Battle: Los Angeles

Marine Haste, Repent At Leisure

Battle: Los Angeles US 2011

Directed by Jonathan Liebesman

Playing at cinemas now.

Given the fact that Battle: Los Angeles is fairly long, light on plot and character development, full of macho posturing, jam-packed with humongous explosions and possibly has more bullets flying around on-screen during the course of its running time than you could possibly attempt to keep track of or shake a stick at in a real life skirmish... I am very surprised to say that I really loved Battle: Los Angeles.

Shot with a 100% hand-held shaky cam sensibility, the feel of this movie is almost verity without going to the extreme first-person shenanigans of recent movie like Cloverfield and the REC series (all of which I liked, for the record). This film is in no way trying to claim that it’s found footage or archival footage and it uses multiple viewpoints where, frankly, no cameraman would risk his or her life if the events occurring on screen were to actually be taking place. Similarly, the director is not beyond using a pretty good, thundering soundtrack (courtesy of Brian Tyler) to help push home the emotional context of scenes and comment on the action as it would be used in most any other movie.

In short then, the language of the hand-held verity type shot has been brought back into the context of the semiotics of film in general (well yeah, it never actually left) on this movie and therefore it doesn’t get overburdened with the need to justify each and every change of pace or location with an eye to the source camera. Instead, this movie never loses sight of it’s intention to bring a rollicking boy’s own war story into the laps of the audience and most of the time it never really fails to live up to that promise with it’s Saving Private Ryan VS Aliens take on the subject material.

There’s not much in the way of character development other than a very clichéd script which sets everybody up at the start and then brings in some very trite bonding moments later on in the film. What both amazes and amuses me is that, considering the lack of well written dialogue in the picture, the director managed to assemble a cast that are all very good at their craft and even found room for a couple of very well know and superb performers to deliver some rather cringe worthy dialogue in some places. Aaron Eckhart, Michelle Rodriguez and Bridget Moynahan are all excellent and surprisingly efficient in this movie... and seriously, hats off to Eckhart for genuinely getting me to believe in him as a marine... even if he’s a marine on “his last training detail before he retires”. Yeah, you heard that last bit right. See, I told you the film had terrible clichés in it. I know it wasn’t just me because some guy in the row behind started laughing in the middle of what was mostly trying to be a very “male-bonding” and touching moment. Great stuff.

But none of that really matters because the majority of the film is like all those battle scenes that you see in Saving Private Ryan. Not as fast film stock as it could have been but very choppy and chaotic in some places which makes you feel much more like you are actually there experiencing these things with the characters than you might if you were watching something else that claims to put you right in the picture but really, unless you’ve got your head tilted at the right angle, just gives you eye ache more often than not. Hmm... wonder what phenomenon I could be thinking of there then?

And the starling thing was, even though the characters are hollow and one dimensional and have, in some places, some quite laughable dialogue, the film is shot so intensely that I really cared about the fate of a lot of these characters. And it’s a very bleak film for the most part with ultra-tension creating sequences of suspense and high-octane nerve shredding as you wait for the enemy forces to slowly pick off “our team” one by one. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I had such a high investment in the characters as I was watching it... this film has a high mortality rate in terms of the poor human marines and civilians who are flung together in the face of adversity.

Battle: Los Angeles is about a tiny group of Marines sent to get a few suspected survivors out of an evacuated area of Los Angeles within the first hours of our planet being invaded by nasty aliens. The goals and mission objectives are set and we are told right from the start that we are losing on the ground but that the aliens have no proper air fleet and so the US rule the air... and once they’ve given you that little crutch, after a little while they take it away again and we are left feeling even more hopeless in the face of alien death and destruction. And then the guns really come out to play... this really is an intense little movie and about the only thing that spoils it... apart from the unbelievable dialogue in some of the calmer scenes, is the fact that after it’s been getting bleaker and bleaker for most of the film and you are expecting the credits to roll on a downer... after the mission is completed, a second mission is quickly taken on which has the potential to turn the tide of battle. I think the last 20 minutes or so of the movie where Eckhart, Rodriguez and a few of the others sort out a plan to kick some serious alien butt was probably tacked on to the end of the script to leave audiences with a sense of hope after the end credits roll... but it’s not really something that strengthens the film any.

Ultimately though, Battle: Los Angeles is a competent, if cliché ridden aliens VS marines movie and I liked it so much it’s definitely going to be a DVD purchase for me when the time comes. And besides... Eckhart’s always good to watch. Give it a go... you might surprise yourself.

Sucker Punch

The Punch Back

of Notoriety Dames

Sucker Punch US 2011

Directed by Zack Snyder

Playing at cinemas now.

I’d been wanting to see Sucker Punch for some time. The trailers looked visually fantastic and I have a certain respect for the director, Zack Snyder. Looking at the previous three films I’ve personally seen of his, I actually quite enjoyed them all:

The remake, or in this case genuine re-imagining (aka “cash-in-on-an-old-name-utilising-the-barest-minimum-trace-elements-of-previous-version-to-do-it”) of Dawn of the Dead was actually a really, really great zombie/people holed up and in peril film... comparable and in some cases superior to some of George A Romero’s own zombie movies.

Similarly, Snyders take on Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300 was an exciting time at the cinema and really delivered the goods, full of pretty shot composition eye-candy which pulled it somewhere above the average “guy’s night out movie”. I’d not read the original comic book of this one so my perception of it was not diluted by having a stake in the “is it or isn’t it a good adaptation” game.

Now Watchmen I had read when it first came out. It’s one of those legendary comic books which conquered the world back in the 80s and, along with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s The Killing joke, colonised the consciousness of the non-comic book readers when reprinted as a trade paperback and ushered in a growing perception that comic books weren’t just for kids anymore (although a whole cross section of them hadn’t actually been for kids for a good many decades before that). As such, I was a little disappointed by some of the stuff that got written out or sidelined in Snyder’s take on Watchmen (it really needs a 12 hour mini-series to do it justice... even Terry Gilliam couldn’t make it work... or at least pitch it at a level that secured the financing for the project) but at the same time I thought he gave it as good a shot as anyone could do because a lot of that source material did make it to the screen and the atmosphere this movie captures is dead-on in many ways to the comic book that inspired it. I’ve not had a chance to watch the extended ultimate Edition of this one yet (with the pirate comics put back in etc) but I’m looking forward to it. A hugely entertaining, if flawed attempt to film a very dense text and pack it into only a few hours.

Which brings me right back to Sucker Punch. Which by now I’d been hearing bad things about. Lotsa negatives to be found in the reviews for this thing so by the time I got to the cinema to see it, I was kinda primed on having a less than entertaining time at the cinema with this one... except, the imagery in the trailer looked extremely special so I couldn’t expect the absolute worst.

As it happens, I’m happy to say that I had a really great time with Sucker Punch and, though it does have its slight flaws (to my mind), I think that there are so many Dyonisian celluloid pleasure to be absorbed and enjoyed within it’s not over-long running time... that if you have a love of cinema then you’ll be doing yourself a disservice if you don’t rush out to your local movie house and see this thing... with the slight caveat that, if your local flea pit is as sporadic or downright bad at actually getting the film on the screen in the right speed, ratio, colour separation etc as my local “Cineworld Experience” is... then you might want to go find a proper cinema to see it at.

