John McClane Vs George Bailey Grudge Match

Every time a bell rings,
another terrorist gets his wings...

John McClane Vs George Bailey Grudge Match

So... I got into a disagreement on Twitter last month. Not an argument as such but a slight difference of opinion with a lady I much admire, who I follow on Twitter. One of the many strings to this talented lady’s bow is that she does a podcast about movies with her equally talented husband (I’ve written a review of one of their amazing books here in the past... they’re really great) and on that podcast they were having a debate about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. She takes the stance that it’s not and I take the stance that, it most certainly is but... well, I hate disagreements so I stated my case and left the conversation hastily because, frankly, she gave me an idea about something I could write on the subject and which I could use for Christmas blogging... which is this lonely little article here. ;-)

I got to thinking because, it seems a lot of people take the tack that just because a movie is set during the Christmas season, that doesn’t make it a Christmas movie. Many people will not accept the first two Die Hard movies as traditional Christmas fodder at all. Well, I can sort of see the point if you’re talking about ‘Winter’ movies but... not if the Christmas setting and sentiment of the season suffuses the film with its spirit. For instance, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (which I review here) is not a Christmas movie because it’s set in a snowy locale for much of its running time during the winter... it’s a Christmas movie because parts of it are set around Christmas and include Blofeld giving out deadly Christmas gifts, hope of a future beyond what James Bond has been doing with his life up to now (basically killing people) and, frankly, the most kick ass Bond song ever written by John Barry. No, not that one, I’m talking about the other song which is Christmas themed and shows up in a number of places on the soundtrack in varying forms, Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown? This song, which talks about the magic of Christmas, is sung by Nina with lyrics by Hal David and, yeah, easily the greatest James Bond song ever written. I get it out every Christmas for many spins.

Anyway, I thought to myself, how can I prove to people that Die Hard is a genuine Christmas movie and then I thought... by taking a traditionally loved and accepted Christmas film and showing how, if you compare the two, Die Hard has way more Christmassy elements to it than said example. So George Bailey and his guardian angel Clarence came to my rescue because, frankly, my number one all time favourite Christmas movie is... and I suspect always shall be... It’s A Wonderful Life. There’s no two ways about it... it’s a Christmas movie which blows away all other seasonal films and leaves them standing in the snow. It’s a film I love and could watch over and over again, every December (and I do need to find a decent Blu Ray of it to upgrade to so I can review it for this blog next year).

However, if you’re talking Christmas movies then, in terms of the ornaments and decorations which make a Christmas movie, not to mention the underlying spirit of the film, then Die Hard appears to blow it away like Bruce Willis throwing James Stewart off the roof of the Bailey Building And Loan  and yelling out “Yippee Ki-Yay Frosty Lover”. I’m going to labour now, in a very quick to make point, why Die Hard is more a bona fide Christmas movie than my beloved It’s A Wonderful Life in the possibly misguided hope that this will end the immortal argument of McClane’s Christmas credentials once and for all.

Okay, so it’s an easy thing to do. Just list the Christmassy elements of the two films and let you decide...

So... in the Red Corner, we have Die Hard (reviewed by me here). It’s a film which takes place at Christmas and, get this, the action takes place in a building where a huge office Christmas party is taking place. That party gets brutally gatecrashed by thieves posing as terrorists but, woohoo, the husband of one of the party goers, a cop called John McClane, wants to preserve those Christmassy family values by putting his own life on the line and saving his wife and fellow party goers from Alan Rickman and his gang of thugs. So there are your family values right there but, woah, this film is absolutely littered with Christmas propoganda. I should mention, perhaps, Mr. McClane’s message on the corpse he dresses with a Christmas hat and with the message written on his jumper which says... “Now I have a machine gun. Ho - Ho - Ho!” Heck, he even uses Christmas tape to fasten a gun to his back in one scene. Then there’s the chauffer in the car park playing Christmas rap tunes in his car. And let us not forget the late, great Michael Kamen’s wonderful score which actually takes some traditional song melodies such as Winter Wonderland and writes them into the action and stealth cues as John McClane brings his message of Christmas spirit and death to his enemies. All this, for me, gives the whole film a flavour of Christmas and, while I’m not nuts about this film and don’t hold it in as high regard as a couple of the sequels... if I’m ever going to watch this film on any given year then it has to be between the 1st and 30th December for me, otherwise... it’s just ‘out of season’.

Okay, so... in the gloriously monochromatic corner we have... It’s A Wonderful Life, the greatest Christmas movie of all time. So let’s take a look at the Christmas elements. Okay, so strong family values for sure as George Bailey sacrifices his entire life and stays in Bedford Falls in the pursuit of everybody else’s happiness. Technically not a Christmas thing in and of itself but I’ll let that slide. Okay, so the film starts off, for the first couple of minutes, at Christmas Eve in Bedford Falls and returns to that setting for the last, what... 30 to 40 minutes of the movie? This film is 2 hours and 10 minutes long and the part which just happens to be taking place at Christmas is not even a third of the total running time of the thing. And even then there’s no real interaction with the Christmas festivities in this part... it’s pretty much just one of the Bailey kids practicing a Christmas song in the background of a scene for maybe a minute. And as for music... I think there’s a snatch of Oh Come All Ye Faithful mixed into the opening of the film to point out that it’s December but, well that’s it as far as the score goes into festive territory I think (I have the wonderful CD put out by Kritzerland a few years ago on in the background as I write this). The song they all sing in front of the Christmas tree after the suicidal father decides not to kill himself after all is... the traditional version of Robbie Burns’ Auld Lang Syne, which is pretty much a New Year's song, not a Christmas thing. And then there’s... oh wait, that’s it. There’s hardly any specific symbols of Christmas in this thing other than the warm feeling you get in your heart when all is well (despite a loose end or two)... just like you get a warm feeling in your heart when John McClane’s family unit is safe and he pushes Hans Gruber off the Nakatomi Plaza building. And, for your information, angels are not specifically a Christmas thing, especially not Guardian Angels. This just makes It’s A Wonderful Life a Christian movie, not necessarily a Christmas one.

And there you have it. I personally think they’re both Christmas movies but if you’re going to stand up and attack the festive feel good yuletide slammer that is the yearly Die Hard tradition for, I’m sure, a lot of people then... yeah, well there’s a heck of a lot more of the Christmas trimmings in the Bruce Willis flick than the Jimmy Stewart one (and, like I said, I’m not the biggest fan of the first Die Hard but I recognise it as a well made movie, as you’ll know if you’ve read my review of it). If it comes down to it personally, It’s A Wonderful Life is always going to be getting a good seasonal showing throughout my life, truth be told but, yeah, Die Hard once in a while for the odd December or two, for sure.

So there you go, two Christmas crackers that movie fans will mostly love, I should think but, both equally valid of being termed a Christmas movie, at the absolute least. I’m sure this debate will run and run between people for many years to come but, if you just want the facts, point the naysayers towards this little article... it’ll hopefully save you some time. ;-)

Batman Returns

What A Feline

Batman Returns
USA/UK 1992 Directed by Tim Burton
Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B

Batman: You know, mistletoe can be deadly if you eat it.
Catwoman: But a kiss can be even deadlier if you mean it.

Okay, so my second Christmas movie of the year is Batman Returns, the only sequel that Tim Burton made to one of his own movies (reviewed here), so far. This one retains Michael Keaton, Micheal Gough and Pat Hingle as Bruce Wayne (Batman), Alfred the butler and Commissioner Gordon respectively but also welcomes a whole new cast of actors/characters into the mix. This was the second time a cinema released Batman movie had teamed up super villains to try their luck against the central protagonist, following the 1966 movie starring Adam West. This time around he goes up against Danny DeVito as Oswald Cobblepot, aka The Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer as Selina Kyle aka Catwoman.

The look and feel of the movie is fantastic, far surpassing the first film (which I reviewed here) in pretty much every way. Everything is dark and cold but the way its designed and lit harkens back to, in some ways, a German Expressionist film with, also, a smattering of Russian architecture thrown in, if I’ve got my eye in. It’s also very Christmassy, not just with Gotham under heavy snow in both time settings covered in the film (pre-credits and then the main body of the film 33 years later) but because the whole film is heavily infused with Christmas iconography... mistletoe, Christmas parties, a Christmas tree lighting ceremony and even Michael Keaton’s last lines in the film... are all about the greetings of the season.

So, yeah, out of this loosely fitting tetralogy of movies, it’s this second one by Burton himself which I think is probably the best, although some of the staging and pausing to give various characters big visual moments does seem a little less subtle and inappropriately indulgent by today's standards, perhaps.

The architecture in this is not the only thing that’s post-modern either. The whole film is chock full of references to other things. For instance, Max Schreck’s company cat logo. I mean, I get it, it’s where Selina Kyle is working when she’s ‘killed’ and resurrected as the Catwoman but, honestly, why did they have to use the exact same logo as Felix The Cat. It’s one of a few things which completely popped me out of the movie, continually (because it’s used a lot) when I first saw it. I kept assuming a character would walk on at some point and explain how Felix The Cat was somehow connected to the Batman universe... pretty much expecting this culturally iconic visual theft to be somehow admitted and explained during the course of the film. I guess I was more naive in those days, expecting movie producers to acknowledge it when they outright stole something.

