Category: Films

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Set the controls for the heart of the sun

 

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films

 

One my favourite British science-fiction movies is The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), starring Edward Judd, Janet Munro and Leo McKern, directed by Val Guest and scripted by Guest and Wolf Mankowitz.  (The underrated Guest made three other movies, 1955’s The Quatermass Experiment, 1957’s Quatermass II and 1960’s Hell is a City, that I also like a lot.)

 

The Day the Earth Caught Fire is an apocalyptic tale wherein the USA and the Soviet Union carry out simultaneous nuclear-bomb tests at the earth’s poles and, subsequently, the planet experiences weird meteorological events.  Rivers dry up in some places and rain falls in unexpected torrents in others.  The general trend, though, is that temperatures rise.  The film’s heroes – a pair of London-based journalists – discover that those nuclear tests have disrupted the earth’s nutation, its axis of rotation.  Our planet is now spiralling closer and closer to the sun and in a few months’ time will plunge into it.

 

Yes, the film’s science is wonky.  A full-force hurricane has a heat-release every 20 minutes that’s similar to one 10-megaton nuclear bomb going off, so a few such nuclear explosions are nowhere near enough to knock the earth out of its orbit.  Also, what’s amusing about the film from a 2024 viewpoint is that its journalist heroes work for the Daily Express – a newspaper now so moon-howlingly rubbish it makes the Daily Mail look comparatively sane and reasonable.  Today, while the Thames evaporated, the Express would be denouncing the earth-knocked-out-of-orbit / crashing-into-the-sun scenario as a woke hoax and politically-correct fearmongering.

 

However, as a dystopian sci-fi movie showing a gradually-unfolding catastrophe through the eyes of some ordinary people who are powerless to do anything about it, The Day the Earth Caught Fire is both affecting and chilling.

 

The film ends ambiguously.  The world’s governments make a last-ditch attempt to reverse the damage, exploding more nuclear bombs in the desperate hope they’ll nudge the earth back into its proper orbit.  Meanwhile, in the Daily Express’s offices in now-utterly-sweltering London, we see that two versions of the next day’s front page have been prepared.  One bears the headline WORLD SAVED, the other the headline WORLD DOOMED.  And we leave the film’s characters there, not knowing their fate.

 

I’ve been thinking about the ending of The Day the Earth Caught Fire a lot today.  November 5th, 2024, is when Americans go to the polls to elect a new president.  That will either be Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.  The latter was once memorably and accurately described by the New Yorker writer Mark Singer as someone whose existence is ‘unmolested by the rumbling of a soul’.  A few years ago, less eloquently, I called him ‘that rancid man-slug of evil.’

 

Trump has been open about what he’ll do to the USA if he’s re-elected president.  He’ll transform the world’s most powerful country from a democracy into an authoritarian state, with him as despot-in-chief.  Even if the American public are stricken with buyers’ remorse after voting him in, he’ll change the election laws and fiddle the constitution so that they can’t ever get rid of him and his far-right Republican successors (who’ll no doubt be led by the repulsive J.D. Vance).  The Trump Reich will be here to stay.

 

Along the way, he’ll also embolden other fascists in other countries around the world, hand over Ukraine to his buddy, hero and idol Vladimir Putin and allow Putin’s malignant influence to extend right into Europe, make American women second-class citizens with zero control over their bodies, persecute LGBT people and probably erase trans ones, put the lunatic anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy in charge of American health policy and appoint Elon Musk as his Joseph Goebbels-style head of propaganda who’ll pump out misinformation and hate on Twitter (or ‘X’ as Musk calls his debased platform these days).  Science will be derided, suppressed and defunded.  Pig-ignorance will be lauded, promoted and revelled in.

 

Worst of all, Trump, a climate-change denialist, will add billions of tonnes of US carbon emissions to the earth’s atmosphere, probably thwarting any last chances of humanity doing anything to mitigate the effects of the climate catastrophe.  Yes, the earth really will be catching fire, if slightly more slowly than it did in Guest’s movie.

 

So, world saved or world doomed?  We’ll find out a little later this week.

 

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films

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Mama Mia

 

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

 

One more post in advance of Halloween…

 

I’ve now watched all of the X trilogy of horror movies directed and written by Ti West and starring Mia Goth (who also co-wrote one of them).  These are X (2022), Pearl (2022) and MaXXXine (2024), which focus on the characters of ruthlessly determined actress Maxine Minx and frustrated wannabe actress Pearl Douglas, both played by Goth.  At its best, the trilogy is great.  At its worst, it’s still good fun.

 

X is the story of some city-folk heading out into the countryside and falling prey to a foe their slick city ways can’t deal with.  Yes, that’s the plot of half the horror movies ever made, from Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) to Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1982), from John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) to Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999), from Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever (2002) to Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019).  In West’s spin on it, the city-folk are six young filmmakers, including Goth’s character Maxine.  The year is 1979 and they intend to make a porno movie on the quick and on the cheap.  As a market for their product, they’re eyeing the up-and-coming technology of VHS, which will allow people to pay money and watch steamy movies they’re never likely to see in their local cinemas.  The filmmakers have rented a building on an out-of-the-way farm for the shoot, a farm belonging to an elderly couple called Howard and Pearl.

 

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

 

Incidentally, Howard and Pearl are also the names of an elderly couple featured in the BBC’s long-running, almost never-ending – and terrible – situation comedy Last of the Summer Wine (1973-2010).  I guess an American like West wouldn’t have known that.  Though maybe Mia Goth, who’s English, could have warned him that those character names were likely to give viewers from the United Kingdom PTSD-type flashbacks to Last of the Summer Wine.

 

X‘s Pearl is clearly unhinged and she’s about to get worse.  Ruminating on her current wrinkly decrepitude, mourning the loss of her youth, and jealously resenting the nubile young bodies performing sex-acts for the cameras on the other side of the farmstead, the old woman flips.  Bloody mayhem ensues, involving guns, knives, pitchforks and a large alligator who hungrily lurks in a pond elsewhere on the premises.  The scene where Maxine takes a naked dip in the pond, not suspecting that its scaly occupant is slowly closing in on her, is one of the creepiest things in the movie.  Rarely have aerial shots been so unnerving.

 

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

 

In all three movies, West revels in the setting.  X takes place during a Texas summer and the heat and sweatiness are nicely conveyed by the 1970s-aesthetic of the visuals.  The daytime shots, at least, have a faintly bleached and blurry look that evoke all sorts of bucolic American horror movies really made in that decade – the aforementioned Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the likes of John Hancock’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), Jack Starrett’s Race with the Devil (1975) and Jeff Lieberman’s Squirm (1976).  Meanwhile, the way Pearl embodies the horrors of the aging process gives the film an extra depth.  This theme is touched upon both melancholically, as when Pearl realises how much Maxine resembles her when she was young, and queasily, with Pearl shuffling down to the makeshift film studio, spying on the actors doing their sex scenes and imagining she’s taking part herself.

 

But X’s greatest gimmick is its casting, for Mia Goth plays not one, but two characters.  She’s Maxine and Pearl.  The latter role required her to spend ‘a good 10 hours in the make-up chair’ in order to get the old-lady prosthetics applied.

 

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

 

X ends with Maxine’s escape from the farm.  She drives off into the night, still determined to make it big as an actress.  But what comes next isn’t a sequel but a prequel.  If it was plausible for Goth to play Pearl with heavy make-up as an old woman, she could obviously play the character without make-up as a young woman.  Hence, we got Pearl, also released in 2022.  This is set in 1918 with the title character stuck on her parents’ farm (the same one as in X, though disarmingly smart and new-looking compared with the crumbling, rundown version of it in the previous film) whilst waiting for husband Howard to return from World War I.  She’s especially stuck because the Spanish flu pandemic, the early 20th century’s equivalent of Covid-19, is raging and Pearl’s family are isolating themselves.  It doesn’t help matters that her father (Matthew Sunderland) has been crippled by a stroke and her mother Ruth (Tandi Wright) is humourless, censorious and bitter.  Pearl responds to the situation by fantasising about becoming an all-singing, all-dancing silent-movie star – which increasingly provokes Ruth’s wrath.

 

Meanwhile, Pearl is already subject to the psychopathy that’ll lead to X’s bloody events 60 years later.  In an early scene, she takes a hay-fork to an unfortunate goose who didn’t display sufficient enthusiasm for a show she put on for the animals in the barn. She then goes to the pond and feeds the dead fowl to an alligator, whom she’s named Theda after the silent movie actress Theda Bara (and who’s presumably the granny of the alligator in X).

 

Though her mother is determined to clip her wings, other things seemingly pull Pearl in the direction of her dreams – namely, the flattery of a handsome but lecherous projector at the local town’s movie theatre, and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join a travelling dance troupe, the auditions for which are being held in the local church.  Predictably, during the ensuing conflicts, betrayals and disappointments, Pearl snaps.  The bodies pile up and Theda the Alligator gets some unexpected meals.

 

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

 

Even more so than X, Pearl shows West and Goth at the top of their games.  The director excels in orchestrating the showbiz-y fantasies that Pearl weaves around herself, including one set in a cornfield and involving a scarecrow that’s inspired by The Wizard of Oz (1939).  We can’t help but pity her even though we know she’s turning into a monster.  And Goth is amazing.  She’s particularly awesome at the end, when Howard finally arrives back from the war and finds the farmhouse kitchen in a less than decorous state.  Pearl presents herself – “I’m so happy you’re home!” – with a rictus-like smile, simultaneously heartfelt and terrifying, that seems to stay on her features forever.  No wonder Peter Bradshaw, film critic in The Guardian newspaper, hailed Goth as ‘the Judy Garland of horror’.

 

Pearl isn’t around for MaXXXine, released in 2024 and set in 1985, six years after the events of X.  But we glimpse her in flashbacks and her presence is felt in one of the film’s most harrowing scenes.  This is when Maxine – now in Hollywood and trying to graduate from starring in porn movies to starring in something slightly more upmarket, i.e., horror movies – sits in a make-up chair and has a cast made of her head.  With her face buried in the cast, and blinded by it, she suffers a panic attack and imagines Pearl is in the room, caressing her, as she did during one creepy moment in X.

 

Whereas the action in X and in much of Pearl was confined to a farm, MaXXXine is far more expansive.  Its story unfolds all over Los Angeles, from the Hollywood Hills to the back-lots of Universal Studios (where, significantly, we see the Bates house and motel from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho), from the city’s luxurious mansions to its ultra-dodgy strip-clubs, peepshows and back alleyways.  But it’s the time rather than the place that gives the film its vibe.  MaXXXine unashamedly immerses itself in the garish sleaze and excessiveness of the 1980s: big hair, Ray-Ban sunglasses, spandex, lip-gloss, neon colours, graffiti, cocaine, hustlers, flashy convertibles with personalised number-plates, X-rated video stores, lascivious hair-metal bands, gory slasher movies and general ‘me’-generation greed.  West depicts this world as a cesspit, but a somehow joyous cesspit.  Maxine, of course, has taken to it like a duck to water.

 

But it’s still water that contains alligators.  Maxine gets caught up in a murder spree by an apparently Satan-worshipping serial killer who’s targeting people close to her.  She also has to deal with a crooked private investigator, played with scenery-chewing magnificence by Kevin Bacon, who knows she was present at the bloodbath at Pearl and Howard’s farm in 1979.  These things happen while she’s pursuing what she believes is her big break – a starring role in a schlocky horror sequel called The Puritan II, about to be filmed by a hard-as-nails lady director (Elizabeth Debicki).

 

© A24 / Motel Mojave / Access Entertainment

 

This leads to the first of a few unsatisfactory things in MaXXXine’s plotting.  Maxine is so determined to hold onto the film-role that she refuses to cooperate with the cops investigating the serial killer, because getting involved in a murder case will prevent her working on The Puritan II.  We know that Maxine is now in some ways as psychopathically ruthless as Pearl – early on, she’s shown dealing with a would-be mugger in a manner that’ll bring a grimace to the face of anyone possessing a pair of testicles – but come on.  Your friends are being slaughtered around you.  There’s a good chance you’ll be next.  How could you not go to the cops, important impending film-role or not?

 

Also awkward is the film’s ending, which veers off into a completely different style of movie – admittedly still a 1980s style, that of a Jerry Bruckheimer-Don Simpson action thriller.  At the same time, when the identity of the villain is finally revealed, it’s scarcely a surprise, since it was heavily signalled beforehand.

 

However, criticising a film paying homage to the 1980s for being illogical is self-defeating, considering that bona fide 1980s movies were hardly known for their logic.  It’s telling that one 1980s movie  MaXXXine has been compared to is Brian De Palma’s violent thriller Body Double (1984).  (Both have scenes prominently featuring Frankie Goes to Hollywood songs, Relax in Body Double, Welcome to the Pleasure Dome in MaXXXine.)  Body Double is regarded as a classic now, but on its release the critics dismissed it as De Palma at his most throwaway, as a series of stylish set-pieces in search of a plot.  MaXXXine is a similar, De Palma-esque mixture of splendidness and shonkiness.

 

© A24 / Motel Mojave / Access Entertainment

 

Anyway, there’s much to enjoy in it.  Goth’s first scene as Maxine is brilliant.  It culminates in her emerging from the audition for The Puritan II and contemptuously informing the long queue of would-be starlets waiting outside that they’re wasting their time because she has the job in the bag.  She then struts off to the sound of ZZ Top’s Gimme All Your Lovin’.  The cast is great too.  As well as Goth, Bacon and Debicki, it has Giancarlo Esposito playing Maxine’s shady agent.  Esposito, of course, was the terrifying Gus Fring in Breaking Bad (2008-13) and Better Call Saul (2015-22) and here he does a shockingly Gus Fring-like thing near the movie’s end.