There’s a whole load of the typically dynamic and out of kilter visual splendour you’d associate with a Zack Snyder film but I think what has probably garnered it such negative reviews are the lack of clarification on the part of the director as to what the level of reality is in the film. The film tells the story of a character who finds herself unjustly disposed of in a mental hospital (named after Annie Lennox... but more on the musical side of the movie later) or possibly she’s in a brothel but the trouble is that, by the end of the movie when the director tries to pull the rug out from under the audience and disorientate it in a manner which might have worked had he not telegraphed the so-called twist within the first ten minutes of the movie, you’ve no idea if the character you are watching is a figment of another character’s imagination, or indeed if it’s actually vice versa (which would make more sense given the severe diminishing of one of those characters at the end since the other character’s fate might be the pseudo-reality which her imagination has permanently locked her in) or, at the most surface level and boringly simplistic level, actually two separate characters. I think pretty much the lack of general closure and spelling out of what’s going on is probably what has subconsciously caused so much unfortunate criticism to be levelled at this movie. I personally, since most of the film is set between the moment a spike is about to be pushed through the (possibly) main protagonists head to deliver a crude lobotomy and the actual deed itself, tend to conclude that the character in the movie who seems to have “got away with it” is actually a fictional construct created by a less than fortunate character in a very similar ending to that of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil... as opposed to the emphasis on escape, freedom and hope the director (or possibly studio?) tries to leave the audience with to garner repeat viewings.

What I do know is that when the character Baby Doll goes into her dance routines (which are unseen by the audience) she escapes from her “real” world (as does the audience who follows her journey) to brilliant, adrenalin fuelled flights of action fantasy which really warrants the use of the word “spectacle”. I might mention giant sized, gatling gun toting, mechanical samurai (an oblique visual reference to the Daimajin movies?)... dead German World War One soldiers resurrected with clockwork and steam that spout gouts of arterial steam when shot, a fire breathing dragon playing cat and mouse with what looks like a Lancaster Bomber and a bomb sabotaged train crawling with hostile robots who the five “Charlies Angels” of Baby Doll’s mind have to do battle with in order for the girls to escape the prison of their, possibly “real life” environment.

And quite apart from these specific sequences which are, to be sure, what the movie will be remembered for in years to come when the harsh sting of the box office is not so cruelly felt, there are some nice little directorial flourishes like the opening five minutes in which Snyder betrays (or more appropriately, celebrates) his affinity with comic books as he manages to set up a characters entire back story leading to her arrival at the asylum without using any dialogue and in an almost rapid-fire staccato burst of images which call to mind a comic without any speech bubbles or word-based narrative... very classy... although I expect a certain section of the audience may find it somewhat irritating.

The music took me by surprise too. The score is filled with songs (some of which even I knew) which are new cover versions of works by the likes of The Eurythmics, Jefferson Airplane, The Beatles and (wince) that Queen group which are rerecorded and rearranged (and in some cases significantly lengthened) as kick-ass rock augmented soundtrack action cues. The way the music works with the images will have you tapping your toes and singing along to a rockin’ version of White Rabbit while frenetic action and dizzying visual splendour is happening before your very eyes. Sweet Dreams are made of this!

At the end of the day with this film, I’d have to say that the sequences set in the two possible “realities” of the asylum/brothel are actually pretty cliché ridden and drag a little in places... but they are still very beautiful shot compositions to watch so no fan of the visual arts should go out too disappointed from a screening... and these scenes are more than made up for by the insane set pieces set in the world of Baby Doll’s dances. So all in all, as I more than intimated at the start of this review... I’d have to widely recommend this one. Go on... Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream... It is not dying... It is not dying.

Anuvahood

Robbing Hood

Anuvahood UK 2011

Directed by Adam Deacon, Daniel Toland

Playing at cinemas now

To say I was dragged along to the cinema kicking and screaming to see this movie would be overstating the case just a tad, I think. However, in my defence, my young friend Orange Monkey had expressed a hankering to see this new “youth culture” movie since we saw the trailer together while we were waiting for Paul to start (for more Orange Monkey shenanigans, see my Paul review here) and since I have to own up to it being usually me who picks the movie (which turns out to be a good thing after seeing this ;-) I wanted to be enthusiastic and supportive of her choice of celluloid torture for the evening.

I do have to confess, though, that in the back of my head I knew the lead director/writer/actor/songwriter’s work from his stint as one of the “bad guys” in the excellent movie 4321 from last year so I was kinda hoping for more of the same... even though the trailer looked kind of lame to me and I couldn’t understand half of the words that the young people in said trailer were saying... or at least, I could understand the words they said, just not how they applied in geographic context to each other as they randomly appeared juxtaposed next to each in something which sounded suspiciously like they could be sentences.

Young sentences.

The film began while me and Orange Monkey were desperately shovelling the best part of a shared bag of pic’n’mix into our mouths... but I’m sorry to say that as the movie started to play out, I got less interested in the adventures and exploits of Adam Deacon and his flimsy cohorts as I was by trying to remember just what it was that I’d shovelled into our big bag of fattening, price-bloated movie sweets. Chocolate raisins? Check. Licorice Torpedos. Check. Rainbow Chocolate Drops. Oh yes. Well this bag of pic’n’mix was shaping up to be very interesting indeed... but what about the film?

Well... it wasn’t good but it did have a couple of moments in there which made you realise that this was a well intentioned film put together by some talented people who just happened to get things quite wrong and delivered a package that doesn’t really hold up too well on a basic entertainment level... rather than just being complete incompetents who should never have been left in charge of a clapperboard at all, let alone a camera and monetary budget.

What I’m trying to say here is, that although Deacon himself is actually very good and somewhat likeable as the central character of a loser trying to get by, he surrounds himself with characters who are constantly critical of him and who seem to be unbelievably one dimensional. There’s no real plot to speak of and the constant “comical” hard knocks mixed with kitchen-dub-synch slices of life do nothing to make you care much for the characters or get too involved with their fall and decline. For a little while there, about two thirds of the way through, the movie looks like it might well be finding its heart but nothing solid or useable or, indeed, likeable ever really emerges from these little brief glimpses of passion buried soullessly underneath this jumbled mess of a movie.

I really wanted to like this movie but those brief flashes don’t make up for an uneven script and a really brutal and violently nasty fight towards the end which pretty much kills off any last lingering ideas that this movie might be trying to do anything other than try to quickly save itself by trying to invest you in a brutally put down underdog who is about to rise above himself.

A shame as there are truly some nice little touches of creative spark hovering just at the edges of this movie. The rebranding of Sainsburys to Lamesburys as the local supermarket to offer up an instant recognition hit of MacJob culture, for instance. Or a brilliant montage sequence of “our hero” selling drugs in his local “hood” with CGI intervention so the same characters are seen all over the place as the camera moves back and forth between different areas of the neighbourhood without cutting, sometimes capturing the characters in contrast against themselves... all the while playing out with a modern half song/half rap parody cover version of “So You Wanna Be A Boxer” from Bugsy Malone. But for the most part, these little diversions are very much a case of too little too late and really don’t save the movie on their own merits.

Anuvahood is very much trying to be the Dead End Kids meet Superfly in a modern London ghetto setting... but ends up being less fly and more dead than the directors and writers possibly bargained for. A noble attempt and I’d hate this to be the last work these guys ever put their hand to because there is a level of raw sparkle here which could really “go large” if the talent is handled in the right way... but overall, the film is barely watchable and just doesn’t deliver what it thinks it might be trying to say on the tin.

Or to put it in a way that even the young characters in this film might understand... being as English seems to be their second language...