And talking about Max Shreck, here’s was this 24 year old sitting at the cinema, confronted with this movie, wondering why the heck the third of the lead villains, played by Christopher Walken, has been given such a famous name, that of the actor who played the title character in the famous German Expressionist movie Nosferatu - A Symphony Of Horror. I’m there in the audience thinking to myself how cool it is and waiting for one of the characters to explain that Walken’s playing some kind of ancestor of the real life actor but, no, it’s just an outright steal again. It’s been said the look of The Penguin also owes a debt to the look of the title character in the first German Expressionist film The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari and, looking at it now (and especially on some of the posters marketing the film), yeah, I think that might be right... there’s a smattering of  the look of the make up of Werner Krauss in that movie maybe rubbing off in the film here but, I think the look of Walken’s Schreck could also be said to have some similarities. It’ hard to tell for sure but, yeah, like I said... the film more than enters the realm of post-modernistic entertainment.

The chemistry of all the actors in this is great and the performances are... I dunno... maybe slightly dated but very watchable. The film starts off strongly with a set piece backed by a kind of extended 'Christmas jingly lead in' to Danny Elfman’s re-orchestrated Batman theme, which totally plays out the origin of The Penguin before the film has even started properly and one of the things the film does very nicely and quickly is to draw out all the new characters in a brisk, efficient manner. So Walken and DeVito get very quick character sketches which more than do the job. Pfeiffer gets a slightly more protracted story to show the contrast between the shy, ditzy secretary who gets transformed into the full blown super villainess (of a kind, she's not really a bad person) and this kind of approach usually works well. The post death scene after she’s resurrected by cats and wrecks her apartment, before becoming focussed on the extent of where her unhinged mind wants to take her and she transforms herself into Catwoman, is one of my all time favourite 5 minutes of film... with a beautiful introduction of her theme by Elfman which is also one of his greatest pieces of music.

However, it has to be said that her character is one of many ‘classic’ DC characters which have been fairly tampered with in terms of who they are. For instance, Selina Kyle was always more of a bad girl and in no way shy when it came to the original comics in the 1940s (heck, some of her origins in the strip in later incarnations even place her as a sex worker), so as brilliant a change it is in her character here, which really works in the film, it’s not really true to the source. That being said, one thing they stuck to was the underlying romance of her character as far as Batman was concerned... she was always using his attraction to her to get an advantage and even in the first time they meet in the comic, he kinda ‘accidentally’ lets her get away at the end of the story, if memory serves.

Similarly, The Penguin is a greatly changed creation and really nothing like The Penguin at all. Especially in terms of his deformity with fused fingers which form flippers here... that was never a part of Cobblepot’s character although, it was played out in comics at least once after the release of this film.

One of the things which is evident though, with all these new characters being developed, is that Bruce Wayne as a character is hardly expanded on at all and, despite Michael Keaton finally getting top billing in this Batman movie, he has much less to do... although pretty much all his scenes here are absolute gold and, frankly, he’s easily one of the greatest Batman actors we’ve had on screen. That being said, the romance between him and Michelle Pfeiffer is short but nicely played and it feels like a lot more than the screen time would be able to accommodate.

One bizarre character loss was the non return of Billy Dee Williams from the first film as Harvey Dent. Dent was originally supposed to be the Max Schreck role and when Walken came along, the names were changed and the character very slightly re-written. In fact, when Walken’s character has his come uppance at the close of the movie (in a scene I won’t describe here because I want to make this review relatively spoiler free), the original outcome of what Catwoman does to him was to scar him on one side of the face, thus fully bringing on his transformation as Two-Face with Billy Dee Williams heading up the next movie (Two-Face did appear as a lead villain in the third one but Williams’ contract was bought out and somebody else played him... I’ll get to that when I re-watch it and review it). I think maybe they should have just kept Dent as the villain here, all things considered... although Walken is great as Shreck.

There are some bizarre things in it too which either don’t make sense or are just a turn off. I was hugely angry at the sequence when The Penguin manages to take over the Batmobile as, at the time it just seemed so out of place tonally and something which wouldn’t be likely to happen anyway. That being said, I’m more comfortable watching that sequence now so, yeah, while parts of the movie have aged badly, others have become more palatable over the intervening years. Although, in terms of the whole script, the film seems to have a lot of highly sexualised dialogue... far more than I think a superhero movie would get away with today. It feels bizarrely out of place now and, well, just way too over the top for the mpre general approach to the material.

Also, I am still absolutely puzzled and confused as to how Danny Devito can lay flat on his back on his bed, flap his hands together right in front of his chest and... somehow make a shadow bat directly on the ceiling above him. I mean, for goodness sake, where the heck is the light source supposed to be coming from, his chest? And furthermore, I remember at the time wondering what the heck was going on when Michael Keaton takes his mask off at the end. It’s quite obvious from looking at him that Bruce Wayne blacks out areas around his eyes to hid his eyelids etc when wearing the Batman cowl. So when he takes this off then he should look like a panda or a racoon... instead, the shot cuts as Keaton takes his mask off and all of a sudden he’s got a completely clean face. I remember raving at the time about this at the cinema and, I think I was similarly offended on the opening sequence of Spectre for making a similar mistake when Daniel Craig pulls his mask off.

The best thing about the movie though, far more than the quite captivating (if predatory) art direction, is Danny Elfman’s fabulous score. Although the Batman theme is quite present, this isn’t just a do over score and the various new leitmotifs created for the other characters and some frenetic action scoring (with a lot of musical Mickey Mousing at times) is just generally a fantastic backdrop to the whole experience. It always bothered me that the original CD release of this film sounded kind of muted (a complaint I heard of from a number of people... it’s not just me) but this was finally corrected by LaLaLand records a few years ago with their deluxe, remastered and expanded reissue of the score. Also, the Siouxee And The Banshees song co-written by Elfman, Face To Face, is sadly underused (until the end of the end credits) but it’s a good one and Elfman manges to quite subtly weave a minimalistic version of his Batman theme in among the lyrics (it’s so well done that a lot of people at the time didn’t seem to realise that his main theme was even in the song). It’s a shame this wasn’t more of a hit in the charts because it’s one of my favourites of their songs (although nowhere near as brilliant as Peek-A-Boo, for sure).

And that’s me done on my second Christmas movie of the year, Batman Returns. It was nice seeing it and it’s easily the best of that particular bunch of films but I’m not sure I’m going to be re-watching it again anytime soon. It’s definitely entertaining and fairly easy on the eye though so, yeah, possibly even Tim Burton’s most interesting movie, I suspect.

A Charlie Brown Christmas - The Making Of A Tradition

Cell By Date

A Charlie Brown Christmas -
The Making Of A Tradition
by Lee Mendelson with reminiscences by Bill Melendez
ITBooks ISBN: 9780062272140

A Charlie Brown Christmas - The Making Of A Tradition does exactly what it says on the tin, so to speak. First published in 2000, the book is a behind the scenes treasure trove of information, photographs, animation cells and more, telling the story of how the very first Charlie Brown animated TV special came into being. But not, as I learned within its handsome dust covers, the first Charlie Brown animation... I’ll get to that in a minute.

The names Bill Mendelson and Bill Melendez will probably be familiar with anyone who’s seen a Charlie Brown cartoon in the last 55 years. They worked on them all with Mendelson producing and with, as the credits always used to put it, ‘graphic blandishments’ by Melendez. This tells the story of how the two became involved with Charlie Schulz, the man behind the Peanuts newspaper strip (you can read my review of his entire run here).

The first thing I have to say about this book is that it’s really well designed. Lots of blocks of type with very loose leading and the underlying grid of the page layout showing through (beautiful typography), with headlines big, bold and eschewing capital letters. Honestly, this book is almost like something I would design myself if I had projects as cool as this to work on (my day job is as a graphic designer) and, as an added extra touch, there is a little reproduction of running animation cells on the bottom right corner of all the pages, so you can ruffle them like an old school flicker book and see the characters come to life before your eyes.

Mendelson seems to have written the majority of the book but both he an Melendez have a lot to say. The introduction is just heartbreaking, with Mendelson telling how he was on the phone with Sparky one night (everybody close to Schulz knew him as Sparky) and he was due to meet up with him again the next day but, within hours of the phone call, Charles M. Schulz had passed away. I know too well what it’s like to be left without a sense of closure when someone close dies and this really pulled at the tear ducts, to be honest.