 

In my opinion, then, X is the best horror movie of the three, Pearl is the best movie full-stop, and MaXXXine, despite its flaws, is very entertaining.  I wonder if West and Goth will get around to making a fourth film.  Goth has played Pearl young and old, but played Maxine only young.  How about a fourth movie set in the 2020s, with Maxine now as aged as Pearl was in X and living reclusively like the embittered Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950)?

 

Being a horror movie, though, it would be in the vein of what used to be called ‘psycho-biddy’ or ‘hagsploitation’ movies.  These constituted a sub-genre of horror that featured aging female movie stars playing old ladies who’ve become psychopathically loopy: for example, Betty Davis and Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Tallulah Bankhead in Die! Die! My Darling! (1965) Zsa Zsa Gabor in Picture Mommy Dead (1966), Shelley Winters in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971) and Lana Turner in Persecution (1974).  I have every confidence that the mighty Mia Goth, in old-lady make-up, would hold her own among the likes of Davis, Crawford, Bankhead, Gabor, Winters and Turner.

 

Come to think of it, she’s done it already, in X.

 

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

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Dad of the dead

 

From wikipedia.org / © Nicolas Genin

 

As Halloween approaches, here’s another entry with an appropriately creepy theme.  This time it’s a piece about one of my all-time favourite filmmakers in the horror genre. 

 

George A. Romero’s 1968 debut was Night of the Living Dead, a movie that’s been stupendously influential in at least three ways.  Firstly, it was filmed during nights and weekends over a period of seven months for a paltry $114,000.  The famous opening sequence took place in Pittsburgh’s out-of-town Evans City Cemetery for the simple reason that Romero figured he could film there for free, on the quiet, without getting hassled by the police.  Its success became a lasting inspiration for low-budget filmmakers everywhere, showing that with enough ingenuity, determination and talent you could accomplish something out of next-to-nothing.  No doubt when things were getting tough during the shoots of landmark but ultra-cheap horror films like the $300,000-budget Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or the $350,000-budget Evil Dead (1981) or the $60,000-budget Blair Witch Project (1999), their respective directors Tobe Hooper, Sam Raimi and Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez consoled themselves with the thought, “If old George could do it, so can I.”

 

Secondly, Night of the Living Dead wrestled horror movies away from the gothic costume dramas made by the likes of Hammer Films in Britain, Mario Bava in Italy and Roger Corman in the USA, which by the mid-1960s had become their comfort zone.  It dragged the genre into the present day and made it visceral, nihilistic and properly frightening.  The human characters having to cope with the horrible events in Night were ordinary Joes like those sitting watching them in the cinema audience.  This could happen to you, it was telling them.  And as none of those human characters got through the titular night alive, you really didn’t want it to happen to you.

 

Thirdly, Night introduced the world to zombies as it knows them today.  And today popular culture is swarming with them, not only in blockbuster Hollywood movies like World War Z (2013) but in other media like TV shows, computer games, books and comics.  Whereas before Night zombies had been depicted as poor, lost souls brought back to life by cruel, capitalist zombie-masters using the power of voodoo and put to work in flour-mills and tin-mines, as in Universal’s White Zombie (1932) and Hammer’s Plague of the Zombies (1966), after Night they had a new template.  They became apocalyptic.  They rose from the dead in hundreds, then thousands, and then millions, and fed on living humanity in scenes employing as much blood and gore as the movie-censors would allow.  If they bit you, you got infected, died and became a zombie yourself.  And the only way to stop the shambling, bite-y bastards was to “shoot ’em in the head”.

 

What I like about zombies of the Night of the Living Dead variety is that though they are mindless creatures, the movies themselves don’t have to be mindless.  Those shambling zombies can be a metaphor for all sorts of things – for proletarian workers, consumers, oppressed peoples, whatever – giving filmmakers endless opportunities for social comment.  Thus, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) reflects a modern Britain where anger is an increasingly common social phenomenon and terms like ‘road rage’ and ‘air rage’ have entered the popular vocabulary; its sequel Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later (2007) is an allegory about the post-war occupation of Iraq; and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) satirises a twenty-something slacker generation who can’t tell if someone’s a zombie or just pissed, hungover or stoned.  And again, Romero set the agenda with Night, which channels the fears of late-1960s America.  The country’s racial tensions are symbolised by the fate of the black hero (Duane Jones), who survives the zombie onslaught only to be mistaken for one himself and shot dead by a supposed rescue-posse of trigger-happy rednecks.  Meanwhile, the rednecks’ zombie-shooting / burning activities are not unlike things going on in Vietnam at the time.

 

© Image Ten / Laurel Group

 

However, Night of the Living Dead wasn’t the first George A. Romero film I saw.  That honour belongs to a movie he made five years later called The Crazies, which turned up on late-night British TV in the 1970s.  The Crazies has similarities to Night but isn’t a zombie movie because it features people turning into murderous lunatics rather than into murderous walking corpses.  The story of the US Army trying, and failing, to contain a virus that gradually infects the population of a small rural town and drives them insane, The Crazies sees Romero giving the military a kicking.

 

It’s the army who’ve secretly developed the virus as a potential biological weapon; who accidentally let it escape into the town’s water supply; and who prove useless in trying to maintain order – this is a rural American community and there are a lot of guns, and before long it isn’t just the infected townspeople who are violently resisting the gas-masked, biohazard-suited soldiers.  The army also bring in scientists to try to develop a vaccine but give them hopeless facilities – the local school’s science lab – and when one of them accidentally does stumble across a vaccine, more military bungling leads to his death and the smashing of the vital test tubes.  At the film’s end, they even fail to do an immunity test on the hero, who by now is the only uninfected person left in the town.

 

The Crazies isn’t perfect.  Its low budget sometimes means there’s a visible gap between what Romero aspires to and what he achieves on screen.  But to my 13-year-old mind its blend of anarchy, violence, rebelliousness and, yes, humour was astonishing.  I’ve never forgotten scenes like the one where a soldier bursts into a rural homestead and encounters a sweet old granny doing some knitting, who then stabs him to death with a knitting needle.  A remake appeared in 2010 and, while it has some good moments, it’s ultimately unsatisfying.  This is largely because it focuses on the civilian characters and hardly shows anything of the military ones.  It’s the soldiers and their half-comical, half-horrifying ineptitude that makes the original so effective and enjoyable.

 

© Cambist Films

 

In 1978, Romero returned to bona-fide zombie moviemaking with Dawn of the Dead.  The shopping malls spreading across the American landscape at the time inspired him to revisit Night’s zombie apocalypse and film a more expensive and expansive sequel.  This has four survivors, led by black actor Ken Foree, taking refuge in an abandoned mall and fortifying it against the living dead.  Romero uses the setting to poke fun at the sterility of consumerism, with the foursome’s lives rapidly growing tedious despite their unlimited access to everything in the mall’s stores.  He also shows its idiocy.  When more survivors show up, the two groups fight for possession of the building, though it contains enough supplies for everybody.  The zombies, meanwhile, become irrelevant.

 

The shots of zombies shuffling mindlessly through the mall’s aisles and thoroughfares, staring with glazed eyes at the goods on display, aren’t subtle.  The satire is sledgehammering.  But hey, Romero’s satire works.  45 years on, whenever I find myself in a shopping mall, I soon start imagining the shoppers around me not as human beings but as lumbering cadavers.  Also, in keeping with its theme of excess, Dawn piles on the bloodletting, courtesy of Romero’s regular special-effects man Tom Savini.  In the opening minutes, Romero and Savini treat us to a close-up of an exploding head and the gore rarely relents after that.

 

© Laurel Group Inc

 

Dawn has been remade too, with a Zack Snyder-directed Dawn of the Dead appearing in 2004.  It’s a film I have mixed feelings about.  On the one hand, the first 25 minutes are terrific and I love the credits sequence, which shows a montage of clips and images of unfolding zombie carnage accompanied by Johnny Cash singing The Man Comes Around (2002).  On the other hand, the film is devoid of satire.  The living dead spend nearly all the film not being in the mall, so there’s no identification of shambling zombies with shambling shoppers, and you get a general impression of things being played safe.  It’s a shame, as Naomi Klein’s anti-globalisation polemic No Logo (1999) had been published a few years earlier and a big gory horror movie poking fun at brainless brand-hungry consumerism and mindless corporate greed would have been just the ticket.

 

In 1986, Romero wrapped up his original zombie trilogy with Day of the Dead, which like The Crazies shows his utter contempt for the military – though by now his contempt for humanity generally seems intense too.  Day has the world overrun with zombies and focuses on an elite band of scientists and soldiers holed up in an underground nuclear missile silo, desperately trying to find a solution for the mayhem happening above.  Bitter arguments between the obsessed scientists and the brutish military eventually escalate into all-out warfare.  When the zombies swarm in at the end, they seem the least mindless members of the cast.

 

Admittedly, Day has a couple of sympathetic humans, namely a philosophical Jamaican pilot played by Terry Alexander – Romero’s third black zombie-movie hero – and a somewhat alcohol-pickled Irish radio operator (Jarlath Conroy), both of whom realise the battle has already been lost.  They just want to escape the silo, abandon the mainland and start afresh on a desert island.  However, the film’s most likeable character is actually a zombie, one nicknamed Bub (Sherman Howard) who’s been captured by the scientists and domesticated… sort of.  He can listen to music, pick up a phone and almost whisper a couple of words.  He has vague memories of his former life, when he was a soldier, because he knows how to salute and hold a gun.  He’s very fond of the scientist who looks after him (Richard Liberty) and when that scientist is murdered by the repellent Captain Rhodes (Joe Pilato), he’s genuinely upset and you feel genuinely sorry for him.  And a climactic scene where Rhodes is torn apart by Bub’s zombie compadres while Bub looks on and gives him a farewell salute is one of the most satisfying moments in horror-film history.

 

© Laurel Entertainment Inc

 

On a more intimate scale than Dawn, with more talk and less action, Day was regarded as a disappointment by Romero enthusiasts when it was first released.  However, over the years, its reputation has improved.  It’s my favourite Romero movie and one of my favourite horror movies generally.  Meanwhile – surprise! – a remake appeared in 2008.  Unlike the other remakes I’ve mentioned, this one is absolute shite.

 

After Zack Snyder’s version of Dawn of the Dead made a lot of cash in 2004, Romero got the go-ahead, and considerable studio money, to make his first zombie picture in nearly 20 years.  The result was 2005’s Land of the Dead which, although it received some decent reviews, was disdained by many hardcore horror-film fans who saw it as evidence that Romero had sold out or lost his touch.  I think that’s unfair as, to me, Land is three-quarters of a good movie.  Its opening sequence is superb, showing an abandoned (by humans) suburb whose zombie inhabitants now potter around in the way they did when they were alive.  A zombie commuter lumbers out of his front door with a dusty briefcase, some zombie musicians pathetically try to play their old instruments at the local bandstand and a zombie gas-station attendant shuffles dutifully to his pumps whenever something sets off the motion-sensor bell in his hut.

 

I also like the movie’s set-up.  Presumably taking place several years after Night, Dawn and Day, Land has Dennis Hopper as a megalomaniac who’s created a human sanctuary (bounded by a river and an electric fence) in the middle of a decaying city.  There, the rich and powerful humans live in a luxury apartment block called Fiddler’s Green while the less well-off live in Dickensian squalor in the streets below.  To keep his society going, Hopper regularly sends out a military force into the surrounding wasteland in a huge armoured vehicle called the Dead Reckoning, which is half-tank and half-truck, to scavenge for supplies.  Trouble is, the zombies inhabiting the wasteland are developing rudimentary powers of thought and self-organisation and, miffed at getting splattered by Hopper’s military expeditions, they start to march towards his little enclave.  Their leader is the afore-mentioned petrol pump attendant, played by black actor Eugene Clark.  In a series where the hero has always been black, this suggests Romero has now totally sided with the zombies.

 

Parallels with America’s growing wealth inequalities, its oil-driven foreign adventures and rising anti-American sentiment in the Middle East during the noughties are no doubt fully intentional.  I’d assumed that the Dennis Hopper character in Land represented George Bush Jr.  However, as the critic Kim Newman pointed out in an obituary for Romero in Sight and Sound magazine, the character is actually a property developer.  So maybe Romero had a premonition of who’d be sitting in the Oval Office at the start of 2017 (and quite likely again at the start of 2025).

 

© Atmosphere-Entertainment MM / Romero-Grunwald Productions

 

Land’s main problem is that it’s anti-climactic.  The end scenes where the zombies penetrate the human enclave and then Fiddler’s Green are suitably gory and carnage-ridden.  But you’re waiting for the military force in the Dead Reckoning, led by Simon Baker and Asia Argento, to ride to the rescue and start kicking serious zombie ass.  When Baker, Argento and the gang finally arrive, though, all they do is blow up the electric fence to allow a few survivors to escape.  And that’s it.

 

Still, Land is way better than the two zombie pictures Romero made subsequently.  2007’s Diary of the Dead has an interesting premise.  It’s a found-footage movie about a group of young filmmakers who’re working far from home when a zombie apocalypse breaks out; and they decide to record their adventures on film, documentary-style, as they journey across an increasingly chaotic landscape.  What’s particularly interesting is how they intercut their own story with clips that people around the world are simultaneously uploading to the Internet.  This being Romero, those clips often show human beings taking advantage of the mayhem to act appallingly.  However, after a gripping opening section, the middle of the film becomes predictable; and its final stretch is talky and ponderous to an extreme.