“Dis film is weak, man, is weak!”

The Vampire Lovers

The Lady Is A Vamp

The Vampire Lovers

UK 1970 Directed by Roy Ward Baker

Hammer Films/MGM Midnite Movies Region 1

I wonder if, when Sheridan Le Fanu wrote his short vampire story Carmilla back in 1872, the writer had any idea of the influence and shadow his character would have in the years following its publication. Pre-dating Bram Stokers vastly popular character by a good 25 years, it was obviously one (of a few) influences on the novel Dracula and, while spawning nowhere near the number of movie adaptations and explorations as Stoker’s fanged fiend, Le Fanu’s story has had more than its fair share of movie adaptations over the years... starting with Dreyer’s take on the material and other stories which were published in the same collection as Carmilla, right up until the present day.

I’ve seen a few fair of these myself but I’d never seen the Hammer take on Le Fanu’s tale of Carmilla and her... ooh, ancestor Countess Marcilla Karnstein... or is there something more sinister going on here? ;-) Vampires tend to “live” a long time I guess. Certainly the Hammer Karnstein Trilogy comprising The Vampire Lovers, Lust For A Vampire and Twins of Evil (and actually Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter if you really want to get into it) is one of the more high profile versions of this story. So I finally purchased the old MGM Midnite Movies double bill of The Vampire Lovers (backed with Countess Dracula) and put it on not expecting very much either way from it, to be honest.

Now I’ve read some of Le Fanu’s work (thanks to a cost effective Wordsworth Classics Edition collected edition of his stories... check out their website here) which includes Carmilla and I have to say that, having read it, I don’t think it’s a particularly easy story to adapt into another medium and certainly less cinematic than I would expect of something which has been inspirational source material to dozens of directors over the decades. It’s certainly a style of storytelling which is big on atmosphere and low on action and so, as I said in my previous paragraph... I wasn’t expecting much from it either way.

I’m happy to report however, that The Vampire Lovers is a great success as both an artistic experience and an entertainment. It’s certainly one of the best films that I’ve seen riding out of the Hammer stable and I’ve seen a fair few of them,.

There are some obvious attractions for the full, red-blooded male (if such a creature exists) to be found in the movie in the form of the phenomenal Ingrid Pitt in fine form as Carmilla, but also in the bevy of buxom beauties used to decorate the shot compositions with such budding flowers as the lovely Kate O’Mara and Madeline Smith... there’s a lot of softcore nudity in this film which doesn’t balk at pushing the, perhaps a tad more subtle, lesbian tinted overtones of the original text even further into the foreground with various actresses sharing nude scenes together and I believe that this was a very conscious and deliberate move by Hammer at this time. I’m certainly not complaining about that though (well that’s a surprise then) as I’m quite partial to the aforementioned young thespians draping themselves over each other in various states of undress... but there are other, just as potent pleasures to be found in this little gem of a movie.

For starters, the male cast of the movie are all very good, including the three main male protagonists played by Peter Cushing, George Cole and Jon Finch (Mr. Jerry Cornelius himself). With a cast like that it’s kinda hard to go wrong, to be honest.

Then, of course, there’s the atmosphere. The Vampire Lovers had me enthralled right from the opening of the movie in a pre-credits sequence that conjures up an atmosphere of gothic chills so thick you could cut it with a knife. The scene where a vampire rises from her grave wearing a white shroud is actually quite fascinating to watch and helps to set up a genuine sense of unease in the viewer. This is heady stuff and I didn’t anticipate catching anything quite this potent by Hammer. Admittedly the decapitation effects are nothing less than laughable and unconvincing but what this movie lacks in special effects it more than makes up for in its quite haunting cinematography.

Then too there is Harry Robinson’s score which features some of the more romantic and melodic music written for a Hammer movie. This gorgeous, lush sound is compromised only once where, for reasons known only to the composer or the director (I suspect) the end, winding down part of the shower murder music from Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score is blatantly and quite surprisingly aped by the composer when, really, this movie didn’t need this kind of homage.

Probably the most surprising thing to me though is the way Hammer have managed to tease out the original Carmilla source material in such a way that it does not compromise the memory of the original and manages to stick quite faithfully to Le Fanu’s source elements without bringing in too much in the way of extra meat to flesh out the narrative where it might be expected to sag a little. On the contrary in fact, I would say that Hammer have managed to produce a movie that is actually quite startingly respectful of the original tale... so much so that I only remembered certain sequences from the story on their appearance in the Hammer movie... such as one of the character’s “dreams” of being troubled by something big and cat-like in her sleep. To see what could have been a tawdry dream sequence handled so well and in a “fairly” understated fashion was actually very instructional for me... I was expecting a bit more flash and bang from a studio who have, on occasion, been a lot less subtle in the past.

The Vampire Lovers is definitely a keeper and a spinner in terms of future DVD commitment, boasting a stunningly attractive cast, effective atmosphere, evocative score and more than competent performances, not least from stand outs Ingrid Pitt and Peter Cushing. This one will definitely go in my top-ten Hammer movies list and I am now faced with the somewhat harder challenge of finding copies of the two sequels in their correct aspect ratios... something which I understand is not as easy a prospect as I might at first have expected.

Mr. Moto’s Gamble

Memento Moto

Mr. Moto’s

Gamble

1938 USA

Directed by

James Tinling

20th Century Fox

Region 1

Well that was an interesting little movie experience.

Courtesy of the numerically challenged 20th Century Fox, I cracked open the second of their two Mr. Moto boxed editions and began by watching this one, the third entry in the series. Yes, that’s right maths fans. Due to the what-the-fudge-are-you-smoking nature of the people who put together and marketed the two Mr. Moto Collections, Box 1 contains movies 1, 2, 4 and 5 (but not in that order, just to confuse you even more) and Box 2 contains 3, 6, 7 and 8 (again, not in that order). Fans of sequential numbering systems and chronological continuity had best avoid Fox box sets unless they want to wade into the research first, methinks.

Anyway... Mr. Moto’s Gamble, the third in the Japanese detective’s film series as played by Peter Lorre... is certainly the oddest of the Moto films I’ve seen so far and, I suspect, certainly the most “out of kilter” one I’ll see. Why? Well because it’s a Charlie Chan movie, that’s why! No really! It’s quite literally a Charlie Chan movie... here’s the story behind the movie as I understand it.

Warner Oland’s Chan Movies were making big money but Oland was drinking more and going through a messy divorce with his wife. He walked off set a couple of times on his new film Charlie Chan at the Ringside due to disputes with the studio over the condition of the working environment and only the best part of 3 days were in the can before the plug was pulled.

When it became clear that Oland wasn’t going to come back easily, Fox retooled it to be the third in their new Mr. Moto series. And by retool I do mean literally cross out a couple of names on the script and hand it back to everybody to carry on filming... there’s nothing like subtlety when rewriting a script - and this was nothing like subtlety. Filming resumed, the film was released to critical acclaim and good box office, Oland was wooed back to Fox and signed for three more Chan pictures but before starting work on them he went to spend time with his mother in Sweden and promptly died from Bronchial Pneumonia... enter Sidney Toler!

So what does that mean for Mr. Moto’s Gamble, as Charlie Chan at the Ringside quickly became?

Well, it meant quite a lot actually in terms of the tone of the film and, also, a character crossover from the Chan series. In the Moto films which came before and after this, and as I’ve noted in my reviews, Moto is nothing like the Charlie Chan character. He doesn’t do things according to the law, quite often killing a suspect to further the investigation of the truth in the most ruthless manner while “getting away with it” and often getting into quite physical Judo fights with any opponents stupid enough to take him on...