He then goes on to explain how ex-Disney animator Melendez, who he didn’t know at the time, had done a few minutes of Peanuts animation for Ford, in a series of quick adverts a couple of years before the TV special. When, for his newly established film production company, Mendelson set out to do a half hour documentary on Schulz (which didn’t initially sell to any network at the time, on completion) they decided they wanted a couple of minutes of animation in it and Sparky put him in touch with Melendez for the job. The rest is history, even more so when Mendelson got the idea of asking hot jazz composer Vince Guaraldi to come up with music for the documentary. The world famous Peanuts inspired jazz standard Linus & Lucy (which you could probably hum, even if you didn’t know you knew it), was written for this documentary.

So, the documentary was rejected but somebody at Coca Cola saw it and responded to the animation. So Coca Cola hired Mendelson to do a half hour slot Christmas special for TV, to an extremely short deadline which, with the help of Melendez and his crew, not to mention the best selling score provided by Guaraldi, he managed to pull off. However, the people at the TV company saw it and pretty much hated it. They agreed to still screen it because, obviously, they didn’t want to waste the money, but they said they wouldn’t repeat the experience. By chance, they showed it to a Time magazine critic a few days before it screened and, of course, he absolutely loved it and gave it a very positive write up. Not as positive as the huge audience figures and huge outpouring of love it drew when it was aired though... not to mention procuring an Emmy. The TV company realised their error and immediately ordered five more specials. Like I said... the rest is, a very long, history.

The book is set out into different sections so this is followed by a miniature biography of Schulz himself and then a Q & A session with Mendelson and Melendez. Things I’d never thought of before came to light and this was certainly an education. For instance, I didn’t realise it but it seems obvious now, that one of the unique things about this special and the subsequent TV specials was that these were pretty much the first time that kids in a cartoon were voiced by actual children. This is followed by a section on Melendez and another thing I’d not thought of is that the Schulz’ drawings of the characters, which they took straight to screen unchanged, were not great for certain aspects of animation. There are no way Charlie Brown’s arms are going to reach up to his head to scratch it for example... so Melendez said he had to cut around things so whenever Charlie Brown scratches his head, it’s done in profile with his arm coming up from behind him etc. I’d never thought about that before but it’s one of the many interesting little facts scattered around the pages here.

Another of the many mini sections of the book is a brief biography of composer Vince Guaraldi and it even reprints some of his sheet music for the show (he would go on to score the first 13 specials before dying unexpectedly at the age of 45... his musical direction would inform all the other productions, of course). And added to all this are loads of photos and reproductions of things which are probably published here for the first time. There’s a look at some of the flat shots from the 1960s Ford Falcon commercials, storyboards, background design sketches, production sheets (which I didn’t totally understand, I have to confess) and even two black and white sequential photographs of Charlie Schulz and Bill Melendez reenacting the long running Lucy/Charlie Brown football gag.

Finally, the last section of the book is the full, illustrated screenplay of A Charlie Brown Christmas and I have to say, although I wasn’t particularly expecting much from this part of the book, the script is a joy to read (especially with the animated cells next to them to remind you of the flavour of each scene) and, dare I say it, ultimately quite moving (perhaps more so than actually watching the original animation). And that’s all I’ve got on this one... A Charlie Brown Christmas - The Making Of A Tradition is a fairly quick read but it’s handsomely illustrated, nicely designed and an absolutely wonderful, very informative book on the creative process, production and reception of this great TV classic. I’d recommend this to anyone who loves the world created by Schulz and those wonderful cartoons based on them.

Tales From The Crypt

Ghost Crypt

Tales From The Crypt
UK 1972 Directed by Freddie Francis
Amicus/20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilers here.

Okay then, I’ve seen three previous Amicus horror portmanteau films this year and the reason I’ve been holding back on watching these since I bought them is because the first segment of Tales From The Crypt is actually set on Christmas Eve so, yeah, I really didn’t want to be watching this film anytime other than in December. So this is the first of three Christmas movies I shall be reviewing for the blog this year. Tales From The Crypt is, of course, based on the 1950s EC comics of the same name, which featured five or six short horror strips with, usually, a twist ending. I’ve been reading those for this blog over the last few months but I still haven’t worked through all three EC horror title runs yet to be able to write a review (hopefully you should see that mid 2021). What this means is that I’ve only read two of the stories on which segments are based on in this film because other segments are based on stories from The Vault Of Horror and The Haunt Of Fear. Of course, it’s these EC comics which were the cause of all the shameful outrage ushered in by Wertham in the 1950s, leading to the reduction of free speech in comics for many decades and introducing the self regulating ‘Comics Code Authority’, with their famous seal of approval.

The film is nowhere near as good as the first film in this unofficial series, Dr. Terrors House Of Horrors (reviewed by me here) but it’s pretty consistently entertaining and makes for a more watchable, consistent experience than Torture Garden (reviewed here) and The House That Dripped Blood (reviewed here). The idea of adapting EC comics, which were horror compilations anyway, absolutely fit what Amicus were doing like a glove and so it’s kind of a marriage made in heaven (they would also go on to do one for The Vault Of Horror but, that will be another review, I haven’t watched it yet).

The location of ‘The Crypt’ in this movie version is Highgate Cemetery and the opening credits are views of this famous landmark grave yard but, it’s all rendered a little heavy handed, it seemed to me, with Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor roaring over the credits and, as far as I’m concerned, totally failing to set the tone of the original horror comics, which were never once poe faced or serious, tempering their grim tales with a large dollop of humour. In fact, despite their source, the first and fifth stories of this collection don’t even stray into the horror genre but, this is made up for by the supernatural shenanigans of the other three stories.

After the credits we join a guided tour of Highgate with guide Geoffrey Bayldon who, when they all enter the catacombs, wants his party to stay by him as the place can be dangerous. Almost immediately after he says this, five characters played by Joan Collins, Ian Hendry, James Elliot, Richard Greene and Nigel Patrick become accidentally separated from the tour group and, instead, enter a crypt... the crypt of terror! Or the crypt of actor Sir Ralph Richardson, actually, who keeps them there in the tomb (the entrance way slamming shut behind them) so he can tell his tale of each of the five to themselves... so, yeah, this is the kind of framing story which we are all familiar with now. Mr. Richardson is, I have to say, dreadfully miscast as The Crypt Keeper, who talked to the audience and presented each tale to the readers in the original comics. He’s fine for the script but, yeah, there’s nothing of the character, the look and the humour of The Crypt Keeper in this movie so, I reckon they really fumbled the ball here.

The first tale, which is probably the shortest but also the strongest, is called ... And All Through The House and its the one that is set in the home of Joan Collins, her husband and her daughter on Christmas Eve, the night a maniac from a lunatic asylum has escaped and is prowling the neighbourhood in a stolen Santa Clause costume. However, the maniac is not the person the husband should be worried about. After he creeps downstairs and puts his presents under the tree, with his daughter already tucked away in bed, he sits down to read the paper. Now the film has no real stylistic traits that stick out in the mind as a signature of the director to lift the film (it’s not a patch on the Dr. Terror film that Freddie Francis directed) but this first segment is easily the most dynamic of the five. As we look at the front of the newspaper that the husband is reading we hear the loud cracking of his skull and it’s a nicely done shot as the blood from his mortal wound seeps through the front of the newspaper before he drops to the floor with a 'caved in' head. We see Joan Collins revealed as his murderer behind him. It’s made clear she’s much more interested in his insurance policy than him and with her daughter relatively quiet in bed and after locking her doors against the escaped maniac, who seems to be lurking outside her house and trying to get in, she elaborately re-stages the killing to look like an accident in the basement of the house but, when she’s done, the little girl has let ‘Santa’ in and the maniac ‘gets her’. This is the only sequence in this film (which is untypical of the time but I’m guessing this is one of the earlier films to employ this technique) which includes one or two genuine ‘jump scares’, which are quite effective when they happen, thanks to Francis using a lot of moving camera to invest a sense of paranoia and panic in Joan Collins’ character. A brooch she is gifted by her husband in this scene is pretty much a foreshadowing of the timeline of the whole movie, if you spot it.

The second section, Reflection Of Death, is one which is based on a story I’ve read in the comic and, frankly, it’s not one I would have picked but it’s done fairly competently. This involves ex-Avenger Ian Hendry covertly leaving his wife to escape with his lover. However, they are caught in an accident and when he stumbles from the wreckage, something is different about him and, unknown to him, some time has passed. All is revealed with the second half of this short tale being done almost completely as a point of view shot from Hendry’s character’s eyes (pretty much the only way you could keep the, not so twisty, reveal kinda secret), just like in the comic.

The third section, Poetic Justice, finds Peter Cushing playing a widower (he had recently lost his wife in real life), a man whose face doesn’t fit in with the well to do neighbourhood and whose rich neighbours, especially the son played by James Elliot, try to get him to sell his house up and go. Although Cushing is in touch with his dead wife through a ouija board, he doesn’t count on the cruelty shown him by his neighbours and some insulting St. Valentine’s cards are the final nail in his coffin. He kills himself and his neighbours get what they want (if not in the way they wanted it). However, one year later, he rises from his coffin and gets a very poetic revenge on the son and, frankly, it’s the only tale in this collection which comes close to the humour of the original comic in the irony of the final denouement that finishes this section. Cushing is absolutely brilliant here as a kindly but broken old man and, seriously, the brilliance of his performance is very moving.

