creature running around Florida with Helen, as he tries to stay close to a water source, takes on an almost ‘slasher film’ atmosphere to it, it seems to me. Like I said, it’s a step down but in mimicking King Kong’s idea of a monster brought to civilisation and then breaking loose, it’s not just a retread of the first one, which I guess we can be thankful for. For that matter, neither is the third in the series but... yeah, I don’t really want to say too much about the third yet. I’ll get there on another review.

Of course, by now, Millicent Patrick, who had designed the original version of the title character, had already had her career ruined by Bud Westmore and was not around to work on the picture. I think where this really falls down for Universal is in the next film where... oh yeah... not talking about that one yet. One person who is around on this is a very young, uncredited Clint Eastwood in his first movie role, as a lab technician in one scene (see pictured above). That always makes me laugh.

So, anyway, this is one short review but it’s really not the movie the first one was and, I’d not recommend seeing Revenge Of The Creature (who has no real revenge issues at all, from what I can make out) without having first watched the glorious Creature From The Black Lagoon. So definitely check out the first one if you’re thinking of watching this one at some point.

Gamera - Guardian Of The Universe

Gyaos & Dolls

Gamera - Guardian Of The Universe
aka Gamera Giant Mid-Air Showdown
aka Gamera daikaijû kuchu kessen
Japan 1995
Directed by Shûsuke Kaneko  
Daiei/Toho Arrow Films
Blu Ray Zone B

It had been 15 years since the last Gamera movie and a full three decades since his cinematic birth. Toho was releasing the final of the new Heisei era Godzilla films at the end of this year but now it was time for everyone’s favourite, jet propelled giant turtle to make a return, in a trilogy of Heisei era pictures beginning with Gamera - Guardian Of The Universe. It’s been hailed as a masterpiece by critics (it won a lot of awards) and, more importantly, it was a champ at the box office and its reputation is huge with most audience members... apart from the director and creator of the original Gamera films, who felt it lost a lot when it stopped focusing on young children as the target audience.

The film is a total reboot this time around. The Showa films never happened in this universe and nobody has even heard of Gamera, nor of Gyaos (also returning here) in this movie until an inscription embedded in a mysterious floating atoll, which houses Gamera within, is translated.

The plot of the film is that a whole bunch of 15 foot wing spanned Gyaos (so, initially much smaller than the original Gyaos from Gamera VS Gyaos, reviewed here) have awakened (or hatched) on a small island and eaten the 17 people who were there. Mayumi, played by Shinobu Nakayama, is an ornithologist and, since the Gyaos’ are initially believed to be giant birds, she is brought in by the government to research and then help capture or kill them. 

 Meanwhile, Yoshinaro (played by Tsuyoshi Ihara who you may remember from the remake of 13 Assassins, reviewed here, some years ago) is trying to find out why the drifting atoll was threatening his plutonium transport ship. He gives a comma shaped bead, one of many found on the atoll, to the teenage daughter of his employee, Asagi (played by Ayako Fujitani, the daughter of Steven Seagal, who plays this character in all the films in this trilogy). Gamera awakens and fulfills the prophecy from the monolith on the atoll as he goes to rid the world of Gyaos, mistaken at first as a destructive enemy force (because, you know, he accidentally knocks about a few buildings here and there) and therefore finding himself pursued by the army. However, the comma shaped bead has chosen Asagi, who is now spiritually bonded to Gamera and, when he receives a battle injury, she starts bleeding and getting beaten up too... although she can connect with him in her head and can use the spiritual closeness of her father Naoya (played by Akira Onodera) to help Gamera too.

Because Gamera is somewhat distracted by the army firing gazillions of missiles at him after he’s destroyed most of the Gyaos creatures, one Gyaos manages to eat enough to transform into a proper, much larger giant monster, more like the size of the original Gyaos in the Showa era films. So, after destroying as many of the Gyaos eggs as he can, Gamera has to face off against Gyaos one last time.

And, yeah, it’s pretty good. The acting all seems much more naturalistic compared to the wonderful Showa era movies and monsters have been updated for the times but, it’s all pretty much business as usual... it’s just had a lot more money thrown at it this time around. Well, I say the monsters are updated but they are still unmistakably Gamera and Gyaos. Gyaos is not licking everybody’s blood this time around though, as there is no reference to his legacy origin as being a ‘giant Dracula creature’ in the spirit of the ‘giant Frankenstein’ kaiju movies, alas. He does still retain his sonic beam and the initial ‘ramping up’ of the beam which creates a visual distortion field looks fantastic. Gamera looks as cute as ever and I’m happy to say the film makers have kept his distinctive, high pitched roar. Yes, he still sounds like Johnny Weismuller exhaling loudly on Helium gas, I’m glad to report.