But not in this one. This one, while he does retain quite a bit of the mannerisms and character of the Moto we have known from before (Peter Lorre is too great an actor to let that kind of stuff slip) he is more Chan like in his detachment from the physical action... something Oland’s Chan usually left to Keye Luke, playing Lee Chan (Number One Son). A couple of Judo sequences have been hastily injected into this one but you can tell that these weren’t part of the original set up and they kind of hang about on the fringes of the movie and could easily be spliced in independently of the main narrative.

Another Chan characteristic is the amazing aphorisms that the Chan actors always delivered. Like I said, they just crossed out the Chan name in the script and wrote in Moto’s because on any number of occasions, Peter Lorre delivers, in his own style, a number of those little sayings that make Chan fans smile.

Thirdly, but by no means lastly, we have Keye Luke. Here we have a crossover movie created by the rewrite, because in this movie Keye Luke is in it and, yes, he is playing Charlie’s Number One Son Lee Chan... Moto promises to write to Lee’s illustrious father to cover for him coming to Moto’s detective lessons.

So yeah, the film plays out like a standard Charlie Chan film but this is a Chan film from the Oland era... and as such it is top notch.

There’s some great stuff shoehorned into this tale of murder at the boxing ring, including one of the most creative newspaper montages I’ve yet seen in one of these old black and whites. Instead of spinning or dissolving or wiping, in one sequence the newspaper front pages are cut into four horizontal strips. Four rectangles which are rotated to bring up the next newspaper edition on the next rectangular strip-face. Brilliant and creative stuff from when it was cheaper to do stuff in-camera.

Also, there are some amazing faces turning up in this one. It wasn’t long after I’d recognised that the thug/heavy standing in the background and occasionally saying a few words was a pre-fame Lon Chaney Jr, that I realised another major player in this movie was John Hamilton... who a decade or two later would be filling the shoes of Perry White opposite George Reeve’s in the hit TV show The Adventures of Superman. And then, if that wasn’t enough, you’ve got Ward Bond and Chan regular character actor Howard Huber playing this movies frustrated police inspector! Brilliant stuff. And then.... and then I recognised that John Hamilton’s employee was played by... oh, heck I don’t even know his name. But he was the financial clerk in the Bailey’s Buildings and Loan in It’s A Wonderful Life. What a great cast!

Mr. Moto’s Gamble is a great film, if not a great deal like a regular Mr. Moto film. Definitely one to watch if you’re a fan of either the Chan or Moto series though. It’s definitely entertaining in that way that only a pre-1940s, cynical but funny detective movie can be. Check this one out if you only ever want to watch one of them. Looking forward to watching the sixth in the series sometime next week!

Mightier Than The Wardh?

The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh

aka A Blade of the Ripper

aka Next! Italy/Spain 1971

Directed by Sergio Martino

Shameless Screen Entertainment

Region 0

Before I get into this review proper, I’d just like to give a huge shout out of thanks to Shameless Screen Entertainment for sending me a review copy of their new release of one of my all-time favourite gialli. Since this is the first UK release of this on DVD, I’ll try to refrain from peppering this review with the usual spoilers.

Whenever you see two or more of the names Edwige Fenech, Ivan Rassimov and George Hilton sharing the same billing on a movie directed by the great Sergio Martino, you know you’re in for a treat... and Martino’s second proper feature, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, sets the trend for these remarkable movies as a) it was his first giallo and b) it stars all three of these understandably famous genre actors.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that this movie, apart from being one of my personal favourites, is one of the truly great non-Argento gialli ever made. It’s definitely a standout movie (as anyone who’s seen it and knows the genre well will probably confirm) but I think it also, in many ways, helped set the style that the generic giallo-thriller would aspire to over the years. Made only two years after Argento’s breakthrough movie, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, this movie definitely sets a high benchmark when it comes to a lot of the visual and audio props which the Italian giallo has come to be known for over the decades and, although it does play with the elements initially explored and then popularised by Mario Bava and Dario Argento... it penetrates past the surface of standard homage (which is what a lot of the early gialli tended to be in some ways) and really pushes the limits as to what can be done with all those little stylistic devices which still makes the genre so beloved by its fans (myself included).

It’s a film that uses those devices but does so to further explore the boundaries of what can be done in the format... or at least throw out the gauntlet to other directors as to what directions the genre could be taken in. If Dario Argento is the D.W. Griffith of the giallo movie, then Sergio Martino is this genres Orson Welles and The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh is definitely the Citizen Kane of giallo. A Citizen Kane in the sense that it utilises a whole host of camera techniques and ways of telling the story which in itself becomes almost a summary of where that particular strand of Italian cinema is at that point... all encapsulated in one, vastly entertaining movie.

The film starts out with one of the first of many little sequences which you’ll recognise as turning up in other, later gialli which were obviously “inspired” by this movie... a man kerb crawling, on the look out for a “lady of the night” to keep him company. He picks a young lady up who undresses in the car (this movie definitely doesn’t shy away on it’s nudity quotient) and then promptly finds herself gorily slashed by the driver/murderer. Immediately following this, the movie does a seventies freeze-frame and a quote from Sigmund Freud appears on the screen. I’d like to think this was a really pertinent quote which gives the audience an insight into the mind of the killer but, in all honesty, I suspect this was just studio/directorial flim-flam to attempt to justify to the audience the large quantities of nudity, death and sexual fetish they are about to see up on the screen for the rest of the movie. This movie must have been a bit of an eye-opener for the majority of audiences back in Italy in 1971 I suspect.

I mention sexual fetish because that is what the “strange vice” referred to in the title is referencing in association with the titular character Julie Wardh... played by giallo legend Edwige Fenech.

Now then, I have to pause a moment here to say a quick word about my favourite giallo actress, the wonderful Edwige. There are many great and beautiful women in the history of the Italian giallo... I might mention the likes of Nieves Navarro (aka Susan Scott), Anita Strindberg or Florinda Bolkan, but Edwige Fenech has got so much going for her that she really stands out in these kinds of movies. A brilliant personality she can play smart, strong (as she does in the excellent Strip Nude For Your Killer), slightly evil or intensely vulnerable (as she does in this movie) and she also sports another standout pre-requisite for appearing in the Italian Giallo genre... she looks gorgeous naked. As you’ll see when you watch this movie (and yes, as I write this review I am, indeed, drinking a cup of tea from my Edwige Fenech in The Case of the Bloody Iris Mug... yeah, I’m sad).

So anyway, after that digression, where was I... oh yeah, we meet Mrs. Wardh and when someone uses the words “sexual pervert”, we are treated to a flashback of Mrs. Wardh and another main player in this movie (and the genre in general) Ivan Rassimov... playing a character called Jean. He and Edwige are in a forest and getting into some extremely rough sex in the rain... it’s all so beautifully shot and features a haunting flashback leitmotif on the soundtrack, courtesy of score composer Nora Orlandi.

We pop out of the flashback soon enough and we join Mrs. Wardh, the wife of a successful political secretary, as she wanders around her apartment. And it’s here that the voyeuristic style of the camerawork which paces the film really begins to come into it’s own as it wanders around the apartment, following our main protagonist only very languidly, allowing her to wander off of screen without being in a hurry to catch her. The shot compositions in this film mainly seems to be built around angles and movements that highlight upright sections in the frame and this is particularly enhanced and played against in this particular apartment set where the wallpaper is all based on horizontal stripes... which are then blatantly truncated and split into vertical sections... which I’m sure I’ve seen Martino favour as a stylistic choice on more than one occasion in his movies.