The fourth segment, Wish You Were Here, is a quick retelling of The Monkey’s Paw (with references made in the actual dialogue) and what happens when Richard Greene’s wife, played by Barbara Murray, uses the three wishes granted to them by a Chinese idol to try and get them out of bankruptcy. The demise followed by the unpleasant ‘fate worse than death’ conclusion to Richard Greene’s character oddly, in a way, doesn’t match up to the endgame of the framing story very well but, well, I guess it doesn’t really matter all that much.

The fifth sequence, Blind Alley, is what happens when an ex-military, penny pinching Nigel Patrick takes over a blind people’s home. This is the other story that I’ve read in the comic. He treats the people there poorly and lets one of them die unnecessarily. Then the ring leader of the group of blind people, played in his usual, wonderfully grim manner by Patrick Magee, hatches an elaborate plan of revenge involving Patrick’s ravenous Alsation dog and a wooden alley made by the blind people with walls decorated by many razor blades. The ending is suitably grim but, I honestly remember the comic book story seeming a lot harder hitting than this version of the tale.

And that’s that. When the five stories have played out, The Crypt Keeper reveals to the five characters what the audience has, by now, surely already figured out in an ending similar in intent to that of Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors. And I’ve not got much else to say about this one, to be honest, other than to add that Douglas Gamley’s score for the movie is much better suited to the material than the heavy handed Bach piece at the opening and closing credits. Tales From The Crypt is a nice enough film but it’s certainly not the best, or worse for that matter, of the Amicus portmanteau horror films. I think I’ve got two more of these on my ‘to watch’ pile, which I hope I’ll get to sometime next year.

A DC Universe Christmas

The Wonder Of Christmas

A DC Universe Christmas
by various writers and artists
DC Comics ISBN: 9781563896408

A DC Universe Christmas is a nice, festive, trade paperback reprint of a number of DC Christmas stories drawn from various decades of the company’s output... or, you know, a shameless seasonal tie in to shift old stories and repackage them for new readers. You decide.

Now, the fact that the stories come from varying time periods means that there is a complete mixture of art (not to mention writing) styles in the tome and I’d have to say, I much preferred the stories reprinted from the 1940s through to the 1960s than any of the other ones from later time periods. Also, I noticed that those ones were more likely to entertain the idea of Santa Claus as a real person rather than just an invention to keep the dreams of children alive... or to keep them quiet.

The age of various strips means there are some characters in here from recent years (up until 2000, when this was published) who I had never come across before and, also, a few second tier characters from the 1960s (but these tales they appear in date from much later), who I had no idea about. So characters like Impulse, Enemy Ace and Bat Lash were not on my radar but, can’t see that I’m missing much of anything, although the Wild West story of Bat Lash showed some promise. What’s worse is that some of the characters had changed identity from the ones I used to read as a kid. For instance, The Flash is neither Jay Garrick or Barry Allen in his story here. Instead he’s... Wally West. Seriously? Wally West was Kid Flash, the sidekick, when I was growing up. I guess he grew up too. Also, well, this seems to be the Tim Drake version of Robin in one of the stories... who I think I remember came on board as the third Robin after Jason Todd was killed by The Joker, if memory serves. Actually, the short Robin story in this, where he’s feeling lonely for the holidays and then suckered into turning up at a surprise Christmas party with his ‘superhero family’ is a nice one and worthy of something written 50 or more years before it actually debuted in 1999. Which is a pleasant surprise.

So, yeah, a bit of a mish mash of a collection but, seriously, I wouldn’t expect anything more and these kind of things are always going to be a hit and miss kind of affair. For me, though, there were some nice highlights to the book...

For instance, although it’s one I’d read before, there’s a nice Wonder Woman story reprinted from a 1943 issue of Sensation Comics called The Story Of Fir Balsam. This one is a snow bound adventure and is told from the point of view of the titular Fir tree. In it, Fir Balsam helps Wonder Woman, who is Amazonian so she can speak to Fir because she knows tree language, to both thwart a nazi racket and also restore an estranged family, bringing two kids and their father back to the mother. This one is pretty good.

Another good one is Billy Batson’s Xmas, reprinted from a 1947 issue of Captain Marvel Adventures. Nowadays he’s known as Shazam... which makes no sense whatsoever (but I’m really not going to go into that yet again). This involves Captain Marvel getting an unfairly dismissed department store Santa his job back and also has the not so brilliantly resolved question of... what did Billy Batson and his alter ego Captain Marvel (who were very much their own beings in those days, remember) get each other when they went out Christmas shopping?

Perhaps the oddest story here, A Swingin’ Christmas Carol, is a reprint from a 1968 issue of Teen Titans. This one features characters like Ebeneezer Scrounge, Jacob Farley and Tiny Tom and, as soon as the Teen Titans realise the adventure they are living is a strange parallel to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, they try to solve the problems posed by the story by masquerading as the three ghosts from that book... with not the kind of solution they were necessarily expecting. This one is annoying because the criminals have a ray gun that can turn rubbish into valuable retail products and, at no point in the story does anyone stop to question what possible science there could be behind this... it just makes no sense. It’s also annoying when... and this kind of dates it... all the characters (including the guy writing the captions) refer to Wonder Girl as Wonder Chick. A sign of the times, I guess.

The last story in the book is a reprint of the 1940 comic Superman’s Christmas Adventure and, yeah, it’s pretty good. In this one, Clark and Lois try to bring Christmas to the poor kids of Metropolis, show a spoiled brat the error of his ways and, ultimately, thwart an evil scheme of Dr. Grouch and Mr. Meany when they try to shut down Santa’s operation at the North Pole. When they kidnap and then gas the reindeer, it’s up to Superman to work with Santa Claus to not only keep Christmas going (Superman pulls the sleigh for the sleeping reindeer) but also to reform the two killjoy criminals by showing them Christmas kindness. This kind of stuff is pretty much what Christmas is all about, as far as I’m concerned.

And that’s about it for my quick overview of this one. A DC Universe Christmas is not the best Christmas superhero comic I’ve read but it does contain a mixture of different styles and sometimes even differing views of just what the Christmas spirit is, or should be. It’s a good stocking filler for that superhero lover in your life and you should find something that will warm your heart inside. The world needs more collections like this, I think.

Tenet

 

Welcome To The Palindrome

Tenet
UK/USA 2020
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Warner Brothers

Warning: This one will have big  spoilers so, you know,
if you don’t want to know then please don’t read.

Regular readers of my blog will know I’m not the biggest fan of Christopher Nolan. I’ve seen nine of his feature films now but was generally disappointed by most of them and truly baffled by the bizarre impression that they’re somehow high brow and almost impenetrable in their construction (pedestrian and obvious would have been my thoughts). I’ve been disappointed by hopeful expectations almost every single time and, the only films of his I’ve really thought were worth a ticket purchase, were the second and third installments of his Dark Knight Trilogy (after a fairly shaky, fumbled first installment with Batman Begins). I’m never really wanting to go into his films expecting them to be bad but I’ve almost resigned myself to that now and... now that I’ve finally seen Tenet... yeah, I have to say that, okay, it’s not as bad as Inception but, it’s still a bit drab, in all honesty.

Tenet has a nice central concept but it’s a whopper of a suspension of disbelief in terms of the fantasy element of the movie and, frankly, I’m more likely to be on board with fire breathing dragons and magical swords than I am with what he’s done here, which is to hijack the concept of the flow of time as, crucially to the plot, something of an alternating current that you can ride both ways and, well, ridiculing the science while, to his credit at least, remaining totally poe faced about the whole thing.

It’s somewhat strange and a bit of a dud as far as I’m concerned because... I’ve never really believed in the passage of time. I don’t have Alzheimers yet (as far as I know) but, if I did I think I might well be perceiving the universe as it really exists... as a single playing field which, due to the limitations of my standard ape brain, I can only perceive in a linear fashion, to the point where the whole human race participates in the measuring of this fictional thing known as time and begins to see it as something beyond the huge convenience which that specific measure was invented for... to synch up various actions and events with each other. So the idea that you can run backwards and forwards through time as though it’s something that can be viewed from differing viewpoints kind of misses the point, for me. Also, one of my favourite ideas when I was growing up was the metaphorical use of entropy to describe the chaotic, moral decadence of human nature but, when you get down to it, I’ve either completely misunderstood the concept of what entropy is all my life or... Nolan’s just not using it in a plausible fashion. Entropy isn’t something that can be reversed folks so... yeah... like I said, a fantasy film. And I don’t mind a fantasy film, for sure but... it just felt a bit flat for me.

