Category: Films

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In space, no one can hear the alarm

 

© 26 Keys Productions / Scott Free / 20th Television / FXP  

 

What an exasperating franchise the Alien one is.  It kicked off in 1979 with one masterpiece, Ridley’s Scott’s Alien, and continued in 1986 with another masterpiece, James Cameron’s Aliens.  But its instalments after that have been, in various ways, maddeningly uneven.  They’ve contained some intriguing ideas, themes, characters, sequences and images.  Yet those good things were nullified by other things that were utterly duff.

 

David Fincher’s Alien 3 (1992) had as its setting a fascinatingly grim, labyrinthine industrial complex that’d been repurposed as a prison.  But it was hamstrung by an ill-conceived script wherein most of the interesting characters vanished halfway through and the movie’s interminable final act consisted of indistinguishable bald guys running Super-Mario-like through corridors.

 

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection (1998) had some great ideas – Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley character reincarnated as a superhuman clone containing bits of alien DNA, the setting of a stricken space station that’s basically The Poseidon Adventure (1974) in outer space, gripping action set-pieces underwater and on a vertiginous ladder.  But it suffered from juvenile plotting and dialogue, a crap-looking new monster (‘the Newborn’), and misjudged performances ranging from Ron Perlman’s obnoxious overacting to Winona Ryder’s wan underacting.

 

In 2012 and 2017 Ridley Scott returned to the franchise and made two prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, which again had some nice touches – especially Michael Fassbender’s performances as the angelic android Walter and the devilish android David.  But the prequels were ruined by their obsession with creating an over-complicated and unnecessary backstory for the aliens.  Also, there were some clunking scenes such as the one in Covenant where Walter and David meet up, Walter starts playing a flute, and David suggests, “You blow, I’ll do the fingering.”  Ooh-err, missus.

 

Recently, we got Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus (2024) and, again, some lovely moments – a sequence where the surviving protagonists have to negotiate a shaft in zero gravity while deadly globules of acidic alien-blood float around them; or a bit where a hitherto nice android (David Jonsson) hooks into some tech in order to open a door, accidentally gets upgraded, and turns into a callous shit.  But Alien: Romulus blew its potential by paying too much fan-service to the previous films.  “Please,” I was thinking as the film’s big finale approached. “Don’t anyone say, ‘Get away from her, you bitch!’”  But wouldn’t you know it?  Someone did.

 

© 20th Century Studios / Scott Free Productions / Brandywine Productions

 

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned the two crossover movies where the aliens encounter the creatures from the Predator franchise, Alien vs Predator (2004) and Alien vs Predator: Requiem (2007).  That’s because I regard both films as unspeakable shite that deserves to be fired into a black hole.

 

Now we’ve just had an eight-part TV series entitled Alien: Earth.  This was masterminded by Noah Hawley, responsible for five seasons of the Fargo TV show (2014-24) inspired by the 1996 movie of the same name made by Joel and Ethan Cohen.  It pains me to say that I feel the way about it as I feel about the post-Aliens alien movies.  Alien: Earth has some good bits, but those are offset by some crap bits.

 

Here’s Alien: Earth’s set-up.  (Be warned that spoilers for the series are coming.)  It takes place in 2120, shortly before the events depicted in Ridley Scott’s original Alien.  Earth is controlled by half-a-dozen super-corporations, including Weyland-Yutani – ‘the Company’ – which featured in the movies.  Episode One sees a Weyland-Yutani spaceship, which has been on a mission of exploration and has collected specimens of five different extra-terrestrial species, including some worryingly familiar-looking eggs, return to earth, out-of-control, and crash into a skyscraper in Bangkok.  Thailand is the property not of Weyland-Yutani but a rival corporation called Prodigy.  The young, impulsive CEO of Prodigy, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), sends in rescue and security teams to secure the disaster site – but also to seize whatever cargo the spaceship is carrying.