And, yeah, it’s a fun romp with a lot of gravitas to the acting and some good model work. Although, I noticed a lot of the things which would have been done with easily perceptible models in the original movies, such as tanks and battleships, have been replaced by the real thing in this production (darn, I miss the silly models). It’s also quite spectacular and there are explosions galore with the only real weak effects appearing as matte lines in certain scenes at the end, where Gamera and Gyaos are locked together in combat and heading in and out of the Earth’s atmosphere.

The music is very different too, with composer Kow Otani giving this a much more darker and westernised sounding score (on a par perhaps with the kind of scoring found in the 1984 film The Return Of Godzilla). It works quite well but, I have to admit, I really missed the corny old Gamera song which was in a few of the 1960s and 70s productions. Still, we can’t have everything I suppose. At least Gamera got to keep his look and his roar and, you know, there isn’t a single ricochet sound on the entire foley, from what I could hear.

Yeah,  Gamera - Guardian Of The Universe is very enjoyable but I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily any better than the best of the Showa era films... it’s just a slightly modernised approach which happens to work really well and is hugely entertaining. I look forward to looking at the next two.

Spider-Man - No Way Home

Home From Home

Spider-Man - No Way Home
USA  2021 Directed by Jon Watts
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Here be big spoilers right from the start... because there’s not much to talk about in this movie other than the central premise/gimmick.

Okay, so first my congratulations to Marvel for getting a film out which has appealed to enough people that it’s literally made billions of dollars in cinema box office in the middle of a pandemic (which still isn’t anywhere over yet... as I’m sure we’ll all find out fairly soon). As for me... well Spider-Man - No Way Home wasn’t a great Marvel movie and it wasn’t a terrible one. It’s about on a par with the last one in the series, Spider-Man - Far From Home (reviewed here) but, at least in this one we see the Spider-Man costume more prominently. In fact we see a number of different costume variants from different versions of, not just the most recent films in which Tom Holland’s Spider-Man has appeared in but also, yeah, spoilers people, we see the versions from the previous two iterations of Columbia’s Spider-Man movies.

So Holland is back alongside Zendaya as MJ (who’s not actually named Mary Jane as everyone had assumed), Jacob Batalon as Ned, Jon Favreau as Happy, Marisa Tomei as Aunt May, Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange and Benedict Wong as Wong... among a whole host of other regulars from the series. It ties in some of the post-credits scenes in previous movies such as Far From Home and Venom - Let There Be Carnage (reviewed here) and allows them to make more sense because this one is definitely playing around with the idea of multiverses... I guess the studio heads were staggered by the box office of Spider-Man - Into The Spiderverse (reviewed here) and wanted to sort out something similar in a live action version. So J K Simmons returning as J Jonah Jameson at the end of Far From Home makes sense now because this iteration of the character is not the same as the one in the Sam Raimi films... he just happens to look like his multiversal counterpart.

Okay, so what that means, thanks to a screwed up spell when Peter Parker asks Doctor Strange to remedy the problems that Jameson has made for him, is we have various villains... and heroes... from the previous two Spider-Man franchises continuing their story points in the part of the ‘multiverse’ we are familiar with from the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) films. So, yeah, we have Willem Dafoe as The Green Goblin, Alfred Molina as Doctor Octopus, Jamie Foxx as Electro, Thomas Haden Church as The Sandman and Rhys Ifans as The Lizard. Plus, of course, Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield portraying the previous versions of Peter Parker (aka Spider-Man), who are on hand to lend the Tom Holland incarnation some assistance when he loses someone close to him and finds himself in his darkest hour.

And, I will probably get a lot more out of it the second time around but, although I don’t feel all that impressed by this one... which makes absolutely no sense in the way it leaves the characters at the end (I’m hoping they clear up their ‘lack of common sense’ mess in the up and coming Doctor Strange movie)... the film has it’s fair share of up and down moments... more up I am happy to say.