In this scene this kind of slow lulling, splitting of the shot is brilliantly rewarded as we see Edwige exit right of shot into another room and... while the camera is still, languidly trying to catch up to the intersection where this character split off to the right, she returns entering screen right and going into a room opposite her (screen left) but this time she is naked... since she’s had time to remove her clothing while the camera slowly wends its way to the back of the apartment. This little shock of naked flesh against the horizontal stripes intersected by the upright composition sends a little jolt into the visual cortex of the viewer and it’s clever little tricks of perception like this one which are dotted throughout Martino’s gialli that make his films stand head and shoulders above most of the rest of the pack of the directors working in this genre at the time.

And those beautiful, vertical based compositions really pervade the atmosphere of the film and make this particular giallo an absolute joy to watch. There’s even a Psycho styled shower murder where the naked, young lady in question is seen inside the confines of the shower curtain... but instead of staging this shot in the traditional manner, Martino even here has three plains to the shower curtain so said victim can be beautifully framed in her own upright vertical section.

Another stylistic flourish which becomes very apparent in this particular sequence is the fact that there are three different styles of camera viewpoint going on. Number one being the audience/voyeur/third person narrative way of shooting a shot and the other two being hand held, rapidly moving POV shots which seem to alternate between killer POV and victim POV during the murder sequences... going so far as to turn the camera upside down as the victim in the shower dies from her stab wounds.

And the more this movie plays out... the better it gets. After a bizarre “dress ripping” party scene very early on in the picture... where two naked women end up wrestling... we are treated to another flashback scene between Edwige and Ivan where Mrs. Wardh’s particular brand of BDSM (that’s the modern politically correct terminology for what a lot of us would simply call good old, plain S & M) is made clear when, after Jean has done pouring a bottle of some kind of alcoholic substance over Mrs. Wardh’s naked body, he smashes the bottle over her and the shower of glass on her body is used by Jean to cut her body as he has sex with her, to highlight her blood fetish to the audience in what is actually a really beautifully shot scene (I’d expect nothing less of Martino). It’s all handled in loving slow motion... this in direct contrast to the way in which this character is presented in the present/non-flashback level of the story in the previous party scene, pulled to our attention in a crashing and arresting three quarter to close up shot which is in some ways a little reminiscent of the way Sergei Eisenstein would pull out stray “characters” from a crowd rather than just zoom in on them (which he possibly wouldn’t have been able to do anyway when he was making such famous movies such as Strike and Battleship Potemkin). To be fair, Martino does use a zoom here and in a lot of places in the movie, but the way he uses it is with an intensity and passion that never once makes its use feel overused. This is all good stuff.

Even the more familiar trappings of the giallo format are exquisitely mastered and rendered almost super-real by Martino’s techniques. The shiny, black gloved hands of the killer and the glint of a highly polished razor blade are done so stylishly that one can’t help but wonder if the original US title of this movie, Blade of the Ripper, wasn’t inspired purely by the visual style of the movie.

Now I’ve never really appreciated George Hilton much but my friend really likes him (well he kind of looks like him actually so maybe that explains it) and he certainly seems to appear in some good gialli... and here he’s yet another possible suspect as the killer... along with Ivan Rassimov and... oh, no. I’m not giving away all the suspects because, even though at times this particular giallo looks like it’s given up all it’s secrets... it owes a little more than just a shower scene to Alfred Hitchcock and it has a few little tricks up its sleeve towards the end of the picture which you might not quite see coming... and I don’t want to spoil those for you here. But these are all par for the course for the giallo fan and the solution and reveal of the solution to this movie is bound to make most fans of the genre smile.

Another thing that will make fans of the genre smile is one of a series of threatening notes Mrs. Wardh is sent throughout the course of the movie. It ends with a phrase which was to become the title of another great Sergio Martino directed giallo starring both Fenech and Rassimov... Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key! Perfect.

And to top it off, naturally, we have Nora Orlandi’s incredible score which ranges from bubbly exuberance to deeply haunting (such as the leitmotif lead melody structure I suggested earlier for the flashback sequences) and this really deserves a more commercial release than the extremely limited (double figures?) release by Hexachord... a release, I heard through the grapevine, that was so limited because it wasn’t known at the time who owned the rights to the music. I have a bootleg of this a record producer gave me once but someone like Digitmovies really needs to do a proper commercial run on it because this score is so brilliant and would sell well... especially after some of it was included in Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 2.

The Shameless edition of this movie boasts a beautiful print and an excellent transfer and I have to say, although I’ve seen this movie before, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this movie looking any better than it does here. The preview copy I was sent is one of the “check discs” for the company but... if the final release is anything like the quality on here then fans of this particular giallo are really in for a treat.

There’s also a fistful of great little extras which include pre-menu trailers for some of Shameless up-and-coming releases (which I won’t spoil by revealing here), a new interview with director Sergio Martino, a brief but well put together mini-history on Edwige Fenech and a “trailer park” featuring the promo trailers for the first 30 movies in the Shameless stable.

As usual, Shameless have done a phenomenal job here which I’m sure their loyal fanbase will appreciate.

A-dJust-Ment to say I love you...

The Adjustment Bureau

2011 USA

Directed by George Nolfi

Now playing

at UK cinemas.

Philip K. Dick is not the easiest person to adapt for the moving image... actually, scratch that, I’ll rephrase that last little, perhaps obvious, statement and see if I can’t hint at the real problem with this idea here.

Ready? Here goes...

Philip K. Dick is not the easiest person to adapt for the moving image when the main concerns of that moving image are to provide spectacular special effects and kinetic action to the youngest possible audience imaginable.

There... that did it.

Philip K. Dick is very much a concept man and I think the reason his work has gotten to be a hot property in an age where his stories could be told more credibly with modern technology is because what he really does is talk about small ideas about people and their relationships with each other in a sci-fi milieu which allows him to explore those ideas to a degree unavailable to him in a more vanilla genre of fiction (although I loved his unpublished until after his death, early serious non-sci-fi novels as much, if not more, than his more recognised body of work... it has to be said). Of course... once those little conceptual nuggets are mined by the screenwriters, the evil, money-grabbing circus that is “Modern Hollywoodland” then wants to add action and scope and epicness into the mix... something that really is kinda missing the point with Dick’s work. His stories were always about being human... Hollywood is all about “Kablaam and Dollars” (Hmm... Kablaam and Dollars. Think I’ll run with that at some point).

Subsequently his works are, more than often, quite heavily changed for their big screen counterparts. Screamers is probably the closest to its source material (the short story Second Variety) but even the classic (and in my book, greatest) Phil K. Dick inspired movie Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) proves that you can take the kernel of Dick’s ideas and run with them in a slightly different direction but still have something which is very much in the style of Philip K. Dick. But if you’re not careful, the director and writers will completely miss the point and the humour of the original story, as they did with the mind-numbingly awful Total Recall ("loosely" based on We Can Remember It For You Wholesale) and turn in a movie which is just so much brainless drivel (and I’d expect better from Veerhoven!).

I’m very glad to report, however, that George Nolfi’s big screen version of Dick’s short story Adjustment Team is one of those movies that, while changing pretty much all the window dressing on the story (married salesman becomes single, successful political candidate) the main premise and, basically, the soul of Philip K. Dick's idea is very much adhered to throughout the course of the story.