 

Survival of the Dead followed in 2009.  Set on an island off America’s northwest coast where a feud between two families escalates while society breaks down around them, it resembles an especially scrappy episode of The Walking Dead TV show (2010-22) and is a sad final instalment in Romero’s zombie sextet.

 

In between zombies, Romero made other types of movies and a couple are very good indeed.  That said, I’m not a fan of his two collaborations with Stephen King, Creepshow (1982), an anthology film scripted by King in the style of the old EC horror comics, and The Dark Half (1993), an adaptation of one of King’s novels.  Creepshow has its admirers and features an excellent cast – Adrienne Barbeau, Ted Danson, Ed Harris, Hal Holbrook, E.G. Marshall, Leslie Nielson and Fritz Weaver – but I find it unnecessarily hokey and slightly unworthy of Romero’s talents.

 

© Libra Films International

 

But Martin (1978) is excellent.  It’s about a modern-day American teenager (John Amplas) who, clearly mentally disturbed, believes himself to be an 84-year-old vampire.  He ends up living in the Pittsburgh suburbs with his great-uncle, an elderly Lithuanian immigrant.  Steeped in the lore and superstitions of his old country, the great-uncle is only too happy to take him at his word.  A disorientating mixture of blood-spilling, dreaminess, humour and melancholia, Martin is worth seeing as a tonic to those wimpy Twilight books (2005-20) and movies (2008-12) that have defined teenaged vampires in the 21st century.

 

Also praiseworthy is Romero’s 1981 non-horror movie Knightriders, which has a young Ed Harris in charge of a travelling medieval-style fair where the central attraction is the re-enactment of knightly jousting tournaments.  The gimmick is that there isn’t a horse in sight.  The knights doing the jousting are bikers riding (and regularly falling off) motorcycles.  Furthermore, Harris, who sees his fair not as a business but a community, tries to live according to a knightly code of virtue and honour.  This does him few favours as the fair suffers money problems and attracts unwelcome attention from bloodsucking promoters and talent scouts, sensationalist journalists, crooked cops, rival motorcycle gangs and redneck crowds who just want to see motorbikes getting smashed.  Knightriders is overlong and meandering, has about 15 characters too many and is sometimes sentimental, melodramatic and hippy-dippy.  But it’s also endearingly high-minded and decent-hearted.  It again shows Romero’s disdain for materialism and mindless conformism, though this time in human rather than metaphorical terms.

 

© Laurel Productions

 

And Harris’s struggles in Knightriders reflect Romero’s uncomfortable relationship with the wider moviemaking industry, an industry that was all-too-happy to ignore him, exploit him, mess him around and rip him off.  It was still doing this to him near the end of his life.  Indeed, during the years before his death in 2017, Romero’s work that saw the light of day was in computer games and comic books.  None of his film projects came to fruition after 2009.

 

In closing, I’ll say this to the spirit of George A. Romero.  Sir, you were responsible for half-a-dozen movies – the original Dead trilogy, The Crazies, Martin and Knightriders – that are special ones for me.  I salute you.

 

© Laurel Entertainment Inc

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Nostalgic wallows 3: the Ritz Cinema, Enniskillen

 

From Old Enniskillen / © Neil P. Reid

 

Two things inspired me to write this.  Firstly, I recently discovered that the Ritz Cinema in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, began business in 1954, making 2024 the 70th anniversary of its opening.  Secondly, I discovered that the Walt Disney live-action movie The Island at the Top of the World, the first film I saw in the Ritz or in any cinema, was released in 1974 – a half-century ago.

 

The Ritz was located on Enniskillen’s Forthill Street, next to the Railway Hotel and opposite and along from the local ‘mart’, as agricultural markets are called in Ireland.  It struck me as a distinctive building during my visits to Enniskillen.  I usually accompanied my mum on shopping trips, though she didn’t bring me to traipse around the shops with her.  The town centre, with the main shops, was a control zone, which meant if you parked your car there you needed to leave someone sitting inside it.  The 1970s were the most violent years of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, with the province’s retailing areas under threat from car-bombs. The security forces reasoned that if parked cars had people inside them, they were unlikely to be rigged to explode.  So that was my function – to prove our car wouldn’t blow up while my mum was shopping.

 

Anyway, the Ritz’s façade was a two-storey rectangle of red brick, with three archways at street level opening into a narrow veranda before the building’s entrance-doors, and with three big windows above.  It was particularly striking when lit at night.  Its upper half acquired an Art Deco-like frame of illuminated red and white neon, with the name ‘Ritz’ emblazoned in red capitals at the very top.

 

From an early age I was eager to get inside this mysterious and exotic-looking building, but there were problems.  I lived in a village called Kilskeery that was nine miles from Enniskillen.  To see a film in the Ritz one evening, I’d have to persuade my parents to make an 18-mile round-trip – or 36 miles if they took me, returned home and then went to collect me again when the film was done.  And unfortunately my parents weren’t film enthusiasts.  My mum had last gone to the ‘pictures’, as they were called in those days, to see a Tarzan movie.  I suspect it’d been one of the late-1950s series starring Gordon Scott as the yodelling, loincloth-wearing, vine-swinging jungle man.  My dad, meanwhile, never hinted at when he’d last been in a cinema.  He didn’t call it going to the ‘pictures’ but to the ‘flicks’ – an even older term dating back to the 1920s, when silent, black-and-white films had flickered on the screens. So I assumed it’d been a long time ago indeed.

 

© Walt Disney Productions / Buena Vista Distribution

 

As I grew older and read the What’s On pages of the local newspaper, the Impartial Reporter, and saw the films that were showing at the Ritz, I waged a verbal war of attrition against my parents, begging them to let me go to the cinema to see such items as Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973), Disney’s animated version of Robin Hood (1973) and Roger Moore’s first Bond move, Live and Let Die (1973).  Long before the Internet and YouTube, my only idea of what those films were like came from brief clips of them I’d seen on a kids’ TV quiz-show called Screen Test (1970-84), in which the contestants would watch excerpts from films, including newly-released ones, and then answer questions about them that tested their powers of observation and memory.  The clips, predictably, were gathered from the films’ most exciting bits, which convinced me they were equally exciting for their entire running times and were thus the best things ever.

 

In the mid-1970s, having seen a bit of The Island at the Top of the World on Screen Test, and read in the newspaper that it was about to play at the Ritz, I resumed my pleading – and, finally, my parents gave in.  Or rather, they talked my Uncle Robin into taking me to see it.  I got what I wanted, and my parents didn’t have to go anywhere near the Ritz themselves, so it was a win-win solution.  Except, of course, for Uncle Robin.  My mother’s younger brother, Robin was a kindly and infinitely patient man, who usually got saddled with having to amuse and entertain the kids at family get-togethers.  He had to listen to an immense amount of rubbish from me – I’d bombard him with questions like, “If Mytek the Mighty from the Valiant comic had a fight with the crew of the Seaview from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, who would win?”  (More than 30 years later, on the day of my mother’s funeral, I noticed my young niece and nephew instinctively making a beeline for him.  Nothing’s changed, I thought.)

 

The fateful evening arrived.  Uncle Robin escorted me into the Ritz and bought  us tickets for balcony seats.  And The Island at the Top of the World, a piece of undemanding hokum in which a crusty Englishman played by  Donald Sinden charters an airship, travels to the North Pole in search of his missing explorer son, and discovers a lost world heated by volcanic activity and populated by Vikings, became the first film I ever saw in a cinema.  Well, actually, it wasn’t the first film.  No, that honour belongs to a documentary, whose title I don’t remember, about Ghana.

 

In the 1970s, going to the cinema in the United Kingdom – Northern Ireland was and still is a part of the UK, though a contested part – was an endurance test.  The main film, the one you’d paid money to see, came at the end of what was innocuously called a ‘full supporting programme’.  This programme usually consisted of a couple of tedious documentaries, travelogues or ‘experimental’ short films, ‘quota-quickies’ that were apparently made and shoehorned into cinema schedules as a way of keeping British filmmaking personnel in employment and keeping the British film industry alive.  So, totally desperate to see some Donald-Sinden-in-an-airship-versus-Vikings action, I had to sit through a very dull documentary about modern-day Ghana.  Then came a weird dialogue-free short film about two boys tormenting each other on the roof of a block of flats, which even my mild-mannered Uncle Robin, normally reluctant to criticise, said was a load of rubbish.

 

With all that out of the way, surely now Donald Sinden and his airship would be swooping up to the North Pole to take on those pesky Vikings.  Right?  Wrong.  Presaged by the irritating, parping Pearl and Dean music, there followed a bunch of crackling, washed-out-looking commercials for eateries, car dealers and other businesses in Enniskillen – all, we were assured, just “yards from this cinema.”  At some point too, the houselights came on and we were exhorted to go down to the front and buy some confectionary from the usherette.  And furthermore,  there were the trailers for forthcoming films to get through…

 

© Hammer Films / Shaw Brothers

 

In fact, for me, the trailers were one of the evening’s highlights.  In 1970s Northern Ireland, at least, it was common practice for cinemas to show trailers for AA-rated (14 plus) and even X-rated  (18 plus) movies before screenings of ones deemed suitable for all ages, like the Disney production we’d come to see.  So, the Ritz aired a trailer for the Shaw Brothers / Hammer kung fu-horror film Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, which was on the following week.  In this, Count Dracula relocates to 19th century China and takes over a cult of Chinese vampires.  Dracula’s old enemy Van Helsing and a team of local martial-arts experts have to hunt the bloodsuckers down.  I thought this trailer was the best two-and-a-half minutes of celluloid I’d laid eyes on.  I mean, kung fu fighting and vampires!  When veteran horror star Peter Cushing shouted to martial arts expert David Chan, “Strike at their hearts!”, I wanted to punch my hand in the air and shout, “YES!”

 

Even after that, it still wasn’t time for The Island at the Top of the World.  This was because Disney had released it as the second part of a double-bill, the first part being a 25-minute cartoon called Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too.  But I found the Pooh cartoon entertaining.  And then, at long last, Donald Sinden boarded his airship and flew to the Viking-infested North Pole.  Like nearly all the films I saw in a cinema at an impressionable young age, I thought the movie was awesome – though no doubt if I watched Island now, it would seem a lot less good.  (In the 50 years since, I’ve avoided watching it again for that reason.)  I walked out of the Ritz that evening feeling exhilarated – though the stuff about Ghana and the weird kids on top of the block of flats left me feeling slightly bemused too.

 

My second visit to the cinema was to see the 1975 re-release of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), which featured monsters brought to life by the stop-motion-animation of special-effects wizard Ray Harryhausen.  It was a lot easier to persuade my parents to let me go to this one.  Noting that the Railway Hotel was next door to the Ritz, my Dad arranged to meet a farming mate (who’d done business earlier in the mart across the road) in the hotel bar.  He dropped me at the cinema entrance, had a chat and a drink with his mate, and picked me up afterwards.  In fact, Seventh Voyage was also part of a double-bill – the other half being the Italian comedy Watch Out, We’re Mad!, in which comic duo Bud Spencer and Terence Hill (real names Carlo Pedersoli and Mario Girotti) defended a funfair and its staff against some Mafia-type gangsters.  This involved much comic fisticuffs and slapstick violence.  It hardly constituted Kubrickian cinematic brilliance, but it seemed to my 10-year-old self the best movie ever.  Also, though I’d watched Ray Harryhausen’s giant animated creatures on TV before, it was epic seeing  them in Seventh Voyage on a big screen.  So, I left the Ritz feeling well-satisfied that evening too.

 

© Morningside Productions / Columbia Pictures

© Columbia Pictures

 

To make things even better, the trailers that evening included ones for Norman Jewison’s essay in science-fictional sporting violence  Rollerball (1975), and Gary Sherman’s cannibalistic-mutants-roaming-the-London-Underground horror classic Death Line (1972).

 

Another memorable Ritz visit came a year later when Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) surfaced at the cinema.  For this, I was again entrusted to Uncle Robin.  When we got there, we were astonished to see a queue snaking back from the entrance and along Forthill Street.  “I’ve never seen a queue at the Ritz before!” marvelled my uncle.  I had a sense that something seismic was happening – which was true, for Jaws marked the advent of huge, crowd-pleasing blockbusters and special-effects-laden franchises, plus the arrival of Spielberg, George Lucas and a generation of young filmmakers happy to give the public what they wanted, big-budget-style.  It would eventually usher in the era of the multiplex cinema, which consigned the Ritz and similar small-scale cinemas to the dustbin, but more on that later.

 

Jaws was the first movie I saw in a cinema crammed to the bulwarks with people.  Everyone was entranced by the events on the screen.  As the communal sense of excitement heightened, their reactions became increasingly dramatic.   And with Jaws, you had John Williams’ minimalist but brilliant theme music cranking up the audience’s feeling of apprehension and dread too: Duh… Duh!  Duh… Duh!  Duh, duh, duh, duh…

 

When the head of the unfortunate fisherman Ben Gardner dropped into view under his wrecked boat, squishily minus an eye, the auditorium filled with a whooshing noise that sounded like a great gust of wind – and then, all that breath inhaled, it was released again as a cacophony of screams.  Later, when the shark popped his big face out of the water in front of the unsuspecting Chief Brody (Roy Scheider), prompting the famous quip, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” there was another chorus  of screams – though this time tempered with laughter, because the moment was funny as well as scary.  I know it has a lot to do with me being 11 years old at the time, but I can’t think of another cinematic experience in my life as exciting or visceral.