My biggest down moment was Jamie Foxx. I’m sure he’s a great actor and it’s really not his fault that the way his Electro character is written sucks, in both this and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (reviewed here). I used to love that character in the original comics but, yeah, this just isn’t him. However, there were a couple of nice ‘blink and you’ll miss them’ electricity strikes around his head during at least two points which were deliberately reminiscent of the head piece of his costume in the proper 1960s comics at least. I was also somewhat disappointed that Tyne Daley didn’t show up as part of the Damage Control team this time around, as she did in Spider-Man Homecoming (reviewed here) ... which is a shame. Did they drop her from the line-up?

All the other characters were mostly handled well, especially Alfred Molina, injecting the Doctor Octopus role with as much sympathy as he did the first time around in Spider-man 2. Willem Dafoe is also absolutely awesome here and, thankfully, mostly unencumbered by that terrible helmet he wore in Spider-Man (although it does turn up briefly). Thomas Haden Church as Sandman is equally multi-dimensional in terms of his character’s dynamic and reversal in this, like a reflection of what happens with Molina’s character here. The Lizard from The Amazing Spider-Man (reviewed here)  is, perhaps, a little different to how I remembered him, however, especially in the design of the character.

There are also some nice moments with Maguire and Garfield as the two other Spider-Men. One moment which is really emotional is when, when it comes to the MJ character in the film, is when the Garfield version manages to save her from the death he accidentally inflicted on his girlfriend Gwen Stacey in similar circumstances in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Also, there’s a fan pleasing moment when the writers address the issue of whether the mutant Tobey Maguire version of the character shoots webbing from his penis or not... which is something audiences have been asking since his first go in the role in Spider-Man, of course. Yeah, they get a lot of mileage out of his mutant DNA in this one, actually, in terms of the humour of the film.

There’s a large dose of tragedy in the film too. Not just with the death of a major character in the series (yeah, I’m not giving that away too) but with the totally nonsensical ‘how can Peter Parker even get money out of a bank to pay the rent now’ way the ending leaves the central three characters of the MCU Peter Parker, MJ and Ned Leeds in at the film’s conclusion. Now, when I first rumbled they were going to go all multiversal at the end of No Way Home, I was pretty sure they would set this up to eject Spider-Man from the future MCU films... or at least Tom Holland’s iteration of it (there’s a couched reference to Miles Morales in the movie so, it’s obviously on their mind). The ending of the movie definitely sets up a future for the series where Tom Holland’s Spider-Man either does, or perhaps doesn’t, return in future movies. I suspect the answer to that one won’t come soon (and I think it will be a bit of an elephant in the room in the upcoming Doctor Strange And The Multiverse Of Madness too, since it’s pretty much a direct sequel to this one in terms of the set up, at least judging from the trailer used as the second of the post-credits scenes here)... Holland has expressed an interest in not returning so I suspect some hasty salary negotiations are being looked at (or not... Marvel have a track record now for replacing characters with different actors, I believe... Roadie, for example, or Howard Stark and Bruce Banner come to mind).

Ultimately, Spider-Man No Way Home is an entertaining movie for what it is... a big attempt at a multiversal crossover cash grab that, apparently, has certainly succeeded in that. I didn’t hate it and I suspect I’ll grow to like it more over time (if they manage to make sense of their ending in future MCU movies). There are some good bits, there are some clunky bits (“You are AMAZING!"... geddit) but, overall, it’s nice seeing the winning team of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange together again (although Strange is not in it as much as you might think). So, yeah, if you liked the other MCU Spider-Man films, not to mention the previous franchises, you’ll probably have a relatively good time with this one, I would say. I still think Homecoming is the best one in this trilogy, though.

Eternals

Eternally Yours

Eternals
USA 2021
Directed by Chloé Zhao
Marvel Studios

Warning: Slight spoilers as to the nature of the main ‘super hero’ characters here.

Okay, let’s address the first of the two elephants in the room here... Marvel’s Eternals is based on the old Jack Kirby Marvel comic The Eternals. Now, I never used to read that one, although I saw it floating around newsstands a lot as a kid in the early 1970s and it seems to me the whole look as in costumes and characters probably has not much in the way of links to what Marvel have done to it in the movie version. Maybe that’s why the producers thought the word The in the title was somehow either superfluous or a way of defending it against the criticisms of the various changes. I’m reading that there were, indeed, a lot of changes from the comics and Kirby’s original vision but, hey, that’s what I’ve sadly come to expect from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So, yeah, can’t compare it and maybe going into it blind was best for me because...