So the main premise of a secret organisation which literally wears the name of its underlying strategic tactic on its sleeve, so to speak, seems to me to be a little overly silly. Actually there’s a scene in the film which popped me out of the movie because it features two of the central protagonists hatching the details of their upcoming ‘heist’ on a crowded bus and I was like, “Seriously, you’re supposed to be a secret organisation, do you imagine none of your fellow passengers are listening in on your plans?” Now that I contemplate the full extent of their ‘special word’ though, I found myself thinking... well, yeah, what do you expect of such people. They need to recruit some professionals instead.

That being said, Tenet isn’t a bad movie... it’s watchable and holds your interest. The main lead,  John David Washington, holds the attention and he did a really good job in this. Despite the limitations of his script he brought a certain confidence to the role and I’d like to see him in something similar but, perhaps, something less overtly fantastical. Ditto for Robert Pattinson who, frankly, I often have a hard time taking seriously but, I think he does an excellent job here. Elizabeth Debicki and Kenneth Branagh are equally watchable in their roles and, in terms of actors and on screen chemistry, the whole thing works rather well.

The film looks quite good in terms of the 'cleanliness of shot' which I tend to associate with this director. He seems to have a penchant for symmetry and a lack of clutter which, honestly, gives everything a kind of polish and layer of shininess which doesn’t always help the credibility of the milieu but, well, it’s easy on the eye, at least. The music by Ludwig Göransson is also pretty good although, I have to confess, if I hadn’t known he was scoring this picture I would have assumed, on hearing it, that Nolan’s regular composer, Hans Zimmer, was on the job. Honestly, it sounds pretty much the same as what I would expect him to compose for a movie so... yeah, great score and I’ll definitely try and grab a copy on CD before long but, well, I certainly couldn’t pick up Göransson’s personal signature from this one (mind you, it doesn’t help that so few of his scores have actually made it onto CD, instead of a useless electronic download, so I don’t exactly have an opportunity to listen to his stuff properly).

My real disappointment comes, perhaps, from my expectations for the film about half way through. I was sure that Robert Pattinson was going to turn out to be an early version of Kenneth Branagh’s character but, instead, the implication from the final shot of the movie seems to be that he’s Branagh’s son. At least, that’s the obvious conclusion I came to from watching this and, yeah, it might be that I’m wanting to cheer the film on to at least some sense of a twist or slightly more interesting denouement because, frankly, Kenneth Branagh quoting the old chestnut about the world ending with a whimper rather than a bang could well be equally applied to this film itself. It’s just a bit dull and, although the film was apparently made in a very clever and impressive fashion, frankly, I’ve seen film being reversed through a projector since I was a young boy and it failed to impress me then too (doubly so when Superman somehow managed to break established temporal mechanics... such as they are... and reverse the world at the end of Superman The Movie... that made no sense). So, if your trick to attempted spectacle is to have various things in a shot running backwards and forwards at the same time... I’m really not that impressed, to be honest.

All I can conclude, I think, is that Tenet has its moments but is not my idea of a truly great action movie and it just felt a little lacklustre in places. Not unwatchable though, for sure... although I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. As for me, I think I’ll stick to The Dark Knight, thank you very much.

Batman

Bat’s Entertainment

Batman
USA/UK 1989
Directed by Tim Burton
Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B

1989 came to be known as The Year Of The Bat for many, due to the release of Tim Burton’s Batman on the 50th Anniversary of the popular comic book character. I remember the mood of the time well. I also remember the queues to get in.

This was pretty much the last time I recall queuing for a movie that was quite literally a ‘blockbuster’. It’s something that, despite the popularity of films these days, you don’t really see anymore. I remember my first experience of the power of the blockbuster, trying to get through a packed Oxford Street in London to see Star Wars at the Dominion Cinema at the tail end of 1977 (literally a day or so away from New Year celebrations... it's a theatre now). Everywhere while the film played for months, monster queues would pop up outside cinemas going on for blocks. Even the word ‘blockbuster’ was first coined for this ‘film queueing’ phenomenon, with the release of Easy Rider in 1969, if memory serves. I remember seeing Batman a few times at cinemas but, the one time which really sticks in my memory is of lining up outside Barnet cinema for a midnight screening with my friend Kerry, in a queue which literally snaked back on itself about 12 times in front of the cinema before ending several blocks away. There was a fair amount of uncertainty as to whether the cinema would have enough seats on any given night to accommodate the amount of people trying to get into a performance.

So it would be fair to say that the film was a huge success (although, I think it technically was financially in the red for decades, in part owing to the deal struck with Jack Nicholson on this film... who was also, due to his shrewd contract, being paid for the sequels even though he’s not in them... at least, I seem to remember reading that).

It was well loved by audiences and critics too, although I remember George Peppard appearing on Breakfast TV at the time and, when asked, saying that the film was terrible. Most people liked it though and that included me. I wasn’t intending to watch this one again for a while but I keep meaning to watch the sequel for a Christmas review (it being a Christmas movie) so, I didn’t want to go into that one again without this one still fresh in my mind.

Okay, so, I absolutely loved it back in 1989 but, in some ways, the film doesn’t really hold up that well today. I don’t know what it is about Burton’s vision (a director I find really hit and miss, although always uniquely creative) but, while it does kind of scrape through as a coherent whole, the film does seem to be just a series of nice looking set pieces with maybe no real downtime to give them strength in contrast. It feels like almost every scene is screaming in your face for attention and you almost can’t quite hear everything in the crowd. To be fair, though, I think that’s probably also a criticism of the whole of Hollywood cinema from the mid 1980s to mid 1990s so, in itself it’s probably unfair to bury it just for that. It’s like this is the first wave of movies to be somewhat ‘detrimentally’ swayed by the aftermath of the huge impact of Star Wars on popular culture because, sometimes the things which make a phenomenon successful are not best understood by the art that it unintentionally spawns.

That being said, I didn’t dislike the movie this time around and can understand why Batman still holds a certain place of high esteem in the hearts of certain cinephiles.

One of the reasons that this was a phenomenon, I believe, is because super hero movies were few and far between at the time and, successful ones were hard to find. The Christopher Reeve starring Superman The Movie had been a big hit but that was over a decade prior to this. Batman had been portrayed in cinemas by different actors three times before this one but, the last time had been in 1966. So, audiences of various ages were ready for a new take. They didn’t want a comical version like the last one had been though, so the casting of Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne/Batman, someone who was known more for comic roles, met with a huge letter writing campaign objecting to his involvement... boy, I wonder what would have happened if this movie was being made in the internet era. I never had a problem with the idea myself (I’d quite liked him in his previous collaboration with the director, Beetlejuice) and, when I eventually saw him in the role, I think I was justified in holding my tongue. 

Keaton is an absolutely brilliant pick for this film as so many of the actors and actresses here are. What a cast! Kim Basinger is brilliant but there are also some great character artists here, among them Michael Gough (as Alfred), Pat Hingle (as Commissioner Gordon), Jack Palance, William Hootkins and even Lando Calrissian himself, Billy Dee Williams, in the role of District Attorney Harvey Dent. I remember getting excited in the cinema when I saw this and was waiting for him to transform into super villain Two-Face before the end of the picture although, well, it didn’t happen. “Huh?” I thought when the credits rolled, “They must be saving that for the sequel.” Alas, although Billy Dee Williams was contracted to continue playing the role, his contract was bought out by Warners and when Harvey Dent finally becomes Two Face for the third movie in the series, Tommy Lee Jones took over the job.

Looking at the film now, there are some nice things about it. It looks lovely in that dark, gothic way that Burton soon became known for although, I think some of the editing on this one is a bit jarring. Sometimes deliberately so, when we are startled by a close up of a TV screen being smashed by a boxing glove and sometimes, less so, when Burton will attempt to hide the visual edit by carrying on the sound of one scene into another (on a specific sound cue like The Joker’s laughter). Incidentally, the destruction of TV sets by The Joker as opposed to, I dunno, just changing the channel or switching them off like a normal person, seems to be some kind of running character trademark here.

Other things of note would be the turning over of a Joker card from a deck at a key point in the narrative, foreshadowing his character’s fate... and the strangely deliberate lack of period in the film, where technology from all eras comes crashing together to give the setting a timeless appearance (much like the old 1930s and 40s Universal Horror movies which, I’m sure, Burton was probably influenced by as a kid). I especially like the way that both Keaton and Nicholson compliment Kim Basinger on her apartment with the observation that it has "lots of space"... something which obviously re-enforces the connection between their two characters as being different impressions of the same coin, in the way in which they both tend to express their psychological abberations.

There are also a lot of references to other moments of both comic history and pop culture scattered throughout the movie... such as the police file photos of Jack Nicholson’s character, which look to me like they’ve been taken from One Flew Over A Cuckoo’s Nest, or the references to Vicky Vale’s photographic work in Corto Maltese (after the famous comic book character of the same name, no doubt).