 

© Zanuck/Brown Company / Universal Pictures

 

My relationship with the Ritz ended soon afterwards, for in February 1977 my family moved from Northern Ireland to Scotland, settling close to the town of Peebles in the Scottish Borders.  In fact, we lived only half-a-mile out of the town, and because Peebles High Street was home to a cinema called the Playhouse, I was suddenly able to see new films much more often.  Tragically, this happy state of affairs lasted just seven months, for in September that same year the Playhouse closed down.  After that, the nearest cinema – also called the Playhouse – was in the town of Penicuik ten miles north of Peebles.  Hence, suddenly, my filmgoing situation became even worse than it’d been in Northern Ireland.

 

I occasionally returned to Northern Ireland to see relatives in the hinterlands of Enniskillen, so I got a few further opportunities to pop into the Ritz.  For example, I remember going to see Marty Feldman‘s spoof of Foreign Legion movies, The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977).  I mainly remember it because a woman sitting in the row behind me would erupt into ear-splittingly loud, hysterical laughter every time the bug-eyed Feldman – who suffered from Graves’ ophthalmopathy – appeared onscreen.  That was very weird.

 

© Universal Pictures

 

During the 1970s and 1980s, TV ownership, then the invention of video cassettes and VCRs, and then the coming of multiplex cinemas – which started in 1985 with the opening of Milton Keynes’ ten-screen The Point – all contributed to the demise of small-town, single-screen cinemas in the UK.  The Ritz lasted longer than most, not shutting its doors until 1992.

 

Remarkably, the building – pitifully boarded up – still stands.  Or at least, it still did in 2022, which is when the image of it currently on Google Maps was taken.  The also-derelict Railway Hotel next door, where my Dad hung out after he’d dropped me off to see The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, looks even more pitiful, closed off behind corrugated iron.  They’re monuments – melancholy ones – to the days when taking a seat in a cinema auditorium seemed one of the most thrilling moments in my life.

 

And when I had Donald Sinden to look forward to, voyaging in an airship to the North Pole to take on Vikings, how could it not be thrilling?

 

© Walt Disney Productions / Buena Vista Distribution

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Cultural Alasdair-isation

 

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

 

Finally, I’ve managed to catch up with the movie Poor Things (2023).  This is Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s adaptation of the novel of the same name, which was written, designed and illustrated by the Scottish polymath Alasdair Gray and published in 1992.  Early this year, it got a brief release in Singapore, courtesy of the city-state’s arthouse cinema The Projector.  But when I tried to buy tickets for it on a day I wasn’t working, I found it was already sold out.  So, I had to wait until it turned up on a streaming service I had access to.

 

Anyway, nine months later, here are my thoughts on the film and how it compares to Alasdair Gray’s novel.  A warning before I proceed – there will be spoilers about both, including about their endings.

 

I’m a huge fan of Gray, who passed away in 2019, and I consider Poor Things one of the key Scottish novels of the 1990s.  It’s a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) set in Victorian Glasgow.  The bulk of the book has a narrator, Archibald McCandless, relating how his scientist colleague Godwin Baxter creates a young woman, Bella, out of dead flesh just as Frankenstein did with his creature.  What Baxter does is reanimate the body of a drowned woman and replace her brain with that of the baby she’d been pregnant with when she died. Thus, Bella, despite appearing to be an adult, has a lot of learning to do.  McCandless falls in love with her despite her initial infantilism (and later childishness and adolescent-ness) and there ensues a highly entertaining mishmash of sci-fi story, horror story, adventure, romance and comedy

 

I’m less of a fan of Lanthimos, having mixed feelings about his previous films.  I thought The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and The Favourite (2018) were all right, but I found his earlier The Lobster (2015) witless and annoying. So, I wasn’t overjoyed to hear that a favourite book of mine was being filmed by someone I was, at best, conflicted about.

 

The good news is that, for the most part, Lanthimos’s cinematic version is very entertaining too.  For me, it’s his most engaging work so far.  However, because it’s stuffed to its bulwarks with scenes of sexual shenanigans, those of a prudish disposition would be advised to stay away from it.

 

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

 

Firstly, it has many good performances.  Willem Dafoe does a decent job of playing Godwin Baxter – ‘God’ as Bella refers to him with unconscious irony – although he wasn’t the actor I imagined when I read the book 30 years ago.  I’d envisioned the late Robbie Coltrane as Baxter, whom Gray depicted as hulking and huge-headed, though with a high-pitched voice and small, dainty – practically Trump-like – hands.  Visually, Lanthimos and scriptwriter Tony McNamara rework the character.  They give him an unsettling habit of burping out bubbles and make his face malformed and stitched-together, so that he resembles a cross between Frankenstein’s creature and the 1930s-40s character actor Rondo Hatton, who in real life suffered from the disfiguring disease acromegaly.  But, helped by Dafoe’s understated, softy-spoken portrayal, Baxter retains the endearing blend of kindness and stubbornness he had in the novel.

 

Ramy Youssef is likeable as Max McCandles – the film’s renamed Archibald McCandless – though, as we’ll see, the excisions and simplifications the film imposes on the book make him a less complex character than the one Gray imagined.  Meanwhile, the most memorable male performance comes from Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn, the lawyer who encounters Bella while doing legal business with Baxter and McCandles, falls in lust and elopes with her.  Or more accurately, since at this point Bella’s mind hasn’t developed much beyond that of a child, abducts her.  While Wedderburn takes her on a debauched ‘grand tour’ that extends from Portugal to Egypt and then to France – with the rapidly-evolving Bella gradually turning the tables on him – Ruffalo gloriously channels every cad, rotter and bounder who’s existed in British culture, from Harry Flashman to Terry-Thomas.

 

Even Ruffalo’s performance, though, is something of a sideshow compared to the one delivered by Emma Stone as Bella.  Mentally growing from a floor-pissing infant to a gawky child, from a rebellious (if naïve) teenager to a verbose and sophisticated adult, all the while wreaking havoc with the social, patriarchal and sexual mores of the society around her because she doesn’t have a filter and is fearless in challenging what doesn’t seem fair or sensible to her, Stone never puts a foot wrong with her portrayal. She fully deserved her Best Actress win for this at the 96th Academy Awards, though I was a little surprised she did win – films as provocative and hard to categorise as Poor Things don’t normally float the boat of the conservative-minded, play-it-safe Academy.

 

Poor Things also netted an Oscar for its production design by James Price and Shona Heath and set decoration by Zsuzsa Mihalek, which are the film’s other great strength.  Price, Heath and Mihalek place Bella and her associates in a world that draws on our popular images and stereotypes of the Victorian era, puts them through a mincing machine and reassembles them as somewhere both familiar and trippily different, one where everything is that much bigger, stranger and more baroque.  One where the traditional Hansom cabs mingle on the streets with chugging, steam-powered ones that have ornamental horses’ heads on their fronts, where Lisbon’s tram system has been replaced by an airborne network of cables and capsules, where the Mediterranean is ploughed by absurdly top-heavy and castle-like steamships churning out yellow smoke under psychedelically tumultuous skies.  I don’t think I’ve seen a live-action film that comes closer to capturing the vibe of the sci-fi subgenre of steampunk.

 

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

 

I think the design team went too far with one detail, though.  Populating Baxter’s house and grounds are bizarre hybrid animals – a half-dog, half-goose creature, for instance, and a half-pig, half-chicken one – which are presumably the results of past experiments.  Doomed to wander around as house-decorations, with their anatomies horribly messed up, those hybrids can’t have much of an existence.  They suggest an uncharacteristic cruelty in Baxter’s nature.  Yet as we see from his fatherly concern for Bella, he isn’t Dr Moreau.

 

A bigger flaw in a generally excellent film is that, at 142 minutes, Poor Things is too long.  And its final stretch is a bit dissatisfying because it has a tagged-on feeling, involving a new character, Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), who is Bella’s husband.  At least, he’s the husband of the woman whose corpse Godwin salvaged, revived and turned into Bella.  He takes her back to his house, proves to be a brute and imprisons her until, once again, she turns the tables on this latest antagonist.  Blessington appears near the end of the book too but Gray takes less time to deal with him – a few pages, if I remember correctly.

 

Unfortunately, as a last-minute villain, Abbott’s Blessington can’t quite match Ruffalo’s splendidly scenery-chewing Wedderburn who preceded him.  Also, the film ends with a weak punchline that, again, implies some out-of-character cruelty on Baxter’s part.  (Actually, it made me think of the 1944 Universal Studios potboiler House of Frankenstein, wherein Boris Karloff’s villainous Dr Gustav Niemann tried to transplant a man’s brain into the body of a dog).

 

Its length and final act aside, Lanthimos’s Poor Things gets a definite thumbs-up from me… as a self-contained film.  As an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel, I’m less enamoured with it.  One issue is that it makes no attempt to replicate what happens at the book’s end.  This is when Gray turns everything on its head because he lets Bella take over as storyteller.  She denounces Archie McCandless’s version of events and makes him out to be devious and delusional.  She claims to be not a Frankenstein-type creation but an ordinary 19th-century woman – though one ahead of her time because she passionately believes in and campaigns for gender equality and social justice.  What we’ve read to this point is an insecure man’s gothic fabrication.  Thus, the book’s last part serves as a rebuke of male attitudes towards women that combine possessiveness with mad romanticism.

 

© Bloomsbury Press

 

This is both more disorientating and more satisfying than in the film. There, yes, Bella becomes an emancipated woman, fiercely intelligent and independent. But she remains a male fantasy creation, something that was made on a man’s laboratory table, reared and tutored in the ways of the world by men and used as a sexual plaything by dastardly men like Wedderburn – Bella, with her brain still trying to make sense of her experiences and her vocabulary still limited, describes those carnal encounters as ‘furious jumping’.  However, Gray pulls the rug from under us, making us question men’s treatment of women and their whole interpretation of women, in a way the film doesn’t.

 

The other thing the book has but the film doesn’t have is Scotland.  Gray’s Glasgow setting has disappeared, supplanted by a sprawling, steampunk-styled, Victorian London one.  And what was generally a very Scottish book has been turned into a film where the only hints that Scotland exists are Dafoe’s low-key Scottish accent and a few Scottish-sounding character names.  This de-Scottification of the story strips from it a layer of symbolism that was obviously important to Gray, an enthusiastic supporter of Scottish independence.

 

You can read Poor Things-the-book as an analogy for the relationship between Scotland and England.  When Archie – falsely – portrays Bella as a creature of gothic fantasy, this parallels how the common image of Scotland was fashioned by 19th-century English monarchs like King George IV and Queen Victoria (with, admittedly, help from locals like Sir Walter Scott) into a fanciful, ethereal never-never-land of castles, mountains, lochs, heather, tartan, kilts, bagpipes and so on.  When Bella finds her voice, refutes Archie’s fantasizing and finds her true identity as a campaigner for feminist and socialist causes, it can be seen as Gray’s wish for Scotland to cut loose from fusty old history-obsessed England / Britain and become a new, egalitarian and forward-looking nation.  Mind you, the tenth anniversary of Scotland’s independence referendum, which ended in failure for Gray’s side in 2014, is just a day or two away – so such a thing probably won’t happen for a while yet.

 

© Estate of Alasdair Gray / From Scottish Poetry Library

 

I don’t think Gray – a man so idealistic that in 2019, rather than have a funeral, he left his body to science – would have been too annoyed had he lived to see the cinematic Poor Things.  I don’t think he’d have indulged in literal ‘furious jumping’.  Rather, he’d have understood why Lanthimos, a Greek, probably didn’t feel comfortable with the Scottish aspects of the story and elected to leave them out.  (It also wouldn’t have surprised me if Gray had donated his royalties from the film to his nearest foodbank.)

 

I suspect, though, he’d have been depressed that no Scottish filmmaker had tried to make a celluloid version of Poor Things that was closer to his original, Glasgow-set vision.  Or that there seems to be zero funding and infrastructure in Scotland’s modern-day arts world to support a local filmmaker wanting to adapt the book to the screen.

 

And I don’t agree with certain Scottish commentators – invariably of a ‘Unionist’ hue – who’ve argued that it doesn’t matter that Scotland has been omitted from the movie.  Journalist Kenny Farquharson, for instance, has claimed that “Poor Things is a triumph for Scotland,” which makes no sense at all.  How can it be a triumph for Scotland if Scotland isn’t in it?  It’s like saying The Godfather (1972) is a triumph for Indonesia.  Or Blade Runner (1982) is a triumph for Birmingham.

 

Incidentally, there is one magical moment where Poor Things-the-film achieves an alchemy with Poor Things-the-book.  That’s the scene at the end where Bella and Archie snuggle up beside the dying Godwin Baxter – a visual reference to the image Gray created for the novel’s cover.