Not only is it adhered to, but Nolfi’s lightness of touch with the characters and their brilliant portrayal on screen as played by a whole group of brilliant actors top lined by Matt Damon, Emily Blunt and Terence Stamp (greatly supported by some really sparkling character actors who I hope will get bigger roles as time goes by... serious kudos to John Slattery and Anthony Mackie who really carry the humour and gravitas of the movie off in wonderful ways) actually pushes the humanity even more into the foreground than Dick went in this particular story and ensures that this film is, essentially, all about love. And like all good stories of that nature... it all hinges on... a kiss.

Interestingly, while the Adjustment Team of the story were definitely “sci-fi” in the strictest sense, Nolfi (who also wrote and produced this movie) has left the hardcore workings of The Adjustment Bureau a little more up in the air so it can also, depending on the personal interpretation of various audience members, stand up to theological ideas and concepts of God and angels but without ramming that possibility down the throats of any atheist or agnostic sections of the audience. This is a nice touch in that it can mean all things to all people.

There’s even an ending which suggests the powers that be are as much a part of their plan and can hence be rewritten, just as much as the population of our planet who are all part of “The Plan” without really knowing it.

Sure, there are a couple of plot holes and mis-steps along the way and despite a “magical” foot chase towards the end of the movie, this film probably won’t get many repeat viewings for action buffs (I doubt this is the movie Hollywood were expecting or wanting, to be honest) and so I’m not expecting it to do particularly well at the box office... but for all that this movie is an honest to goodness love story which feels like the real deal (despite the little on-screen time the two lovers have together).

If you like simple love stories wrapped up in a little bit of sci-fi and a little bit of magic... then you won’t be putting a step wrong if you go take a look at this movie. Well done ot the director and I hope he gets another directing gig soonest. If not... something, somewhere needs a little adjustment, perhaps?

Hourglass... In The Middle Of Hourstreet

The Hourglass Sanitorium

1973 Poland

Directed by Wojciech Has

Mr. Bongo Region 0

Slight Warning: There are, kind of, spoilers in here but, frankly, with a movie like this... events that appear to be happening on screen are all open to interpretation anyway.

The Hourglass Sanitorium is a film by Wojciech Has, the director of The Saragossa Manuscript, which so captivated me a week or so ago (see here). Based, if not completely adapted on a collection of stories by Bruno Schulz's called Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (plus a few others of his works, it seems - yes, I actually looked something up!) this film, like the former film, presents a series of surreal and sometimes challenging vignettes which seem to easily interlink but which defy, perhaps, anything other than a subjective conclusion from its audience.

I actually found this one quite mind-numbing and challenging in a few places, although much of it is also quite inspiring in equal measure.

Starting off with a shot of some sky swirling around as the credits start to play out, the shot pulls back to reveal that this is a view through the window of a train in back projection which, as this kind of view and movement is completely unnatural and, frankly, uneasy... immediately sets up the audience for a ride into a dreamlike state. It’s a very strange set of passengers in this train, full of wretches and drop outs and... well you know the opening of Stardust Memories where Woody Allen gets on the train filled with strange people instead of taking the train with Sharon Stone and various other beautiful people on it? Well I’d rather be on that train than this one!

The conductor turns up to let the person who turns out to be our main protagonist off the train and, although I hadn’t twigged it yet on his first appearance, it’s pretty clear to me now - at least as I interpret the film - that this is the locomotive equivalent of the ferry across the River Styx and the conductor is definitely the Charon figure in this movie.

Our “hero” gets off the train and finds a ruined but still used sanitorium which at first seems to be completely deserted and when he finally finds a nurse she is straightening her clothes out like she’s just been caught having sex. She pretty much acts like this whenever she turns up in the film. Our main protagonist, whose name is Józef, is here to visit his father and so he goes first to see the doctor who is in charge of his parent. It’s made clear that his father has already died somewhere else, but here at the sanitorium the clocks are put back so that, at the sanitorium, he hasn’t died as yet. He is, however, sleeping. Okay... things are starting to get a little surreal and it’s probably easy to see how someone like me can get hooked on this movie so quickly.

Our protagonist starts to wander from room to room in the sanitorium but each time he goes through a door it seems to be to a new scenario or location (some of them big, external locations) and each one seems set in a different part of Józef’s childhood. He soon discovers that he can shift from one “scenario” or room to the next by crawling under the bed and coming out the other end in a different world... or sometimes by crawling under the table.

This is a strange but mostly rewarding film. However, the nonsensical philosophy spouted by Józef throughout the film did start to wear through my patience after a while and there were definitely some sequences that were a quite gruelling watch for me. But I really didn’t mind that much because there was so much great imagery on offer to distract me when the going got tough... or at least mildly intolerable. Things like...

A beautiful and often naked or topless woman with a very enthusiastic Barbara Windsor giggle (who I recognised, by her giggle, from a part she plays in The Saragossa Manuscript). A series of “live” mannequins/automatons, one of which is knocked over so part of the front of its head is knocked open over one eyeball (revealing a load of wiring and automatic workings which then begin to bleed red and bloody. Józef’s father self-administering an enema in his bed while in rapt conversation with his son... and so on. This film has little treasures in it if you are willing to put up with the monotony of nonsense spilling from Józef’s mouth. Unfortunately, I found it hard to sympathise with a character who seems increasingly näive and idiotic as the movie progresses.

By around the half way mark I began to realise that Józef was actually, probably dead... at least thats my interpretation which was reenforced by an ending that sees Józef take on the mantle of conductor of the train... presumably he is the new Charon figure for this particular corner of heaven or hell.

This film is a bit of a mixed bag but I’m really glad I’ve seen it. The sometimes over-talky dialogue is tempered by the variety of lovely bosoms on offer... hey, look, I’m a guy okay. This movie was an even more blatantly sexualised film than The Saragossa Manuscript and I liked this aspect of the movie.

I’d certainly recommend this movie to all lovers of the bizarre and surreal (of which I include myself) but with a word of caution... the rich visuals are tempered with unwelcome bouts of aggravated verbal assault which occasionally lapse the film back into a miasma of tedium. Enter this sanitorium freely but at your peril.

Liam Nesia

Unknown 2011

UK/Germany/

France/Canada/

Japan/USA

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

Now playing

at UK cinemas.

Warning! Spoilers? Oh yes, big ones. Not really spoilers as such if you’ve seen the trailer because... well, you’ll see. If you really want to know nothing more than you can already figure out from the trailer then stay away from reading any of this review.

Hmmm... I remember watching the trailer for this movie at the cinema and as the first thought popped into my head “Woah... they’ve done another Taken or, at the very least, a new Taken rip-off”... the rest of the trailer played out and that rather hopeful thought process had unfortunately changed to... “Blimey, that’s an old plot they’re digging up again. Have people really never seen this hook before?” Still, regardless of the old 1940s-nobody-remembers-who-I-am-not-even-my-wife plot line, it did still look like it was trying to mine the same vein of “thrillcium” that Taken had opened up and, since I’d really liked that movie... there was no way I was wanting to miss this movie at the cinema.

Besides, I’d already seen Rango earlier that day and was singularly unimpressed... so I figured a big, shouty-jumpy-punchy action movie with lots of pulse-pounding percussion effects could not even begin to disappoint me... how wrong I was.