There are also some nice musical references such as the use of Beautiful Dreamer woven into the score which, to be fair, always reminds me of Mighty Joe Young but it’s used nicely here for an expression of The Joker’s more artistic side. Danny Elfman’s score is, of course, phenomenal and, although he’d already done a great score with Beetlejuice, this one really put him on the map. It is kinda clouded by comments that a lot of it may have been... let’s say ‘more than assisted with’ by Shirley Walker, who only receives a conductor’s credit in the final film. Certainly her scores for the Batman animated series sound very Elfmanesque although, to be fair, that was probably part of the brief. Now that she’s dead I suspect the truth will never come out but, I like both composers so I don’t really care. It sounds like this was, maybe, a great collaborative venture, asides from the usual orchestration work by Steve Bartek but, you know, I’m just guessing from differing viewpoints I’ve read and information which sometimes seems to come to light. Great score though, either way.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about Batman. If you watch it now, it’s almost more a film about what cinema was doing at the time rather than something which holds together as all that much more. It’s somewhat flawed, I feel but, strangely watchable and certainly entertaining in parts. I’ve no desire to see it again for a while but chances are I will circle back to it again at some point in my life. At the time it was a benchmark movie and deserves a certain amount of respect for that, I think. Not to mention, it also really put cinematic artist Tim Burton on the map too, I believe. Worth a look, if only for the nostalgia rush.

The Dyatlov Pass Incident

Hard Pass

The Dyatlov Pass Incident
(aka Devil’s Pass)
Russia/Finland 2013 Directed by Renny Harlin
Aldamisa Entertainment

I’m going to try really hard not to put any major spoilers on this because, you need to go in fairly blind.

The Dyatlov Pass Incident is a found footage horror film directed by Renny Harlin and it looks and feels a little like a big budget Blair Witch clone. However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing and I have to say, I was quite taken by this and, not just the film itself but the real life incident which inspired it.

Okay... to paraphrase the actual still footage montage at the start of the film, let me get to the facts first. This is real life now and a somewhat unexplained mystery, despite what the Russians are now saying which, in light of what’s known about the case, seems like a pretty ludicrous kind of cover up (hence why all the interest still). In 1959, a group of nine students went on a hike in the Ural Mountains to a mountain which is known to the natives as... The Mountain Of The Dead. Their frozen bodies were found scattered around the area of Dyatlov Pass near where they’d camped for the night. Evidence suggests they’d ripped out of their tents in a panic and some of them were in a state of undress. One had her ribs crushed. Two others had crushed skulls. But... and this is something... these three, if what I’ve been able to gather from some quick research on the actual event, had no soft tissue damage. As one of the characters in this movie says, how can someone’s skull be crushed from the inside without damaging the head? Also, one of the group, I think the same one with the crushed ribs (I’ll need to look into this further), had a large amount of radiation found in the body. And, furthermore, witnesses in the area talk about seeing orange lights in the sky that night.

Okay, that’s the real life bit. I don’t know much more but there are a few books about this on the market and I am going to have to read one of those soon because it’s fascinating stuff. This movie attempts to ‘answer’ the mystery with a found footage horror/sci-fi story about a bunch of five students set in contemporary times, who go to the Dyatlov Pass to do a film about it.

Holly King (played by Holly Goss) is doing a film dissertation and she chooses her friend as cameraman, Jensen (played by Matt Stokoe), two experienced mountain hikers from their University, John and Andy (played by Luke Albright and Ryan Hawley) and her friend Denise (played by Gemma Atkinson) on sound. And they had me straight away in their filmed introduction when Jensen says to Holly, “You’re not going to use that stupid dotted line to show us travelling, right?” Then his voice comes on saying “Wrong.” as an animated dotted line comes over a map so we can see what their route will be. I don’t know why this hooked me but... it just did, okay?

Anyway, once we’ve met the five students, we then get a montage of news footage showing us that these five making this movie have all disappeared on Dyatlov Pass, although their back packs and equipment have been recovered. We are then told that hackers have been able to retrieve footage from their various bits of camera equipment and phone cameras etc and released it onto the internet. After a bit of foreshadowing with just two of the characters in that footage seeming to be on the utter point of despair, the rest of the movie plays out carrying on from the introduction, as though we’re watching the hacked footage.

So, yeah, we get the usual preludes and then, when they get to the Dyatlov Pass, things begin to happen. And there’s a neat trick where slight bands of interference on the camera are used as a kind of early warning system for the audience that something ‘may’ be about to happen. As well as just to make the viewers anxious of course. Actually, now that I’ve read a little about the film, I also know something else very specific is happening on the periphery of some of the shots when the interference is present which I totally failed to notice the first time I watched it. So, I’ve just ordered a proper Blu Ray edition (I watched this on a new, free and bizarelly legal streaming site called w4free.com), so I can rewatch it and see the things I missed.*

Anyway, as I said and without giving too much away, things begin to happen, the deaths start to occur, the number of antagonistic parties interested in the students doubles and... things start to escalate to a very chilling last 20 mins or so in a really well put together way. Now, there is a little bit of an extra dimension to the ending and, I have to say, as soon as another real life and very American ‘incident’ is talked about and ‘blended’ with this particular tale as part of the background to what is happening (fanciful but fun, in my opinion), I actually managed to figure out exactly where this was all going to end up. It’s a shame that the ending... which is pretty nicely done... failed to take me by surprise but, I have to say, it was real fun getting there and I don’t really care that the big ‘reveal’ was something I’d already got to because, frankly, it’s the perfect ending for the film. I also liked the way they revealed something ‘for sure’ to the audience in the final shot which was planted in an ‘off the cuff’ shot very early in the film (just to spell it out for stragglers)... I was definitely entertained by this one.

What else? Well, the acting job between the five main protagonists is great. This kind of found footage film is always something you need really good, naturalistic actors for and these people really hang together well as a unit. Yes, it gets a bit like a Blair Witch parody at times but, like I said at the start of this review, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

And I like that, now I know how the film ends, there were gazillions of clues scattered throughout which hinted at what was coming. Even down to a shot of someone’s ear in a train carriage near the start of the movie or the compelling ‘entities existing in parallel’ kind of angle to the back story dreams and LSD experiences of two of the characters, which makes for intriguing reflection after the movie has finished.

So, yeah. If you are into those found footage horror movies, despite the excellent camerawork that these students were able to make during their misadventures (there’s something about the jerky camerawork here which still smacks of being overly competent with a camera somehow), then The Dyatlov Pass Incident is definitely something I’d recommend. And also, the bonus here is, I now get to research and explore the actual real life incident this was inspired by... there have been a number of tomes written about the subject so, yeah, sometime next year I can hopefully put a review of one of them up for you on here. I also understand there’s a fictionalised TV series about the original incident coming very soon, too. Meanwhile... watch this movie, it’s pretty effective as a horror experience.

*Oh yeah, watched it again... nice Easter egg, just like the Gorilla playing basketball experiment from years ago... how did I even miss that first time around?

The House That Dripped Blood

Dwelling Point

The House That Dripped Blood
UK 1971 Directed by Peter Duffell
Amicus/Second Sight Blu Ray Zone B

The House That Dripped Blood is the third of the famous Amicus portmanteau style horror films, following on from Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors (reviewed here) and Torture Garden (reviewed here). There had been a bit of a longer gap between this and the previous film but the format is more or less the same, we just don’t have Freddie Francis in the director’s chair. Instead, we have Peter Duffell working from a script by Robert (Psycho) Bloch, who had also written Torture Garden (for better or worse).

This one is kind of in between the previous two in terms entertainment value, I believe. It’s not quite as adventurous or intriguing in concept as Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors but it’s certainly not as dull as the first hour or so of Torture Garden. In the previous films you had linking stories consisting of a train carriage and a wax museum fortune teller respectively... this one has a story about a police inspector who is trying to find out why a big film star has gone missing from his home, the titular dwelling which, despite that title, doesn’t once drip blood and, indeed, was nearly awarded an A certificate from the UK film censors if the film makers hadn’t pleaded for a stronger rating, fearing that the lack of credibility of a movie which such a light rating would harm its chances with horror film fans.

So each story is of somebody telling the inspector about one of the previous inhabitants of the house and the demise which was visited upon them. Actually, the house seems to have absolutely nothing to do with things at all other than at the insistence of a policeman and the estate agent (a Mr. Stoker, if vampire fans are paying attention). I’m guessing that setting the vast majority of the action of each tale there, where the main characters of each segment found themselves back at the house between adventures, was appealing because you didn’t have to go to go out and shoot on other locations quite so much.

The five segments are Method For Murder, Waxworks, Sweets To The Sweet, The Cloak and the framing story... Framework. Here’s a quick run down of the stories as they appear:

In Method For Murder, Denholm Elliot plays a crime/horror writer who rents the house and moves in with his wife to give him the proper atmosphere to write his next best seller. Early on he devises a new character, Dominik, an escaped strangler from a mental asylum. Alas, not long after he creates him, he starts seeing Dominik around the house and grounds. I have to say, the 'gaslighting' plot is pretty obvious here and the final reveal is thoroughly expected. Perhaps that’s why, after this reveal, something else is piled on which, to be honest, seems a little hasty and somewhat of a clumsy attempt to add an extra bite to the proceedings. Not the best idea but the segment plays along nicely up until then.