 

© Bloomsbury Press

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God save the queen

 

© Brandywine Productions / 20th Century Fox

 

I see a new Alien movie has just been released.  Entitled Alien: Romulus and directed by Fede Alvarez, it’s had variable reviews – for instance, Peter Bradshaw gave it two stars in the Guardian, Kim Newman gave it three stars in Sci-fi Now and John Nugent gave it four stars in Empire.  My tastes generally align with Newman’s, so I suspect if I go to see it, I’ll find Alien: Romulus a middling cinematic experience.  I suspect too the critics reacting most positively to the film are secretly doing so out of relief that co-producer Ridley Scott didn’t insist on it having Michael Fassbender play a certain, cocky android spouting tediously about the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

 

Anyway, this gives me an excuse to reprint something I once wrote about James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), the second entry in the series.  Film fans will probably spend the rest of time arguing about whether it or Ridley Scott’s 1979 original is the best Alien movie of all, but Aliens is probably my favourite.  That may be because I first saw it in a more conducive environment – a packed cinema in Aberdeen shortly after its release, where the audience initially didn’t know what to expect but certainly showed their appreciation when the thrills started coming.  (Whereas I first saw Scott’s Alien at a gathering of my high school’s film club, where the building tension was seriously interrupted by a ten-minute break when a teacher had to change the reels on the projector, and I watched the movie surrounded by loudmouth, smartass, wanker-teenager schoolmates.)

 

Here, then, is my paean to Aliens… With some bonus Father Ted.

 

© Hat Trick Productions / Channel 4

 

Scene: The living room of the Parochial House on Craggy Island during a 1996 episode of Father Ted.  The elderly and infirm Bishop Jordan, one of a visiting trio of church dignitaries, has just been explaining how he had a heart attack last year and needs to avoid having sudden surprises and shocks.

Father Dougal (bellowing at the top of his voice): AAAAAHHHHH!

Bishop Jordan almost suffers a heart attack on the living room sofa.

Father Ted (seeing Bishop Jordan’s distress): Dougal!  What are you doing?!

Father Dougal: Sorry, Ted – I just remembered Aliens is on after the news!

Father Ted: Dougal, for God’s sake!  (To the stricken Bishop Jordan, who has almost collapsed off the sofa.)  I’m sorry, Bishop Jordan!  (To Dougal.)  Did you not hear what he’s saying about his heart?

Father Dougal: I know, but it’s just that it’s the Director’s Cut!  Come on everyone, let’s all have a lads’ night in!

Father Ted: Dougal, just shut up!  (To Bishop Jordan.)  Ha-ha.  A heart attack?  That’s rare enough these days.

Bishop O’Neill (trying to help Father Jordan back onto the sofa): There were certainly a lot of prayers said for Bishop Jordan –

Father Dougal: I don’t know why we can’t look at Aliens –

Father Ted: Dougal!  Bishop O’Neill is speaking.

Father Dougal: But…  They’d love it, Ted!

Father Ted: No, they wouldn’t!

Father Dougal: But bishops love sci-fi –

Father Ted: DOUGAL!  WE ARE NOT WATCHING ALIENS!

 

© Brandywine Productions / 20th Century Fox

 

Like Dougal in that old episode of Father Ted, I still get irrationally excited when I discover that James Cameron’s Aliens is about to get another airing on TV.  And during the first occasion I watched it, there were a few moments when, like the beleaguered Bishop Jordan, I thought my heart was about to pop.  Yes, Aliens is a film that gets the adrenalin sluicing through you like almost no other.

 

It’s remarkable that the film achieves this when it’s a sequel.  One of the Great Laws of the Cinema is that, compared to the original films, sequels are almost always rubbish.  Certainly, that law seemed to hold true in the 1980s, when cinema audiences were subjected to such puddings as Halloween II (1981), Grease 2 (1982), Rocky III (1982) and IV (1985), Jaws 3-D (1983), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and Rambo III (1988), Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986) and Beverley Hills Cop II (1987).  Oh, and Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1981), which was directed by a certain James Cameron…

 

Aliens’ task was particularly daunting.  It was to be the follow-up to Ridley Scott’s magnificent haunted-house-in-space movie, 1979’s Alien.

 

It’s unsurprising that while Cameron was shooting the sequel at Buckinghamshire’s Pinewood Studios in the mid-1980s, he had to put up with a sceptical British crew who were of the opinion that this bearded early-thirty-something Canadian wasn’t fit to lick the boots of the mighty Ridley.  Mind you, the contempt was reciprocated by Cameron.  A man used to pursuing his vision with the single-minded ruthlessness of The Terminator (1984) – the film that he’d directed between the Piranha sequel and the Alien sequel – Cameron was not impressed by the crew’s Great British working practices like stopping every couple of minutes to have a tea-break.

 

The resulting movie shows no disrespect to Ridley Scott or the original Alien.  It simply takes a very different approach to the hideous, slimy, fanged, multi-jawed, acid-blooded title creatures.  Whereas Alien sets one of them loose in a giant spaceship and Scott milked the scenario for all the clammy, claustrophobic horror it was worth, Cameron unleashes a whole army of them in and around a base on a distant planet and declares out-and-out war on the bastards, courtesy of a well-armed platoon of space marines who’ve journeyed there in the company of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, heroine and sole survivor of the first film.   Yes, there’s clamminess, claustrophobia and horror to be found in Cameron’s vision too, but that doesn’t prevent Aliens from also being one of the best action films ever made.

 

That’s not to say that Aliens is a non-stop rollercoaster from start to finish.  Cameron actually takes his time getting his characters to the base (after contact with the 160-strong space colony there is suddenly and mysteriously lost).  Wisely, and unlike a lot of directors of scary movies who’ve come since, he gives the audience a chance to get to know, and get to like, his characters.  So that when hell does break loose, halfway through the film, we’re genuinely on the edge of our seats because we’re rooting for those characters to survive.

 

Cameron does such a good job of it that, 38 years on, I still know those characters like they’re dear old friends.  There’s Michael Biehn’s reliable Corporal Hicks, who packs an old pump-action shotgun alongside his space-age weaponry (“I like to keep this handy… for close encounters”) and who finds himself in the unexpected position of platoon leader after the aliens’ first onslaught wipes half of it out.  There’s Lance Henriksen’s Bishop, the regulation android whom Ripley – mindful of what happened in the first movie – is extremely wary of; though after he’s saved her and saved the other surviving humans three or four times (even after he gets ripped in half) she comes to the realisation that he’s a good, if synthetic, bloke.

 

© Brandywine Productions / 20th Century Fox

© Brandywine Productions / 20th Century Fox

 

And there’s the motor-mouthed Private Hudson, played by the late, great Bill Paxton, who gets the film’s best lines.  This is both before the aliens show up, when he’s a swaggering, show-offy git – “Hey Ripley, don’t worry.  Me and my squad of ultimate badasses will protect you…  We got nukes, we got knives, we got sharp sticks!” – and after they show up, when he’s a quivering, whiny git – “Hey, maybe you haven’t been keeping up on current events but we just got our asses kicked!”

 

But Aliens is no simple testosterone-fest.  Dougal in Father Ted might have earmarked it for a ‘lads’ night in’ but it’s also, subversively, a chick-flick.  At its heart are no fewer than four powerful female characters.  There’s the splendid Sigourney Weaver, of course, back in the role of Ripley – though it’s in Aliens that both Weaver and Ripley properly achieve the status of cinematic icons.  There’s Carrie Henn as Newt, the waif-like little girl who’s the colony’s only survivor and who, gradually, awakens Ripley’s maternal instincts.  While Ripley spends the original movie reacting to and mainly running from the horrors around her, it’s thanks to Newt that in Aliens she becomes increasingly proactive and ends up running at them.  Admittedly, that’s when she’s armed with a M41A Pulse Rifle / M240 Flamethrower.

 

And let’s not forget the impressive Private Vasquez, played by Jenette Goldstein, who’s more than a match than any man in her platoon.  “All right,” she snarls at one point, “we got seven canisters of CM-20.  I say we roll them in there and nerve-gas the whole f***in’ nest.”  And when she’s not shooting down aliens, she’s shooting down Hudson’s bullshit, as happens in the following famous exchange: “Hey Vasquez.  Have you ever been mistaken for a man?”  “No.  Have you?”

 

The film’s final trump card also takes female form: the Alien Queen.  Here, Cameron combines the design of the original alien, by the Swiss artist H.R. Giger, with the concepts of an egg-laying queen termite and a tyrannosaurus rex.  He creates a twenty-foot foe of terrifying savagery, strength and tenacity.  And when she comes bearing down on Ripley at the movie’s climax, it’s clear to the audience that this is the showdown between the Big Bad Mommas.  By this time, the Queen has seen her whole hellish brood wiped out.  Meanwhile, Ripley is determined to defend what’s left of her family – Newt and the now-incapacitated Hicks and Bishop – to the death.

 

What more can I say?  Aliens remains exhilarating nearly four decades on.  Slowly and inexorably, the first half of the film winches you in.  Thereafter, you find yourself strapped into a thrill-ride there’s no escape from.  In the words of Private Hudson: “We’re on an express elevator to hell, going down!”

 

© Brandywine Productions / 20th Century Fox

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Cinematic heroes 5: Richard Johnson

 

© Variety Film / Variety Distribution

 

Richard Johnson, who died in 2015 at the age of 87, was a busy and much-admired theatrical actor whose stage CV included Pericles Prince of Tyre, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Cymbeline, Twelfth Night and Antony and Cleopatra and who could boast that he’d worked with stage directors as distinguished as Tony Richardson and Peter Hall.

 

From the 1970s on, he was also a popular guest star on TV shows on both sides of the Atlantic, so that, for instance, he appeared in Hart to Hart (1979), Magnum P.I. (1981 & 83) and Murder, She Wrote (1987) in the USA and in Tales of the Unexpected (1980, 81 & 82), Dempsey and Makepeace (1986) and the inevitable Midsomer Murders (1999 & 2007) in the UK.  Indeed, it was on television that I first saw Johnson, guest-starring in a 1975 episode of Gerry Anderson’s silly but stylish science-fiction show Space: 1999.  He played the astronaut husband of series regular Dr Helena Russell (Barbara Bain), who’s been transformed into anti-matter.  Even back then, at 10 years old, I found Bain’s character so dull and humourless that this didn’t surprise me.  Being married to her would transform anyone into anti-matter.

 

However, it’s for his film work that I’ll remember him – never more so than for his performance as the main male character, Dr John Markway, in Robert Wise’s spooky-house classic The Haunting (1963).  I think The Haunting is one of the scariest films ever made.  In fact, both Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese are on record as saying that it’s the scariest film ever made.  The fact that The Haunting is based on a terrific novel, 1959’s The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, doesn’t do it any harm, either.

 

The initially smooth and charming Dr Markway investigates strange phenomena in an old, rambling and supposedly haunted house with a group of helpers – the young man who’s inheriting the place (Russ Tamblyn), a psychic (Claire Bloom) and a lonely oddball called Eleanor Vance (Julie Harris), in whom the house’s supernatural forces start taking an interest.  Markway’s wife – Lois Maxwell, who was Miss Moneypenny in the first 14 James Bond movies – also turns up at the premises when things are getting properly scary, which the now-unnerved doctor isn’t happy about.

 

© Argyle Enterprises / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

Director Robert Wise understood that the most frightening things are things we don’t see and are left to our imaginations; because what we are capable of imagining in our mind’s-eye is far worse than anything a special-effects or make-up artist can conjure up onscreen.  So, in The Haunting, we hear rather than see.  The film’s characters find themselves reacting to all manner of weird and disturbing noises made by mysterious somethings off screen.  Wise’s sound editors played these noises aloud while Johnson and his co-stars were filming their scenes, which added to the rattled authenticity of their performances.

 

In addition, Johnson’s Markway gets to utter the iconic line: “Look, I know the supernatural is something that isn’t supposed to happen, but it does happen.”  These words impressed Rob Zombie so  much that he and his band White Zombie sampled them on the 1995 song Super–Charger Heaven.  (The song also features Christopher Lee from 1976’s To the Devil a Daughter snarling, “It is not heresy and I will not recant!”)

 

Needless to say, when Hollywood got around to remaking The Haunting in 1999 with action-movie director Jan de Bont at the helm, the result was dire.  It abandoned Robert Wise’s ultra-creepy, suggest-don’t-show approach and relied instead on a crass welter of computer-generated special effects.  I hate it even more than I hate the 2006 remake of The Wicker Man with Nicholas Cage.

 

Elsewhere, Richard Johnson’s film biography contains an interesting what-if.  In the early 1960s, when Sean Connery was known only as a bit-part actor, former body builder and former Edinburgh milkman, Johnson turned down the opportunity to play James Bond.  Terence Young, who was lined up to direct the first Bond movie, 1962’s Dr No, approached him, but Johnson didn’t like the idea of being stuck playing the same character in a long contract.

 

However, later, Johnson played Bulldog Drummond, a British literary action-hero who’d inspired Ian Fleming when he started writing the Bond novels in the early 1950s.  He was Drummond in two movies, Deadlier than the Male (1967) and Some Girls Do (1969), both directed by Ralph Thomas.  Ironically, the films are far more influenced by James Bond’s cinematic franchise, massively popular by then, than they are by the original Bulldog Drummond books, which were written from 1920 to 1937 by H.C. McNeile (‘Sapper’) and from 1938 to 1954 by Gerald Fairlie.  The books portrayed Drummond as an English gent with combat experience from World War I and, frankly, some very racist views of foreigners, having adventures in an upper-crust world of country houses, servants and vintage motorcars.