Unknown, it turns out, is a classic case of a movie trailer giving you all the answers you need to work out, within the first few minutes of the film, that movie’s final solution. You know, from the trailer, that there’s a twist... the trailer shows you Liam Neeson having an accident, not remembering stuff and then, when he does remember who he is, his wife doesn’t recognise him and he has been replaced by another man. That much is simple and very much like those old black and white movies from the 40s that I used to watch as a growing lad.

They really shouldn’t have given this much away because, frankly, the movie already has a transparent plot leading to one inevitable conclusion, which I will reveal in just a minute (you have been warned). Letting you know all the set up in the trailer before it’s even played out in the movie quite easily leads you to deduce the correct conclusions just from the way the characters behave (more pertinently, what they don’t say to each other that a normal couple might) and the way their body language works... something I’m sure the actors were very careful about, trying to pull the wool over the audiences eyes while at the same time trying to stay true to their character’s backstory... something that can’t be that easy to do without actually lying to the audience (well at least they can’t be accused of that).

But because you “know the score” you really do know what’s going on before even the opening credits are finished and the accident which sets up the film has even taken place. Like M. Night Shyamalan’s films The Village and The Sixth Sense, this is a movie which really wears it’s ending on its sleeve.

Okay, here we go then. Car crash. Neesons mind wiped but then he remembers he’s Dr. Martin Harris who’s about to give an important lecture on... oh, I don’t remember, something scientific. But his wife doesn’t remember him and she’s already got another replacement Dr. Martin Harris with her to deliver the all important lecture... not to mention that Neeson’s website has photos of this other guy and there are, wait for it, family photos. Conspiracy signals right here, yeah? They even have family photos. And most of this is information you can get easily enough by just watching the trailer - marketing dilemma... unfortunately you can’t sell the hook because the hook doesn’t hold up under scrutiny for longer than 5 minutes without giving itself away... but without trailering your hook then you don’t have anything unique to say about your movie other than “Ooh. You all went to see Taken and The Bourne Identity. We’d like similar amounts of money chucked at us too please. Come see our wannabe!”... so unfortunately... you have to trailer your flimsy hook!

And to ram the obvious final solution down your throats just that little bit harder, the “flashbacks” are treated with some very dreamlike effects to them. Seriously, this goes beyond the normal semiotics of cinema with the treatment of the film stock in these sections. Now, okay, this could be a stylistic flourish of the director but, frankly, my suspicions have already been more than aroused by the trailer. And when I say my suspicions have been aroused I mean the trailer is dancing naked around me talking dirty and tickling me under the chin aroused. I know these aren’t normal flashbacks we’ve got here, they’re fake memories and, even in the unlikely instance that they had indeed been flashbacks... then why the heck is Mr. Liam-I’m-a-simple-married-doctor-giving-a-lecture-here-folks-Neeson so good at keeping the enemy at bay with his jumpy, shouty, fighty stuff and his stunty-drivey-crashy stuff? Give me a break.

Okay... so I hope by now anyone still reading this will have cracked the so-called spoiler for this movie but, just in case you havent, I’ll spell it out for you. Yes, Liam Neeson is a bad guy assassin on a mission with his “wife” under cover. Yes the accident has wiped his memory and he’s taken on the fake memories of his own cover story and yes, the film then takes a terrible turn for the worse because once Liam figures out who he is and why he’s there, he then tries to stop it taking place. What? Honestly, half an hour with Diane Kruger warding off danger (so good in Inglourious Basterds but, like Neeson, wasted here) and he’s ready to switch sides and do the right thing? Why? What epiphany happened here that the audience wasn’t privy too? Talk about writing yourself into a corner and then running through the wet paint quickly in the hopes that nobody will notice your clumsy, writerly footprints.

Ok... let’s try to focus on anything good here. Ok... Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger and Frank Langella are all stand out here, although Langella’s a little bit over the top, if truth be told. But the one who really comes out on top here is... Bruno Ganz! Yep, that’s right. You read correctly. They somehow managed to convince the great German actor Bruno Ganz to be in this poor-man’s Bourne rip-off. And, once I’d gotten over the shock of how old he’s looking now (was half expecting that angel from Wings of Desire and its sequel to fall to earth on screen again, clutching his suit of armour) I realised that he is the only character I can respect in this mess of a movie. A seriously well-written and intelligent, considered performance from Ganz here and almost (almost) worth the price of the ticket... if only he’d had more screen time.

And that’s about it, I think, for both the good stuff and the bad stuff when it comes to this particular movie. Unknown is an okayish, no brainer actioner which will probably leave you fairly unsatisfied because it’s so easy to figure out what’s going on so quickly in the movie. A third rate version of The Bourne Identity... which makes it a second rate Salt in my book! If you like seeing the slow transformation of solid actor Neeson into Mr. Mature Action Hero... then you’d be better off staying away from this one and waiting until they’ve got Taken 2 in the can. And, yes, that movie is already in pre-production and awaiting shooting. Lotsa shooting is my guess ;-)

Home, Home on the Rango

Rango 2011 USA

Directed by Gore Verbinski

Now playing

at UK cinemas.

Warning! Yeah... there are probably spoilers in here. If you haven’t seen it by now though you needn’t bother, I reckon.

Unwarning! Ooh, no. You’re okay. Just re-read it and it’s curiously spoiler free. Drive through at your leisure.

Ok... so as I type these words it’s a little under one week since I saw Rango at the cinema (by the time this goes up on my blog it will probably be closer to two because I have a bit of a backlog here at the moment... normal service will be resumed as soon as probable). Now my friend who I went with was laughing away at it and having hysterics but I’m sad to say that it didn’t have anywhere near the same reaction with me (I honestly don’t remember cracking a smile... but then again, I rarely do these days) and the really worrying thing for me, having to write up the film one week later, is that I couldn’t remember anything about it and I just had to watch the two trailers to kinda jog my memory... oh, yeah. It was that one.

Now I don’t see a whole lot of animated fayre these days... I’m more an old school Tom & Jerry or Bugs Bunny kinda person if truth be told (can someone please tell me if my suspicions that carrot chomping Bugs Bunny was based on cigar smoking Grouch Marx are correct?) but I have seen a few and I don’t dislike all of them. I quite liked the first two Toy Story films and I also quite liked the first and third Shrek movies (havent seen number 4 yet). And I absolutely loved Monsters Vs Aliens so, since the movie in question is called Rango... well, I was already to see a brilliant parody of the Django films. Since I knew this was a Western remake of Chinatown starring Johnny Depp as a chameleon lizard, I was waiting to see him drag a coffin around in cavalry uniform and do all sorts of Django-like things.

Sadly, this was not to be. Even though Rango director Gore Verbinski and composer Hans Zimmer both collaborated in a sequence in the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie that parodied the Spaghetti Western quite blatantly and which was, musically speaking, just a little too close to comfort to Ennio Morricone’s scoring for Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West. Seriously people... I know temp-trackitus is a modern and seemingly incurable disease but I’m surprised Morricone didn’t sue their asses, the music is that close in structure. Have a listen to “As A Judgement” on any of the Once Upon A Time In The West albums and then listen to “Parlay” on the album release for Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End if you don’t believe me. Astonishing! Did money change hands here?