I really don’t understand the almost overwhelming negativity about this movie. I literally only know one person who liked it... everyone else I’ve seen commenting on it on social media (for example) has given it a big thumbs down but, honestly, I’d have to say this is one of the more watchable and entertaining of the Marvel movies. Due to the comments, I actually put off seeing this one for a while and was expecting it to be really quite bad or, I dunno, lacking in action somehow but, no... it’s chock full of action and it’s got a load of great actors... Salma Hayek, Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Angelina Jolie, Kit Harrington, Kumail Nanjiani (yay, Stuber!), Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Ma Dong-seok and Bollywood star Harish Patel playing a bunch of interesting and diverse characters who don’t always get along with each other and don’t always do the things Marvel good guy/bad guy characters would usually do (this is not a bad thing). Which can also be said, to a certain extent, about the way the film’s storyline goes in general (I kinda wish the studio had the guts to present the audience with the original preview ending of the movie, which is a lot bleaker from what I can understand).

Yes, it’s a long film but that’s because it’s got an epic storyline and, intimate and comedic moments aside, it has a real epic feel to it too. One of the things which gives it that is that the story keeps flashing back from present times to various points in Earth’s history to reveal the reasons behind why the titular heroes have separated and hidden themselves among mankind in the first place. It also addresses the other elephant in the room... why they’ve not done anything to save humanity during its various historical crises, such as the Thanos snap... out of the way fairly quickly and, I thought, glibly at first. That is until it’s addressed again later in the movie as a more satisfying motivation on the part of these once and future heroes.

Now there were some things that maybe let it down a bit. For instance, when one of the heroes turns up dead fairly early on in the modern sections of the film, there was no question in my mind that the film was probably going to reveal a very Watchmen style twist somewhere near the last act... which proved entirely correct so, yeah, no real surprises there. Also, one of the characters is established and then seemingly tossed aside as he only seems to be there to make the most of in the first of two post credits scenes (the mid credits scene in fact) so that his character can be used to set up two other Marvel comic book characters, who will no doubt be appearing in Phase IV of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (one of them is only a voice at this point so, yeah, he got even shorter shrift in terms of appearing in the movie... I won't spoil it for you by naming him here).

The one big problem for me though... apart from some anachronistic sign language used in the wrong part of human history, was the fact that if these beings were created to be perfect beings at carrying out a specific mission... as it’s established they were... why give them specific defects such as, well, one of them being deaf. I mean, yeah, great that deaf people are represented but the concept of giving that character the origin she has makes absolutely no sense in this specific context, it seems to me.

Still, I’m willing to forgive the movie things like this because, as I said, it’s an entertaining movie and much better than some of the weaker entries in the MCU, such as Iron Man 2, Thor 2, The Incredible Hulk or the Guardians Of The Galaxy movies. I was thoroughly engaged with it and it certainly didn’t seem as long as two and a half hours.

One very interesting thing, given it’s a Marvel movie, is that there are two DC references in the film... specifically in terms of talking about both Superman and Batman at different points in the movie. Now, at first I thought that this may be some big money making plan on the part of Marvel (and it certainly would be a licence to print their own money) to cross over with Warner Brothers’ DC Universe at some future point but, thinking about it, certain secrets about the characters are revealed and so, what I think it actually does is establish that DC comics are alive and well in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but... they are just that. Fictional comics and media and not something which meshes with the MCU in a more interesting way. So now, I have to say, I’m fairly puzzled as to why I’m hearing these references to rival comic book companies in a Marvel movie (and, yeah, you can bet DC will get their own reprisals in on their up and coming movie slate, for sure, when it comes to referencing Marvel comics).

But, yeah, other than that... not too much to say about Eternals other than... I think the audience seem to have reacted really harshly (maybe because it’s not just straight Bam! Kapow! Kablooey! this time around) and I really hope to see some of these characters again in future Marvel movies. Which, despite the low box office take, I think they will be practically forced to do at some point because it seems to set up so many future MCU events which would dovetail nicely into this. And, while it probably doesn’t adhere closely to Jack Kirby’s original ideas, I could definitely see some of his ‘cosmic influence’ on certain sequences in the movie... which did give a few scenes a more Kirbyesque look, it has to be said. Splendid stuff and I hope that Marvel don’t listen to the audience response on this one.