The second segment, Waxworks, follows the adventures of Peter Cushing, who moves into the house for his retirement, looking forward to reading, music and gardening his remaining years away pleasantly. However, when he visits a local Wax Horror Museum, he is enthralled by the exhibit of Salome, who startingly resembles a woman he obviously once loved but lost. He is told by the owner of the waxworks that the model is based on his own dead wife, who was a murderess. Joss Ackland, a friend from Cushing's past and an equally unsuccessful rival for the same girl, it transpires, drops by on a visit and also discovers the enchanting Salome. Needless to say, with both gentlemen under the spell of the wax model, something is amiss and there are some violent (but in no way graphic) resolutions in store for certain characters.

Up until now, the stories feature killers rather than anything or anyone that would bring this film into the horror genre but, luckily, the next two segments do stray back into that classification, starting with Sweets To The Sweet, featuring Christopher Lee as a widower who moves into the house with his young daughter, who he won’t let have a normal childhood. Instead, he hires a new 'live-in' tutor played by Nyree Dawn Porter but, although the teacher and the little girl hit it off, the real villain of the piece is not necessarily who you think it might be. Well, okay, it was for me but I’m sure some people will not be expecting the way this one goes.

Finally we have the fourth segment, The Cloak... which dovetails also into the resolution of the framing story. This is the story of a famous star of horror films, played by Jon Pertwee not long after he started playing the lead role in Doctor Who. He moves into the house and is in a new movie with an actress played by the stunning Ingrid Pitt (who also played in Countess Dracula, reviewed here and The Vampire Lovers, reviewed here). The tale tells of the pompous actor who is working on sets that are not good enough for him and with costumes he doesn’t think will do. So he goes to a local shop to buy a decent cloak for his vampire character. And it’s nice that the owner of the shop, who sells Pertwee the cloak, is none other than Catweazle himself, Geoffrey Bayldon. Of course, less than a decade later, the two would be regularly starring opposite each other in Worzel Gummidge, with Pertwee as Worzel and Bayldon as The Crowman. Anyway, Pertwee gets more than he bargained for because, whenever he dons the cape he gets the urge to suck blood, casts no reflection and, in a scene which really pushes the comic nature of this last segment (horror and comedy have always been natural bedfellows), levitating and flying around his room. Pertwee really does a great job here and, as usual, relishes his over-the-top comic performance (which would sometimes come out in his Doctor Who work from time to time too). The end of the segment has a twist reveal and a case of vampirism that is then, more or less, repeated less than ten minutes later in the wrap up to the film, followed by the estate agent breaking the fourth wall and asking if, perhaps, a member of the audience would like to rent the house next.

And, it’s not brilliant but it is fairly entertaining and, with a cast that strong, a pleasure to watch. There were some nice little touches and references to both film and horror history and, strangely, a bit of unintentional future casting foreshadowing, as there is a scene where Christopher Lee is reading the exact same paperback edition of Lord Of The Rings that my father used to read and revisit again and again in the 1960s and 70s. Who knew at the time that he would, decades later, go on to play one of the main characters in that work.

There’s also some nice camerawork and shot design throughout. This isn’t brightly coloured with primaries like some of the films which it can name as its kin, instead relying on a mostly subdued colour palette throughout, barring a scene or two at the Horror Museum where it strays briefly into Italian giallo/horror territory. However, the director does do some nice things with the camera which offsets the lack of dynamic colour in the film. For instance, a shot of Christopher Lee’s head front and centre of the screen when he answers a phone call is contrasted by the big staircase and landing around the hall, which we can see up and above past Lee’s head as his daughter walks around it. Another really nice moment is where the Inspector is being told about one of the previous owners of the house and he is in extreme foreground with his head on the right of the shot and with his arm coming up from the left of the shot, holding a cigarette. The policeman telling the story is also in deep focus in the middle groove of the shot made by the negative shape of the foreground character and his arm. So, yeah, some great shot ideas here.

The music, by a guy I’d not heard of called Michael Dress, is serviceable and appropriate throughout most of the film, really coming into its own in the framing story whenever anyone goes inside the gloomy house, where he manages to weave a quite creepy and subtle atmosphere into the music. This matches a visual device of the director, who tends to sometimes cut around to sinister objects in the house by way of short breaks from scene to scene to imply a time transition. The composer seems to have died only a few years after this, at the tender age of forty years old, so I guess that’s why I’ve not come across him before.

And I don’t have too much more to say about The House That Dripped Blood, to be honest. I enjoyed this much more than Torture Garden and am really looking forward to watching the next film in this unofficial series of Amicus Portmanteau horrors. That will hopefully be sometime very soon as one of the segments also brings it into the realm of... ‘Christmas movie’.

The Queen's Gambit

The Pawn Identity

The Queen's Gambit
Netflix 2019 Directed by Scott Frank
Mini Series Seven Episodes

The Queen’s Gambit is a seven episode mini series about a fictional chess player from a somewhat damaged background who goes on to compete against the Russian Grandmasters on their home turf. Now, I’ve never been much of a chess player, it has to be said. I learned the game when I was about 6 or 7 but I lost pretty much all the games I played so I never really bothered getting into it properly. I could only see the game for four or five moves ahead and don’t have the kind of mind able to focus on huge combinations of moves and their consequences simultaneously. I’m more of a Maths person so, despite the ‘chance’ element of a dice roll, I’m much more of a Backgammon friendly competitor, truth be told.

That being said, I’ve always been fascinated with the way it’s been portrayed in film, with two of my favourites of the many chess movies out there being The Luzhin Defence (a very early, very short review from the dawn of NUTS4R2 can be found here, don’t judge me, I was just starting out) and Knight Moves with Christopher Lambert, which I haven’t seen since it played in cinemas back in the early 1990s... but I remember it made some kind of impact on me.

Another thing which drew me to finding a way to see this one was the actress playing the adult version of main protagonist, Beth Harmon. She’s portrayed here by Anya Taylor-Joy and I’ve been looking out for her work since seeing her in films like The VVitch (reviewed here) and Morgan (reviewed here). I’ve seen her in a number of films since (I’m really not going to list all my reviews with her in this blog article) and I have to say that, she’s one of those rare actresses who come along, just occasionally, possessing real star quality... like the old titans of cinema from an age long gone. Sure, there are some great actresses out there and I love them all but the strange, almost alien look of this actress and the fact that, when she’s on screen it’s hard to look at anybody else, is something else. She’s pretty good at her craft, for sure but, she’s also a ‘star’ and those are very few and far between these days. This mini series really cements that aspect of her, in my opinion.

That being said, it would be easy to fall into the trap to think that she somehow carries the weight of the series on her shoulders here but, she doesn’t. This is so well presented and directed, for one thing, that the somewhat dazzling technique of the work really pulls all the elements together. Plus there’s a hell of a crew of good actors and actresses who more than hold their own alongside the main protagonist and they also deserve a shout out and a rousing round of applause... I’ll name check Annabeth Kelly and Isla Johnston (as younger versions of Beth Harmon), Moses Ingram, Marielle Heller (brilliant as the ‘mother’ who adopts the orphaned Harmon), Harry Melling, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Marcin Dorociński and, in a small but impactful character role, Bill Camp as the caretaker who teaches the young orphan the rudiments of chess.

The show starts off with a short bookend section set in the 1960s (when the majority of the show takes place) which we catch up to again in episode six, to introduce Anya Taylor-Joy... but then very quickly switches to the younger version of her character growing up in the 1950s, in an orphanage, for the reminder of the first episode (Taylor-Joy gets to shine in all the other episodes). The episode deals with how the character becomes dependent on tranquiliser pills to open up the part of her already Mathematically brilliant head to see chess moves in her mind’s eye (often presented as a literal interpretation and appearing on her ceiling, a shorthand which the director gets you used to so he can fall back on it to make quick plot points at a later point in the show). After she’s adopted and is starting to become successful as a chess player, she also starts taking up the booze favoured by her heavy drinking new mother and this further fuels her dependence on mind altering substances.

Now, when I started watching the first episode a credit came up on the screen that the show is based on a novel by Walter Tevis. So, yeah, of course, the whole drugs and alcohol thing made perfect sense. I haven’t read Tevis’ original novel so I can’t say how faithful this adaptation is but I have read his more famous novel, The Man Who Fell To Earth (which is also a wonderful movie, reviewed by me here, again... it’s an early review by me, don’t bite my head off). That particular story deals with an alien who is trying to get enough money to put together a spaceship to take him back to his own world and family but who ends up stuck on Earth after wrecking his life on booze and pills. So, yeah, I’m not going to give away the trajectory of Beth Harmon here but, I will say their characters share similar journeys in their respective tales... up to a certain point, at least.