Anyway... back to my review proper. You’d think Verbinski and Zimmer would do a more than passable parody of those same Western shadings in Rango but, while the tropes and genre markers of various American and Italian Westerns are all present and correct, the film doesn’t quite fall into the usual postmodern trap of eclectic appropriation for the sake of hitting the mark for a certain kind of audience (probably people like me, I’m ashamed to admit) and, while it is to be applauded that story and characterisation are pushed to the fore (as they should be) I personally found myself missing the blatant and, more specific, style of parody which the cinema going audience has become accustomed to in the last twenty or so years.

Now for anyone else these strong points of the movie, and there are many strong points on offer here, would be a sign of how good this movie is... and it is a good movie, whether I liked it or not. A solid piece of movie-making which, if the reaction of my friend and the judgement of other reviewers are anything to go by, is also fortunate enough to be a popular cinema movie and, therefore, a money spinner.

Let’s check the boxes then... Great animation. Check. A microcosmos of a world created for these characters that holds itself together by its own logic and doesn’t fall over when you tug at the strings. Check. A good selection of voice performances. Yes, it has that too. An actual story. Surprisingly another affirmative... so yeah, there’s obviously a lot of good things on offer here. And I obviously should have been really happy with this movie... but I wasn’t. And I can’t quite figure out why, to be honest.

Maybe it’s that I saw it as a movie with an over-reliance on slapstick humour that’s possibly the problem (Ooh. Look at the funny lizard running all over the place arms akimbo and making funny noises!). Or maybe it’s the fact that I found the whole thing emotionally cold and a turn off to the point that... even after the brilliant emotional set-up of the opening sequence with Rango and his, err, companions... I still didn’t care about what happened to any of the characters in this movie. I know... I’m being harsh.

Ok... so I’m going to try and play it fair here. If you want a recommendation from me to go see Rango then you’re not going to get it. But... well this movie seems so well loved by people that I’m going to do something I’ve only ever done here once before and point you in the direction of somebody else’s review so you can see the flip side of my scarred face of the Rango coin. Check out @SquidyUK’s review of Rango here if you want a more enthusiastic and more in-depth look about the various strong points of this movie. Because you won’t find me taking a second look at this movie again on here.

Dead Residents

The Resident 2011

UK/USA

Directed by Antti Jokinen

Still playing at UK cinemas.

Beware... I might just Hammer home those spoilers on this one.

I was really keeping my fingers crossed that I’d have a good time with The Resident because it’s Hammer’s second theatrical release after their rebirth and... well I really wasn’t as impressed as I'd hoped I’d be by their first “new era” movie. Let Me In, their vibrant but ultimately dumbed down adaptation of Let The Right One In played more like an action-packed remake of the superior Swedish movie version than as an attempt to address

any of the shortcomings that the Swedish version

had in adaptation.

And... for a while there... I really thought The Resident might just live up to my hopes.

For starters... it’s got a pretty good cast of actors... and they’re all giving great performances and acting their socks off. There’s Hilary Swank who, it must be said, I only ever saw in Brian De Palma's unsatisfying buy enjoyable adaptation of James Ellroy’s brilliant novel, The Black Dahlia... she was pretty convincing for the most part.

Then there’s Jeffrey Dean Morgan who I loved as both The Comedian in Zack Snyder’s brave attempt to bring Watchmen to life and as the leader of The Losers. He plays someone who seems to be a genuinely nice guy until... aw heck. They show you themselves what’s really going on very early in the movie... you can figure it out.

And then, the really fabulous piece of casting on this one is the legendary Christopher Lee, returning to the company (or at least a bought version of it) that made him a star name back in the 50s and the decades that followed. Now this really is a coup for Hammer, which is why it’s so disappointing to have to report that, although he does his usual, great acting job... his part is fairly slim in this one and his whole character comes across as criminally underused, it must be said. You get the feeling he’s been wasted in this part which, considering the debt Hammer also owe to him, is a bit of a blow for fans of the “old Hammer”.

Still, all three of these actors do a really good job and, on top of this, the film starts off really well with a brilliant and aggressively kinetic title sequence which, for a while at least, is matched by a similarly aggressive and fast paced editing style with exactly the kinds of “cut on movement” that people pre-Bond films used to decry as one of the ultimate editing no-nos.

The film tells the story of a nurse, played by Swank, who goes to live in a new apartment following her split up with her last boyfriend. Unfortunately, someone is spying on her... and as it turns out, drugging her and doing naughty things to her while she is knocked out... and the film comes a little unstuck very early on when the silhouette of the stalker in her apartment appears on screen and it’s fairly obvious from the actor’s build and posture that it’s the aforementioned Jeffrey Dean Wright who’s playing the psycho in this movie.

Even so, though, the whole atmosphere and setting up of the film is expertly handled for the first half an hour and everything is going great guns until... it gets to the point very quickly which I shall call The Resident’s “Vertigo” moment. That is to say...

You know that scene in Hitchcock’s Vertigo where Hitch has Kim Novak’s character deliberately give the game away to the audience as to her identity about twenty minutes before the end of the movie so that everyone knows what's going on? I believe there’s still a lot of debate to this day as to whether revealing everything so early on denied the movie a better twist ending and if, maybe, that revelation should have been held back until the last five minutes. Whether or not that was the right time to reveal that twist to tweak audience attention in the last reel of Vertigo or not is something I’m sure everyone who watches it has an opinion about... but whether it’s too early or not isn’t something anyone can really have an answer for.

One thing I do know, though, is that The Resident has a very similar Vertigo juncture where earlier scenes in the film are played out from a different character’s viewpoint but that, after about only a half an hour of the film has played out before it deliberately tips it’s hat to the audience... not that the audience had much trouble deducing who the identity of the “resident psycho” was after that earlier silhouette shot, of course.

I’m sure there must have ben some debate as to whether or not to allow that revelation that quickly in this movie but it doesn’t really matter ultimately because unfortunately, once this movie has tipped it’s hat... the film seems to transform into a fast-paced but curiously ineffective entry into the teenage slasher cycle... or to be more accurate in the case of The Resident, like an extraordinarily badly written teen slasher movie.

And after it does that, of course, there’s no going back with it. The film deteriorates quite rapidly into badly reconstituted stalk and slash cliché and ultimately you may well, like me, find yourself looking at your watch and trying to work out if you can survive the genuinely mind-numbing tedium that this movie has seen fit to turn into.

Oh, it’s not too bad. It probably does okay for the teenage market that this and most other modern movie behemoths are squarely aimed at... and 40 somethings like myself should probably know better than to go and see stuff like this in the first place, to be honest.

I think the real test of this movie can possibly be best summed up in a piece of “overheard” conversation from one talkative lager lout to his beer swilling mate as I was leaving at the end of the movie... “Blimey!” he said, as he walked down the corridor displaying up and coming events in the cinema’s future... “I could have written a better movie than that”. The sad thing about that statement, though, on giving a little further thought to the film in question is... I’d have to say the lad in the main foyer was right. He probably could write a better movie and therein lies one of the undeniable conclusions that this particular piece of popcorn fodder inadvertently pushes home to cinema goers everywhere, no doubt.. that a superb cast and a visually interesting director and cinematographer are, in themselves, not a convincing crutch to hide behind when the quality of the writing suffers. This movie would have gone down really great in the 80s but these days it just seems old fashioned and contextually an unsound base from which to start building your writing blocks on.

Not an essential viewing but certainly an exciting starting point to see if Hammer can learn how to play the game and revitalise what was once a great British studio and turn things around for themselves (given their previous track record for being a leader, of sorts, in British Horror through the decades). Their new movie Wake Wood gets a release on DVD today... lets see if they can do a little better with that one.