 

© Greater Films Ltd / Rank Film Distributors

 

I’ve seen Deadlier than the Male and, because I read a few Bulldog Drummond books in my boyhood, I find it fascinatingly peculiar if nothing else.  It transfers Drummond to a glamorous Swinging Sixties setting populated with luxurious islands, private jets, yachts, speedboats, brassy music, bikinis, dolly-birds and gadgets (like giant, computer-controlled chessmen).  At least, that’s ‘glamorous’ as far as its less-than-Bond-sized budget allows.  Its chief gimmick is Elke Sommer and Sylvia Koscina as a pair of voluptuous, presumably sapphic assassins who go about their deadly work with a kooky cheerfulness.  “Goodbye, Mr Bridgenorth!” they cry as they tip a victim (played by future 1970s British sitcom-star Leonard Rossiter) off a high building.  Mr Kidd and Mr Wint did this schtick more amusingly in 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever.  Johnson is serviceable as Drummond, but seems bemused by the proceedings.  It’s not among his most memorable performances.

 

Incidentally, in 1951, Johnson’s second-ever film appearance had been an uncredited one as a ‘Control Tower Operator’ in an old-school Bulldog Drummond movie.  This was Calling Bulldog Drummond, featuring Walter Pidgeon in the title role.

 

Johnson’s other 1960s movies include Michael Anderson’s Operation Crossbow (1964), a surprisingly downbeat World War II action-adventure movie in which he plays the British minister who sends George Peppard, Tom Courteney and Jeremy Kemp on a suicide mission to sabotage the Nazis’ V1 / V2 rocket project; and Basil Dearden’s epic costume-drama Khartoum (1966), where he’s an aide to Charlton Heston’s General Charles Gordon, locked in conflict with Laurence Olivier’s Muhammad Ahmed in 1880s Sudan.

 

For me, his most interesting 1960s role (apart from The Haunting) is 1966’s La Strega in Amore, or The Witch in Love, a black-and-white Italian movie in which he plays a young man hired by a wealthy, elderly woman (Sarah Ferrati) to catalogue her huge library.  The manner of Johnson’s recruitment is sinister.  First the woman stalks him, then she places in a newspaper a job advertisement that’s so oddly detailed he’s the only person in Rome who can meet its specifications.  Despite his misgivings, Johnson decides to stay in the woman’s luxurious palazzo when he meets her beautiful and alluring daughter (Rosanna Schiffiano).  But the longer he remains with the two women, the more his grip on reality loosens and the stronger the insinuation becomes that mother and daughter are the same person – two versions of la strega, the witch of the title.

 

© Arco Films / Cidif

 

Italian cinema was awash at the time with full-blooded, gothic horror movies, but director Damiano Damiani ploughs his own furrow with La Strega in Amore, making it dreamy rather than macabre and creating something that wouldn’t seem out-of-place in an arthouse cinema.  Unfortunately, the film’s premise doesn’t justify its one-hour-49-minute running time and it could have been a half-hour shorter.  Still, after seeing Johnson play fairly upright and decent characters, it’s interesting to see him in this playing a vain bastard, somebody you partly feel is getting what he deserves.  And after the languid, arty build-up, the film’s nasty climax delivers a jolt.

 

In 1975, Johnson not only starred in, but also wrote the original story for the forgotten thriller Hennessy, directed by Don Sharpe.  This is perhaps the first film inspired by Northern Ireland’s Troubles, which’d erupted in 1969.  It’s about an IRA explosives expert (Rod Steiger) who, after the British Army kills his wife and child, decides to blow up the state opening of the British parliament, destroying both the government and the Queen.  Johnson gives an endearing performance as the weary, dishevelled policeman trying to stop him.

 

Hennessy is patchy but has an impressive cast that also includes Lee Remick, Trevor Howard, Eric Porter, a young Patrick Stewart and an even-younger Patsy Kensit (playing Steiger’s doomed daughter).  The final scenes in the House of Commons, featuring the Queen, landed the filmmakers in trouble because they used real footage that Buckingham Palace had authorised without knowing it would end up in a film.  Also, at the time, the film’s subject-matter was extremely sensitive.  As a result, its British cinematic release was almost non-existent.

 

© Hennessy Film Productions / American International Pictures

 

Presumably because The Haunting had put him on the radar of horror filmmakers, Johnson continued to appear in scary movies during the 1970s and 1980s. These included Ovidio G. Assonitis and Roberto Piazzoli’s Beyond the Door (1974), Massimo Dallimano’s The Cursed Medallion (1975), Pete Walker’s The Comeback (1978), Sergio Martino’s Island of the Fishermen and The Great Alligator River (both 1979), and Don Sharpe’s What Waits Below (1984).  He was also in Roy Ward Baker’s kiddie-orientated The Monster Club (1981).  This was the ninth and final horror-anthology movie made by American (but British-based) producer Milton Subotsky.  By my calculations, Subotsky’s nine anthologies contain a total of 37 stories.  The Vampires, the one featuring Johnson in The Monster Club, is possibly the worst of all 37.  You feel like banging your head against the nearest hard surface at the story’s punchline, when the bloodsucking Johnson reveals he’s escaped destruction at the hands of some vampire-hunters thanks to a ‘stake-proof vest’.

 

In 1979, 16 years after The Haunting, Johnson played another doctor, a medical one, in a very different sort of horror movie.  This was the Italian film Zombie Flesh Eaters, directed by the legendary Lucio Fulci.  He was Dr Menard, the weary, dishevelled – by this time Johnson was good at doing ‘weary and dishevelled’ – but stoical GP on a remote Caribbean island trying to deal with an epidemic of reanimated, hungry cadavers.  The movie is both gleefully gory and lovably schlocky, with its highlights including a once-seen-never-forgotten underwater battle between a shark and a zombie.  Despite this, Johnson gives it his all.  He spouts the less-than-epic dialogue with as much earnestness as he would doing Shakespeare.

 

Financial pressures meant Johnson wasn’t able to retire and he continued working until his death.  According to his Wikipedia entry, he said in a 2000 interview he was “constantly worried where the next job was coming from,” but then quipped: “At least at my age the opposition gets less and less because they keep dying.”  His 21st century roles included ones in Simon West’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), Woody Allen’s Scoop (2006), Mark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008) and Tom Browne’s acclaimed Radiator (2014).

 

Also in his later years, after Lucio Fulci had become a cult figure and Zombie Flesh Eaters had become something of a camp classic, Johnson was invited to horror movie conventions to discuss his experiences making the film.  A serious Shakespearean actor he may have been, but he always sounded gracious and affectionate towards Fulci.  He was even complimentary about the film’s most notorious moment, wherein his character’s wife gets grabbed by the hair and dragged through a freshly-smashed hole in a door by a rotting zombie arm.  In the process, in loving close-up, she gets a big splint of wood protruding from the hole embedded in her eye – this was surely what cemented Zombie Flesh Eaters’ place on Britain’s list of banned ‘video nasties’ in the 1980s.  According to the journalist Tristan Bishop, an 80-something Johnson enthused to him at one convention, “That spike in the eyeball scene!  Wasn’t that genius?  So cinematic!”

 

Clearly, Richard Johnson was a man who enjoyed his work.

 

© Argyle Enterprises / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

© Variety Film / Variety Distribution

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One Donald I’m sad to see go

 

© Avala Film / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

It’s often said you don’t appreciate the value of something until after it’s gone.  I felt like that last week on hearing of the death of the great Canadian actor Donald Sutherland.  If someone had asked me to list my all-time favourite actors, I wouldn’t have thought of including Sutherland.  Yet when he passed away at the age of 88 – having kept working in film and TV until last year – it suddenly struck me how much I was going to miss him.

 

Sutherland was an actor who could inhabit a range of personalities and project many different moods and emotions, yet whom you always recognised as, basically, himself.  His characters might be heroic, dignified, fatherly, tragic, eccentric, sinister, venal, slow-witted, juvenile, gormless or demented – yet you always knew you were watching Donald Sutherland.  Whoever he played, he retained that unique quality of Donald Sutherland-ness.

 

Born in St John, New Brunswick, Sutherland graduated from Victoria University with an interesting-sounding degree in Engineering and Drama, then relocated to Britain in 1957 and studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.  A few years later, he found his way into Europe’s then-flourishing horror-movie industry.  He appeared in the monochrome Italian-French chiller Castle of the Living Dead (1964), starring Christopher Lee, directed by Warren Kiefer, and with a 20-year-old Michael Reeves, who four years later would make 1968’s masterly Witchfinder General, working as assistant director.  No doubt for budgetary reasons, Sutherland was cast in three roles, most amusingly in drag, as a witch.  He played a good-natured simpleton in Hammer Films’ Fanatic (1965), a blend of the low-key psychological thrillers the studio made when it wasn’t cranking out full-blooded gothic-horror melodramas and the fashionable 1960s sub-genre of ‘hagsploitation’ – the hag here being a dangerous religious nutcase played by Tallulah Bankhead. If the cast wasn’t interesting enough with Sutherland and Bankhead, it also included Stephanie Powers, Yootha Joyce and Peter Vaughan, future stars of TV shows Hart to Hart (1979-84), George and Mildred (1976-79) and Porridge (1974-77) respectively.

 

© Amicus Productions / Paramount Pictures

 

The best remembered of Sutherland’s early horror films is Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), directed by Freddie Francis and produced by Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg – the first of seven anthology horror movies that Subotsky and Rosenberg’s British-based Amicus Productions would specialise in.  To be honest, I don’t think the film’s five stories are up to much, but the framing device, wherein five night-time travellers find themselves sharing a train compartment with the mysterious Dr Shreck (Peter Cushing), who uses Tarot cards to foretell each man’s future, is wonderfully atmospheric.  Dr Terror also has a fascinating cast.  In addition to Sutherland and Cushing, there’s Christopher Lee (again) and another horror-movie veteran, Michael Gough; trumpeter, tap-dancer and TV presenter Roy Castle; disc jockey Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman; and the original M from the James Bond films, Bernard Lee.  Sutherland’s segment even has a fleeting appearance by his fellow Canadian Al Mulock, who along with Woody Strode and Jack Elam was gunned down by Charles Bronson in the astonishing opening sequence of Sergio Leone’s masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

 

Sutherland also featured in 1960s British TV, most memorably in 1967 when he played a villain in an episode of the surreal and stylish espionage series The Avengers (1961-69) called The Superlative Seven.  This has Patrick Macnee’s debonair John Steed being invited to a bizarre fancy-dress party on board a private jet plane, which, after it takes off, is discovered to be remote-controlled.  Eventually, the plane lands Steed and the other, equally-baffled guests on a seemingly deserted island.  There, the party start to be murdered one by one.  As well as riffing on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (1939), the episode has a science-fictional sub-plot where Sutherland attempts to create a race of super-soldiers.  And the guest cast includes Charlotte Rampling and Brian Blessed before they became famous too.

 

That same year, Sutherland turned up in Robert Aldrich’s loud, raucous and violent war movie The Dirty Dozen, about 12 convicts trained by the US Army and sent to France on a suicide mission against the Wehrmacht prior to the D-Day Landings   The movie contained so many famous actors playing characters who weren’t among the 12 convicts – Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Richard Jaeckel, George Kennedy, Ralph Meeker and Robert Ryan – that, over the years, folk have become confused about who actually played the Dirty Dozen.  I’ve even heard a few people declare that, with Sutherland dead, that’s all the Dozen gone.  Well, no – because actors Stuart Cooper and Colin Maitland, who played two more of the Dozen, are still on the go.

 

© Kenneth Hyman Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

The Dirty Dozen’s success led to Sutherland being cast in more World War II movies.  Most notable of these was 1970’s Kelly’s Heroes, in which Clint Eastwood’s Private Kelly, a soldier in an American platoon in 1944 France, learns there’s a fortune in Nazi gold stashed in a bank behind enemy lines and persuades his fellow soldiers, including Sutherland and Telly Savalas, to help him steal it.  Sutherland’s character is a loopy tank commander called Oddball who, with a blatant disregard for historical authenticity, was added to the script to satirise the then-ubiquitous hippy movement.  He says spaced-out things like, “Don’t hit me with those negative waves so early in the morning!” or, “Woof, woof, woof!  That’s my other dog imitation.”  I suspect that for people my age – well, males my age – in the UK, Oddball is the character we’ll remember Sutherland best as, because British TV seemed to show Kelly’s Heroes every other week when we were kids.

 

Sutherland was also in 1976’s The Eagle Has Landed, playing an IRA man who aids some German commandoes, headed by that well-known German, Michael Caine, on a mission in England to assassinate Winston Churchill.  Of Sutherland’s performance, the best that can said is that there are non-Irish actors who’ve played Irishmen with worse Irish accents.

 

Another war movie was M*A*S*H (1970), Robert Altman’s scabrous black comedy set during the 1950s conflict in Korea, in which Sutherland played insolent and rebellious US Army surgeon Hawkeye Pierce.  The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, was the third-most popular movie of its year and gave Sutherland iconic status.  I have to say that, though I like Robert Altman’s movies generally, M*A*S*H has not aged well.  Today, much of its humour feels juvenile and mean-spirited, especially when directed towards Sally Kellerman’s Major Houlihan character, rather than ‘anti-establishment’, which it was hailed as at the time.  Altman famously loathed the M*A*S*H TV show that was spun off from his movie and ran from 1972 to 1983, but I suspect time has been kinder to its gentler brand of humour.