And I’m really not going to spoil this for you and give you a move by move account of what happens throughout the seven episodes... but I will say it’s perhaps more than just a little predicatable and clichéd in content for most of the time. I will also say that this aspect of it really doesn’t matter because the execution is so well done and it certainly holds its interest as the writer/director lifts the lid on the obsessive thought processes and behaviours of international chess players. In terms of that aspect, a very special friend of mine complained that the conclusion was way too Disney-like and, I 'd have to agree on that to an extent, it’s a bit syrupy but, at the same time, it’s pretty much the only ending I was hoping for by the time it got there so, I’m not going to complain about that. Because it’s just done so well.

The drained pastels and check patterns found in the way the colours are sedately aligned in an almost mechanical and precision manner are a good solution to showing the way a chess playing mind might see the world. The chess games themselves are quite lively, with the main ones never being constructed the same way twice. In one important competition, for example, the director goes ‘full on’ into The Thomas Crown Affair mode in terms of using a kind of adrenalised split scene sequence vaguely reminiscent of the Steve McQueen/Faye Dunaway chess scene (without the erotic overtones, these are competition matches). Another tournament has a wonderful shot where a top down view of Beth Harmon against a competitor at one table is panned across past some audience members (some of whom dissolve out of shot to be replaced with different ones to show the passage of time while the camera is still making the slow pan) to finish up above the table opposite to reveal, when the camera then moves down into shot, that this is also Beth Harmon finishing up another opponent on the opposite table. And stuff like this and the audio cues of the clock timers running through non-chess scenes with equal abandon keeps the series sharp and constantly watchable.

Another thing the director does, which shows a very mature understanding of the use of drama in literature but, it can be extremely powerful in the world of the moving image too, is to have a big lead in with a lot of chess games in a specific tournament until the character gets to play the final against the opponent you are waiting for her to beat (after twice setting up the moment by having her lose to him a couple of times previously in the show)... only to see the very first, opening move (as a pawn is slammed down with a fake echo to accentuate that, yeah, this a big one) before cutting away from the game completely and just going onto the aftermath to explain, via the two players in a bar, what actually happened. This was a great way of doing things and really showed me the director knew how to ‘throw film around’ to heighten the tension and release of the drama. Great stuff.

Also, as an added bonus to cinephiles in the first episode, the director really ramps up the tension by having Beth attempt to steal some locked away tranquilisers while all the other staff and kids at the orphanage are busy watching The Robe (which I reviewed here). The thing is, if you’re familiar with the movie, you’ll know that Harmon goes to do her stuff when the movie is on the final scene... so it’s a mite more suspenseful, I suspect, if you know that the film has only a few more minutes to run before the possibility that she’s caught.

And I don’t think there’s much more I want to reveal about The Queen’s Gambit... you need to watch this little slice of genius for yourself. I will say that Carlos Rafael Rivera's score is wonderful but, alas, not available on CD at time of writing (only in a stupid, electronic download format) and the needle drop songs throughout out the show are... well, it’s mostly set in the sixties so, of course they’re going to be pretty good. Also, I love that they use a Donovan song in this because, hey, he’s one of the all time great artists who truly encompasses the spirit of the 1960s. So, yeah, this show comes with a definite recommendation from me and you should all check this out. One of the great mini series of our time. 

King Kong Escapes

Kong Voyage

King Kong Escapes
Japan/USA 1967
Directed by Ishirô Honda
Toho/Universal Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: This one has spoilers.

So I took some time out from the Criterion Godzilla set to pop this one in. King Kong Escapes is a muddled but entertaining movie... alas, entertaining for all the wrong reasons. Now, I’ve no idea what the proper Japanese cut of the film is like but I suspect it’s not all that different because, although the film has actors like Rhodes Reason and Linda Miller in it, it was an American co-production and they all appeared in scenes with many of the Japanese actors such as Godzilla veterans Akira Takarada and Mie Hama (Hama was also a big star for the Bond film You Only Live Twice, reviewed by me here, by this point). Hama plays the main female villain who, in a fit of conscience towards the end, double crosses the main male villain of the piece, Hideyo Amamoto as the nefarious Dr. Who. Yeah, okay... not that Doctor Who. Another one, although, it has to be said, the costume and look of the character seems very much based on the William Hartnell incarnation of everybody’s favourite timelord at the time.

That being said, Who is a carry over from the source material of this film... which isn’t really, as many may suspect, a sequel to King Kong Vs Godzilla (which it’s often marketed as and which you can find reviewed here). Instead, it’s a big screen adaptation of a Rankin/Bass King Kong cartoon of the time... it’s also the last time Toho had the rights to use the character, unfortunately.

The film is... well it’s kinda terrible, despite being directed by Godzilla veteran Ishirô Honda and having a, somewhat slow and ponderous score by Godzilla composer Akira Ifukube. It’s fun though but, alas, the humour on this one is completely at the expense of the cast and crew, it has to be said. The dialogue and plot are... well I guess like something you’d find in a cartoon of the time and the effects work is, surprisingly, mostly abysmal.

I mean, take the ‘not so bad’ actress Linda Miller (she only appeared in three movies and one TV episode but, one of those movies was The Green Slime... reviewed here). Here she is being picked up by a badly 'matted in' giant hand against a live action plate but, as soon as we see her in the hands of the, truly ridiculous looking King Kong man in suit (possibly even worse than the version from King Kong VS Godzilla) in long shot she is a lifeless, plastic doll which, throughout the movie, only has one costume. Now, Ms Miller gets picked up by her new pal Kong fairly frequently throughout the movie, it has to be said but, although one of her costumes does look a  little like the one on the rigid doll in the hands of the ‘suit-mation’ Kong, most of the time she’s wearing something different. It doesn’t matter to the special effects guys though... if she’s wearing white or some other colour, when it cuts back to the doll in the hand... she’s back to wearing yellow. Not only that but, through the course of the movie (and depending how wet she gets in a scene... she takes a dive into the ocean before being picked up by Kong at one point), she has a kind of ‘dirty blonde’ hair. However, when she’s seen in long shot in Kong’s fist, that really is going to change to a vibrant redhead on the doll, for sure.

Other things about the ridiculous effects are the fact that, when our heroes go to check out Kong’s island near the start of the movie, the strange hover ship they use is nicely designed but, honestly, you can clearly see the wires as it’s lifted over the tank of water standing in for the sea. Added to some truly boring fight scenes and this iteration of Kong really is nothing to write home about. The fight Kong has with a dinosaur is fairly ludicrous but I think that one, at least, was played for laughs. However, there’s a big set up battle in the movie and you’re waiting for it to happen and, when it does... well, more on that in a moment.

So the other big hangover from the cartoon series was the invention of the giant robot Kong facsimile, Mechani-Kong. He’s introduced into the plot line to mine for ‘Substance X’ for the villains before the ‘real’ Kong even enters the movie and, all the way through you’re just waiting for the battle between these two titans to unfold. When it does... well it takes place in Tokyo, mostly with a kind of ‘climbing dual’ as the two Kongs climb something which looks remotely like the Eifel Tower (except we’re in Tokyo) and... well... it’s a bit anti-climactic, it has to be said. But, even so, there’s a lot of fun to be had about the idea of this head to head and, ridiculously bad as it is, it still holds a curious entertainment value (this is like the fourth or fifth time I’ve watched this movie in different formats over the decades).

The Mechani-Kong from the cartoon show and made flesh... err... steel here was presumably the inspiration for the similar looking, semi-regular villain Mecha-Godzilla who made his first appearances in the Showa Era films Godzilla VS Mecha-Godzilla in 1974 and the final film in that first cycle, Terror Of Mecha-Godzilla. So some good came out of this movie in regards to that element at least and, either way you look at it, Mechani-Kong certainly looks great and makes for some good photos and artwork. More than his hairy co-star at any rate... who seems to have a permanently manic look about him with his huge, staring eyes.

And... yeah, that’s really all I’ve got to say about King Kong Escapes. A fun but insubstantial piece which has so far been given, it has to be said, a truly insubstantial Blu Ray release. The transfer is okay but you can only watch this in the English dub and, talk about bare bones. I’d moan about the extras if there were any but... remember some of those early DVDs which, when you put the film in the player, didn’t have any kind of menu and just went straight into ‘the movie is now playing, deal with it’ mode? Well let’s just say that this is the first Blu Ray I’ve had which does just that. No menu, just a quick copyright notice and then the film starts playing. Universal really should take a leaf out of the book of Criterion, Severin, Arrow, Indicator, Blue Underground and various other labels who know how to market films like this. I’m hoping somebody will get the smart idea of releasing limited edition kaiju sets with the proper Japanese versions of films like this and Frankenstein Conquers The World in them, crammed with extras pertinent to the subject matter. Until that time comes, alas, we’re stuck with what I would call substandard releases like this and, yeah, I’m glad I only spent £6 on this edition is all I’m saying. If you can get it cheaper, it’s worth a quick look.