 

© Casey Productions / Eldorado Productions / British Lion Films

 

Afterwards, Sutherland was in prestigious films like Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971), Fellini’s Casanova (1975) and Bernard Bertolucci’s 1900 (1975) – none of which I’ve seen.  But it’s in Nicolas Roeg’s masterly horror film Don’t Look Now (1973) that, of his movies I have seen, I believe he does his best work.  Don’t Look Now is an adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier story in which a grief-stricken couple try to get over the death of their daughter by immersing themselves in a restoration project in Venice – only to be haunted by sightings of a small figure in a red coat who at least resembles their deceased daughter.  The film has two set-pieces at its beginning and end whose emotional impact has rarely been matched in the horror genre – Sutherland features heavily in both.  Films about the supernatural, despite focusing on death, memories of the departed and the possibility of an afterlife, don’t usually capture the feeling of grief that well.  But the pained, brittle performances by Sutherland and his co-star Julie Christie convey it with extreme poignancy.  With their performances augmented by Nicolas Roeg’s camerawork, visual imagery and memorably-elliptical approach to storytelling, Don’t Look Now is a film for the ages.

 

Though for me Don’t Look Now gives Sutherland his best role, it’s Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) that gives him his best image.  This is Hollywood’s second adaptation of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers (1955), wherein a low-key invasion of earth is staged by alien pod-people who gradually replace all the real people.  The image in question, now a popular meme, comes in the final moments when Sutherland, the film’s hero, reacts to another character by pointing at her, adopting a grotesque, gawking expression and emitting an inhuman squeal.  This tells us the pod-people have now replaced him too.  The original Body Snatchers movie, made by Don Siegel in 1956, was set in small-town America, but Kaufman’s version audaciously shifts the action to San Francisco, and the result is just as good.  Actually, I was going to say filmmakers have treated Finney’s novel well, for in 1993 Abel Ferrara directed another version that was decent too.  But then I remembered there was a fourth version made in 2007 with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, and it was rubbish.

 

© Solofilm / United Artists

 

As he grew older, Sutherland’s work in films and television inevitably saw him shift from being a leading man to being a grizzled character actor and then an esteemed ‘elder-statesman’ guest-star.  His movies included star-laden Oscar-bait (1980’s Ordinary People), daft Alistair Maclean adaptations (1979’s Bear Island), slightly less daft Ken Follett adaptations (1981’s Eye of the Needle), overripe John Grisham adaptations (1996’s A Time to Kill), overstuffed British flops (1985’s Revolution), Sylvester Stallone movies (1989’s Lock Up), Clint Eastwood movies (2000’s Space Cowboys), paranoid Oliver Stone conspiracy thrillers (1991’s JFK), preposterous Roland Emmerich disaster movies (2022’s Moonfall) and Emma Thompson-scripted Jane Austen costume-dramas (2005’s Pride and Prejudice).

 

He made three films with his son Kiefer – who, when I first saw him onscreen in the 1980s, made me think, “Wow, he looks just like his dad!” – the afore-mentioned A Time to Kill, plus 1983’s Max Dugan Returns and 2015’s Forsaken.  And he featured in four Hunger Games movies (2012-15), playing Snow, the despot running the future North American territory of Panem.  I haven’t seen any of the Hunger Games series, but a future dystopian America ruled by a president called Donald sounds terrifyingly prescient.

 

Ironically, in the 1990s, Sutherland returned to his 1960s roots and started making horror movies again.  He was in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), a clodhopping film that a few years later led to a sublime TV show; 1994’s The Puppet Masters, based on a short story by Robert Heinlein, which was a low-budget but not unenjoyable retread of Invasion of the Body Snatchers; 1998’s police-occult thriller Fallen, in which he rubbed shoulders with Denzel Washington and John Goodman; and 1999’s Virus, an Alien rip-off set on board a ship, in which Sutherland’s over-the-top villain is one of the few redeeming features – his old seadog is so sea-doggish he only lacks a pegleg and a parrot on his shoulder.  Horror-adjacent is his role as Ronald Bartel in Ron Howard’s Backdraft (1991).  He’s an incarcerated pyromaniac whom William Baldwin and Robert De Niro’s firemen-investigators turn to for help when they’re trying to catch the person responsible for a series of deadly, fiery arson attacks.  Thus, he’s the Hannibal Lector of the fire-raising world.

 

However, while I write this, the Donald Sutherland performance that keeps coming to mind – accompanied by the lovely, plaintive song that accompanies it – is the one he essayed in the video for Kate Bush’s single Cloudbusting (1985).  He’s a kindly inventor who creates a rainmaking machine, only to be taken away by some sinister men in suits, who obviously believe there are things man was not meant to know.  This rather vitiates the song’s optimistic lyric, “Ooh, I just know that something good is gonna happen…”  It’s left for Sutherland’s son, played by Bush, to complete his work.  I visited the video on YouTube the other day and was touched to discover how the comments below were packed with people paying tribute to Sutherland.

 

© EMI

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Furiosa and curiosa

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

 

What a strange beast Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) is.  Yes, it’s a Mad Max movie, directed and co-written by the franchise’s mastermind George Miller.  But it’s one (almost) devoid of Mad Max.  Instead, it concentrates on Imperator Furiosa, the formidable warrior-woman played by Charlize Theron who partnered the title character in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road.  Furiosa fills us in on her backstory, from her childhood to early womanhood.  Thus, it’s a prequel to Fury Road and a discombobulating departure from the customary format of the Mad Max films.

 

If you had to sum up the structure of the earlier four movies in one word, that word would be linear.  Things just barrelled along in a straight line.  Indeed, the two best ones, Mad Max II (1982) and Fury Road, were basically ongoing vehicle chases, with plot and characterisation having to scramble on board during the brief moments when people’s feet eased on the accelerators.  Not that I’m knocking them.  Mad Max II is one of my favourite films of the 1980s and I consider Fury Road one of the best films of the 21st century.

 

But with Furiosa, Miller – bravely or foolishly, depending on your point of view – abandons the formula that’s hitherto served him so well and presents a movie with other things besides big, metallic, wheeled things hurtling after and crashing into one another.  There are periods of quiet and calm, where the emphasis is on dialogue, characterisation and violence-free drama rather than on hectic, in-your-face action.  Parts of it even get a bit slow.

 

Which isn’t to say Furiosa lacks action.  It begins with an edge-of-your-seat (if small-scale) chase, and later there are two lengthy action set-pieces that rank among the most thrilling the franchise has produced, even if one of them incorporates a bit too much CGI.  Overall, though, comparing one of the earlier Mad Maxes with this entry is like – to cite two examples from a sub-genre that heavily influenced the series originally, the spaghetti western – comparing Sergio Leone’s lean, taut A Fistful of Dollars (1964) with his sprawling epic Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

 

No, I’m not claiming that Furiosa is as good as Once Upon a Time in the West (one of my top half-dozen movies ever, incidentally).  I also think it falls short of the greatness achieved by Fury Road.  But I still found it pretty impressive.  Before I discuss the movie in detail, though, I should warn you – from here on there will be spoilers.

 

The film gets going with the afore-mentioned chase.  Some scumbag bikers abduct little Furiosa (Alyla Browne) from her community in the Green Place, a Garden of Eden-like hideaway that’s somehow survived the apocalypse that’s ravaged the rest of the earth in the Mad Max version of the future.  Her mother (Charlee Fraser) pursues them into the Wasteland and the scumbag bikers are killed one by one, but not before the last of them manages to deliver Furiosa to Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), leader of a gang with a self-explanatory name, the Biker Horde.

 

A subsequent attempt to rescue Furiosa results in the mother’s death and Dementus keeps the little girl, partly as his gang’s mascot, partly as a surrogate daughter.  “Do not look away, you mustn’t look away!” he urges her while he crucifies her mother in front of her, believing that the trauma will toughen her up and make her better suited to the Wasteland.  He’s obviously a dad who believes in the ‘school of hard knocks’ approach to raising kids.  He also muses, “When things go bonkers, you have to adapt.”

 

Later, he and his Horde stumble across the Citadel that figured, or will figure, in Fury Road and come face to face with the Citadel’s implacable, pustular ruler Immortan Joe.  Here, Joe is played by Lachie Hulme.  Hugh Keays-Byrne, the actor who played him in Fury Road (and also played the franchise’s original villain, Toecutter, back in 1979’s Mad Max) passed away in 2020.  The Biker Horde manages to capture the Citadel’s satellite-settlement Gastown, responsible for producing the fuel for Joe’s vehicles.  After some hard bargaining, Joe reluctantly cedes control of Gastown to Dementus, but demands some concessions from the biking warlord in return.  These include him taking custody of Furiosa.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

 

Born in the healthy environs of the Green Place, Furiosa is genetically undamaged and Joe, desperate for some normal-bodied and able-minded offspring, fancies her as a future wife.  As we know from Fury Road, he has a squad of young wives locked away for breeding purposes, though the results have been disappointing so far – as evidenced by the two sons he’s acquired, the hulking, thick-as-mince Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones) and the psychotic Scabrous Scrotus (Josh Helman).  Not keen on the idea of ending up a spouse to Immortan Joe, Furiosa escapes from his harem, disguises herself as a boy, pretends to be mute and finds employment in the Citadel’s garages.

 

A few years later, after various adventures, and now played by Anya Taylor-Joy, Furiosa becomes apprenticed to the tough but kindly Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), driver of the War Rig, the giant truck that’s the pride of Joe’s vehicular fleet.  “You have about you a purposeful savagery,” Praetorian Jack informs her, which in the Wasteland is as close to a compliment as you can get.

 

Praetorian Jack and the now Praetorian Furiosa gradually bond, to the point where Jack agrees to help her return to the Green Place.  But bigger events get in their way.  Namely, Dementus’s running of Gastown becomes such a disaster that Immortan Joe and his allies vow to get rid of him, even if this means a full-scale war raging in the Wasteland…

 

One thing I liked about Furiosa was the chance to see certain characters from Fury Road again.  Not just Immortan Joe, but subsidiary villains like Rictus Erectus, the People Eater (John Howard), the Bullet Farmer (Lee Perry, replacing the original actor Richard Carter, who died in 2019) and the Organic Mechanic (Angus Sampson), who’s the nearest thing in the Wasteland to a GP and has the thankless task of delivering Joe’s stillborn and / or mutant kids.  But what pleased me most was a fleeting reappearance by the Doof Warrior, the goon who rides in front of a giant wall of speakers whilst playing a splendid, flamethrowing electric guitar.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

 

Furiosa presents us with some cool new characters as well, mostly in Dementus’s entourage.  There’s the piratical Rizzdale Pell (Lachy Hulme in a second role) who, unlike normal movie pirates, doesn’t bother to conceal an empty eye-socket with an eyepatch.  Also facially disfigured is the zombie-like Mr. Norton, who’s actually a Ms. and is played by Elsa Pataky, Chris Hemsworth’s real-life wife, no less.  And I was impressed by the Octoboss (Goran D. Kleut), a satanic figure clad in black, horned armour who rides / flies into battle on a motorbike-cum-kite, trailing a long, black, tendrilous parachute behind him.

 

Dementus also employs two cheerleaders.  He has a Gollum-like weirdo called Smeg (David Collins) acting out his ever-changing moods in a series of strange, performative dances.  And he has a warm-up man called the History Man (George Shevstov) who warns potential adversaries about his boss’s ‘congress of destruction’, i.e., the thousands of motorbikes massed behind him.  The History Man additionally serves the gang as a bard and as an archivist of knowledge, stories and language, which he has tattooed in tiny writing all over his body.  He’s asked to dredge up appropriate words from the mostly-forgotten lexicon of English to mark special occasions: “History Man!  A word-burger if you please!”  And he provides the film with its narration, which implies the saga of Furiosa has been added to this anarchic society’s repository of legend and lore.

 

But among the new characters, the biggest star is Dementus himself.  Chris Hemsworth obviously relished the opportunity to set aside his goody-two-shoes image as Thor in the Marvel cinematic universe and play somebody gloriously, evilly unhinged.  While cunning and ruthless enough to make a credible post-apocalyptic warlord, there’s also a touch of ridiculous, Spinal Tap-style heavy metal-ness about him.  This means that, ultimately, he’s never going to be smart enough to defeat Immortan Joe, still Top Dog when Fury Road rolls around.  He’s merely likely to cause a lot of damage along the way. Inevitably, Dementus gets the best lines.  He goadingly demands of Furiosa, “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” or “Where were you going, so full of hope?  There is no hope!”  Best of all is a muttered aside when a minion disputes his orders: “Hmm, questioning my boss-ority…”

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

 

It says a lot for the more measured performances by Anya Taylor-Joy and Tom Burke that they manage to make their presences felt, and Hemsworth doesn’t walk away with the film.

 

With so many good elements, then, why do I feel Furiosa is less effective than Fury Road?  Well, it’s a bit too long and, while earlier parts of the film are languidly paced, there’s rather too much happening, too much Machiavellian scheming and double-crossing going on, in its later stages.  Also, the franchise’s long-term fans will be frustrated that the war between Dementus and Irmmortan Joe, when it finally arrives, is represented only by a brief montage and a voice-over from the History Man.  Instead, the film’s focus becomes personal.  It zooms in on Furiosa pursuing and confronting Dementus over her mother’s long-ago murder.  I can see what Miller was trying to do, and respect his bravery in doing it, but I’d have preferred things to end with a bigger bang.

 

Still, after seeing it a few days ago, I haven’t stopped thinking about Furiosa.  Things about it that didn’t occur to me in the cinema have occurred to me since.  For example, the nature of Praetorian Jack’s relationship with Furiosa is kept vague and at the time I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a romantic one.  Now I see him more as being a father-figure to her, which nicely fills the void left by her mother’s death.  I also appreciate, with hindsight, how the script uses peaches – yes, peaches – as a motif.  Furiosa is seen picking them at the start, her mother gives her a peach-pit as a memento shortly before she dies, and the same pit has a bearing on what Furiosa does to Dementus at the end (at least, according to the story she tells the History Man).

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

 

And during a Wasteland sequence that’s particularly brutal and traumatic for Furiosa, Miller’s camera leaps back into the surrounding mountains for a moment, and we see a familiar silhouette watching events from afar, next to his trademark V8 Interceptor.  I wonder now if Mad Max’s cameo is meant to show he has a connection with Furiosa even before he meets her in Fury Road.  Does what he observes here remind him of the loss of his family in the original movie?

 

Despite its quality, Furiosa has done badly at the box office.  I suspect many blokes who enjoy action movies chose to skip this one because it wasn’t about Mad Max but about – ugh! – a girl.  Conversely, it obviously didn’t appeal to family audiences.  About a girl it may be, but Furiosa is also the most brutal Mad Max film yet.  It’s got the highest body-count and, while the franchise has always managed to be violent without wallowing in gore, there are more moments than usual where bullets strike faces, flamethrowers torch bodies, throats get slashed and body-parts are severed.  Sadly, Furiosa‘s underperformance has cast doubt on whether George Miller’s planned sixth entry in the franchise, Mad Max: The Wasteland, will ever be filmed.

 

To borrow two of Dementus’s quotes…  It’s a pity that after Furiosa’s box-office flop, people are questioning Miller’s boss-ority.  Because he still has in him to be epic.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

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Still got a Licence to Kill – and thrill

 

© Eon Productions

 

Another unwelcome reminder that I’m now old and decrepit…  I’ve just discovered that 35 years ago today, on June 13th 1989, Licence to Kill opened at the Leicester Square Odeon in London.  Time, I think, for a 35th-anniversary tribute to one of my favourite Bond movies.

 

Few events depress me more than when a film critic like Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian or Pete Travers in Rolling Stone, who knows nothing about James Bond and whose general opinions I don’t think much of either, decide it’s time to pen a feature ranking the Bond films from ‘best’ to ‘worst’.  That invariably means that the 1989 movie Licence to Kill with Timothy Dalton playing Bond ends up near the bottom, held off the ‘worst’ spot only by 1985’s A View to a Kill.  Bradshaw, Travers or whoever the no-nothing critic is will invariably damn Licence to Kill with such adjectives as ‘humourless’, ‘dour’, ‘violent’ and ‘misjudged’.

 

This was the film where Timothy Dalton and the Bond production team decided it was time to shake up the tried-and-tested formula of fantasy plots, over-the-top villains and unlikely action set-pieces and incorporate something more authentic.  In fact, Licence to Kill is a trailblazer for the Bond films of the 21st century, when the series was rebooted into a darker, grittier and critically acclaimed form with Daniel Craig.  But it rarely gets any credit for that.

 

Well, today, 35 years on, it’s time to stand up and be counted.  I think Licence to Kill is a great Bond movie.  When it appeared, I believed it was the best instalment in the series since the 1960s and I still regard it as being among the best half-dozen in the series’ 60-year history.  That its critical reputation is tarnished is down to bad luck.  It was unlucky in the reaction it got from fickle film critics who’d spent the previous two decades complaining that the Bond movies, during the tenure of Roger Moore, had become ‘too silly’ and had lost the ‘serious’ tone of the Ian Fleming books on which they were based.  But the moment that Licence to Kill appeared, they wailed that it was ‘too serious’ and lamented the loss of the glorious silliness of good old Roger Moore.

 

Licence to Kill was unlucky too because, although it made a respectable profit outside the USA, the American takings were the lowest ever for a Bond movie.  Despite what many think, this wasn’t a reflection of its quality, but the result of it being released at an inopportune time when cinemas were already crowded with Lethal Weapon 2, Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (a film that coincidentally was choc-a-bloc with Bond alumni like John Rhys-Davies, Alison Doody, Julian Glover and the original 007 himself Sean Connery).

 

© Eon Productions

 

And it was unlucky to be the last movie before the great Bond hiatus of 1989 to 1995, during which no new Bond films were made due to a legal dispute between Danjaq, the franchise’s holding company, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / United Artists.  This gave people the false impression that Licence to Kill, and Timothy Dalton, had crocked the series for half-a-dozen years.

 

When I saw Licence to Kill 35 years ago, what impressed me first was that it had a plot.  Not a tangle of subplots and diversions created because producer Cubby Broccoli and his writers wanted to fit in copious action and special-effects set-pieces involving, say, gondolas that turn into speedboats, and speedboats that turn into hang-gliders, and crashing cable cars, and Bond falling out of a plane without a parachute, and laser-gun shootouts in outer space, but a plot that moves smoothly from A to B and to C.

 

Licence to Kill begins with Bond being best man at the wedding of his CIA buddy Felix Leiter (David Hedison, who’d already played Leiter in 1974’s Live and Let Die).  Leiter’s big day proves even more eventful than expected because he has to interrupt his nuptials to seize Latin American drug baron Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi).  Sanchez has suddenly turned up on American soil in pursuit of his errant mistress Lupe (Talisa Soto) and her boyfriend – whose heart Sanchez cuts out before Leiter and the Feds clamp the cuffs on him.

 

© Eon Productions

 

Felix gets married as planned, but things take a dark turn when Sanchez escapes from captivity, with the aid of crooked DEA agent Ed Killifer (Everett McGill).  He and his henchmen turn up at the Leiters’ home on their wedding night to get revenge.  Leiter’s new wife Della (Priscilla Barnes) is murdered – Sanchez’s number-one scumbag minion Dario, played by a very young Benicio Del Toro, crows at Leiter, “Don’t worry, we gave her a nice honeymoo-oon!”  Leiter himself is dunked in a shark tank in a marine research centre in Key West, which is one of the fronts for Sanchez’s US drugs-smuggling operation.  Later, Bond discovers Della’s dead body and Leiter’s just-about-alive one, minus a couple of limbs, and vows revenge.

 

Bond starts by investigating the marine-research lab and then Sanchez’s research vessel the Wavekrest – by this time Sanchez himself has returned to base, a fictional Latin American country called Isthmus.  He tangles violently with Dario and Sanchez’s sleazy American lieutenant Milton Krest (Anthony Zerbe) and, gratifyingly, he drops Killifer and his suitcase of blood money into the shark tank that Leiter was maimed in.  (“You earned it!  You keep it!”)

 

Along the way, he finds an unexpected ally in the form of Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell), an airplane pilot who’s been working for Leiter in some mysterious capacity, and incurs the wrath of his boss M (Robert Brown), who thinks he’s getting involved in matters that don’t concern him (“We’re not a country club, 007!”) and revokes his licence to kill.  This was why the film had provisionally been titled Licence Revoked until, the story goes, research in the USA suggested that many Americans didn’t know what the word ‘revoked’ meant.

 

Now rogue, Bond steals a fortune in drugs money from the Wavekrest and uses it to fund a trip to Isthmus for him and Bouvier.  There, he tries to assassinate Sanchez but fails and, in the process, unwittingly exposes a secret operation being run against Sanchez by agents from Hong Kong.  This leaves Sanchez with the impression that the agents were the ones trying to assassinate him and Bond, by exposing them, is actually on his side.  An unlikely bromance ensues and Sanchez, enamoured with Bond, tries to recruit him into his organisation.

 

© Eon Productions

 

Aware that Sanchez is obsessed with loyalty, Bond starts planting doubts in Sanchez’s mind about the fidelity of his many henchmen who, in addition to those already mentioned, include his head of security Heller (Don Stroud) and his whizz-kid accountant Truman-Lodge (Anthony Starke).  Time, though, is running short for Bond because the two members of Sanchez’s organisation who know his true identity are returning to Isthmus: Krest, on board the Wavekrest, and Dario, who’s coming by way of El Salvador, where he’s managed to procure some stinger missiles.  Sanchez intends to use these to shoot down American aircraft in revenge for his recent incarceration.

 

What follows involves much mayhem and gruesome death – death by being doused in gasoline and set alight, by being blown apart in a decompression chamber, by being impaled on forklift-truck blades, by being fed into a cocaine-grinding machine.  A lot of this is inflicted by a now-paranoid Sanchez on the people who work for him.  Yes, Licence to Kill seems a million miles removed from the Roger Moore Bonds, where the most gruesome things were the inuendo-laden jokes cracked while Moore got intimate with ladies about half his age.  But while the brutality here may shock someone accustomed to the escapist fantasises of the 1970s and 1980s Bond movies, I loved it.

 

This was the sort of Bond imagined by Ian Fleming, most of whose books I’d read before I saw any of the films.  Not that Fleming ever wrote about 1980s Latin American drug dealers – his gangsters were of the James Cagney variety, with names like ‘Jack Spang’, ‘Sluggsy Morant’, ‘Sol Horowitz’, ‘Sam Binion’ and ‘Louie Paradise’.  But Dalton nails it as the screen Bond who was closest to the character described by Fleming.  Smooth and confident on the surface, but subtly troubled underneath, he does some bad stuff in the line of duty and hates having to do it.  But even more, he hates the evil deeds – like the murderous violation of his best friend’s wedding – that compel him to do it.

 

© Eon Productions

 

Not that the film is unremittingly dark.  It has some amusing lines and likeable performances.  One thing that brings a smile to the face is the entry into the plot, halfway through, of Bond’s secret-service armourer Q, played by the venerable Desmond Llewellyn.  Q takes some leave and nips over to Isthmus to help Bond and Bouvier out, bringing with him a cache of his famous gadgets.  (“Everything for a man on holiday.  Explosive alarm clock…  Guaranteed never to wake up anyone who uses it.  Dentonite toothpaste…  To be used sparingly.  The latest in plastic explosive.”  “I could do with some plastic,” Bond notes.)  After the Moore films, where Q’s main function was to be the butt of Bond’s jokes, it’s nice to see him with an expanded role and in a different dynamic with Bond.  In Licence to Kill, the two men actually like, respect and care about each other.

 

Llewellyn, though, is just one player in a generally delightful cast.  A 1980s / 1990s action-movie character actor, and nowadays a Sinatra-esque crooner, Robert Davi is excellent as Sanchez.  He tempers sufficient quantities of rottenness with some unexpected integrity – for instance, he insists on honouring the deal he’s made with Killifer, even though his sidekicks urge him to take the easier option of whacking the guy.  Some similarly distinguished character actors play the other villains: Zerbe, Stroud, McGill and, of course, Del Toro.  Plus you get some familiar and welcome faces  in smaller roles, including Frank McRae from 48 Hrs (1982) and The Last Action Hero (1993) and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa from the Mortal Combat franchise.

 

Also deserving praise is Carey Lowell.  Just as Davi is the great overlooked Bond villain, Lowell is the great overlooked Bond girl.  From the very beginning, when she shuts up the odious Dario by shoving a pump-action shotgun into his crotch, her Pam Bouvier character means business.  Her gutsiness is immensely refreshing after so many Bond actresses in the 1970s and 1980s had been given roles that were wooden (Carole Bouquet), insipid (Jane Seymour) or just plain dumb (Jill St John, Britt Ekland, Tanya Roberts).  It’s good too that she doesn’t just exist to follow Bond but has her own agenda.  She plans to retrieve the stinger missiles before Sanchez does serious damage with them, a scheme for which she’s enlisted the help of the duplicitous Heller.

 

© Eon Productions

 

What else do I like about Licence to Kill?  I like its references to Ian Fleming’s fiction.  Milton Krest, the Wavekrest and Sanchez’s fondness for whipping Lupe with a stingray’s tail come from the 1960 short story The Hildebrand Rarity, while Leiter’s encounter with the shark is lifted from the 1954 novel Live and Let Die.  I like how the secondary Bond girl, Talisa Soto’s Lupe, survives the film.  The secondary Bond girl in many films, from Lana Wood’s Plenty O’Toole in Diamonds are Forever (1971) to Berenice Marlohe’s Severine in Skyfall (2012), ends up as a sacrificial lamb, killed to show how beastly the villains are.

 

And I like how the film is a spiritual sequel to perhaps the best-ever Bond movie, 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which ends with Bond getting married and then seeing his new wife Tracy murdered by his nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld.  This is referenced in Licence to Kill by a moment when Bond becomes melancholic during Leiter’s wedding.  “He was married once,” Leiter tells Della, “but that was a long time ago.”  (When I saw the film in 1989 in a cinema in Aberdeen, someone in the row behind me declared: “Aye, an’ he looked like George Lazenby at the time!”)  This suggests that later in the film Bond isn’t just avenging Leiter and Della, but Tracy too.

 

Licence to Kill isn’t perfect, though.  There are a couple of longueurs.  For a man who’s recently lost  wife and limbs, David Hedison’s Leiter seems unfathomably cheerful when he reappears at the end.  Maybe it’s the drugs they were feeding him at the hospital.  And Carey Lowell’s Bouvier is ill-served by a scene where she encounters Lupe, finds out that she’s spent the night with Bond and reacts like a sulky, jealous schoolgirl.  When Q diplomatically suggests that Bond only did it for the sake of the mission, she retorts: “Bullshit!”

 

Licence to Kill was, alas, Timothy Dalton’s final showing as Bond.  When the franchise finally got going again with 1995’s Goldeneye, it was with the cuddlier Pierce Brosnan in the role.  I like Brosnan, but always found his attempts to combine the physicality of Sean Connery with the smoothness of Roger Moore a little unconvincing.  As I’ve said, Dalton strikes me as the actor who came closest to portraying Bond in the way Fleming had imagined him and, for me, there’s no higher accolade.  He’s the connoisseur’s Bond.

 

© Eon Productions