 

Lately, Prodigy’s big project has been to ‘upload’ human consciousnesses – souls, basically – into super-strong and super-durable synthetic bodies.  The results aren’t just ‘synths’ – the trendier term for the ‘androids’, like Ash, Bishop, Call, David and Walter, who appeared earlier in the franchise – but ‘hybrids’, which have human ghosts in their synthetic machines. However, Prodigy has only been able to do this with young consciousnesses – they’ve transplanted the souls of six children, dying from incurable illnesses, into the artificial and enhanced bodies of six adults. The first operation moved the soul of a terminally sick girl called Marcy Hermit into a hybrid Boy Kavalier has christened ‘Wendy’ (Sydney Chandler).  He’s a big fan of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911) and insists on naming all his hybrids after Peter Pan characters.

 

Boy Kavalier sends the six hybrids, supervised by an enigmatic synth called Kirsh (Timothy Oliphant), to the crash site to test their responses in an emergency.  What he doesn’t know is that Marcy Hermit’s brother (Alex Lawther) is one of the medics already there – and, inevitably, Wendy encounters this sibling of her former self.  Meanwhile, it turns out that one spaceship crew-member has survived the crash, a science officer called Morrow (Babou Ceesay), who’s unswervingly loyal to Weyland-Yutani and isn’t about to let a rival company steal his alien specimens.  Morrow belongs to a third category of non-human or non-quite-human persons in the 22nd century, besides synths and hybrids.  He’s a cyborg, part-machine, and has a mechanical arm that can exude blades or work as an oxy-acetylene torch.

 

Boy Kavalier gets the five specimens off the spaceship and transports them to his island headquarters, where they’re placed in a laboratory for study.  Predictably – and due partly to Morrow’s attempts to retrieve them for Weyland-Yutani – things go wrong and some of them escape.  The escapees include one from a much-loved, 46-year-old movie franchise…

 

© 26 Keys Productions / Scott Free / 20th Television / FXP

 

I’ll start with the show’s shortcomings and my first criticism is an obvious one for fans of the films.  The aliens aren’t in it much.  Alien: Earth features three of the H.R. Giger-designed beasties, one birthed on the spaceship before it crashes into the earth, one created in Prodigy’s laboratory, and one produced by an egg-released ‘face-hugger’ that latches onto a human victim, but in Alien: Earth they’re little more than a sub-plot. The focus is on the hybrids, synths and cyborgs as they ponder who or what they really are.  As such, the show often feels more like a follow-up to another classic Ridley Scott movie, 1982’s Blade Runner.

 

Also, in Alien: Earth, Wendy gradually becomes able to communicate with the aliens – much to the dismay of her new-found brother.  First, she behaves like an ‘alien-whisperer’, but by the last episodes she’s managed to exert full control over them and uses them as attack dogs.  This deprives them of agency and – though it’s unsettling to see her direct an alien to tear a platoon of soldiers to pieces – diminishes them as the objects of fear they were in the movies.

 

And the aliens are inconsistently presented.  Several times we see one encounter a group of extras, bloodily slash and chomp its way through them and slaughter them all in a few seconds.  But whenever an alien bumps into one of the main cast-members, it immediately becomes slower, clumsier, and more incompetent, which allows the main cast-member to escape.  Basically, the aliens can be perfect killing machines or can screw up badly, depending on what the script requires at the time.

 

And that brings me to Alien: Earth biggest problem.  Its scripts are so riddled with holes they’re like slabs of Swiss cheese.  The Weyland-Yutani spaceship plunges towards Bangkok and catches everyone by surprise.  But weren’t there satellites in space and stations on earth tracking it?  Didn’t anyone have an inkling it was on the way?  It slams into a skyscraper and is left sticking out of it, but inflicts little structural damage – indeed, there are rich people partying at the top of the skyscraper who don’t even notice what’s happened.  This is a whole, humongous spaceship.  In 2001, we saw what a pair of passenger planes did to the World Trade Centre.  Despite dropping out of the sky, the spaceship manages to end up horizontal after ploughing into the skyscraper.  When people enter it from outside, its floors are perfectly and conveniently level.

 

Meanwhile, Boy Kavalier sends his six hybrids – who’ve presumably cost billions of dollars to create – to the crash scene without any briefing, any guards, any weapons, any protective equipment.  Led by Kirsh, they just saunter on board, and it’s purely through good luck that at least three of them don’t get splattered or taken over by the extra-terrestrial specimens there.  The illogicalities surrounding the hybrids continue through the series.  At one point, Boy Kavalier’s scientists have to ‘wipe’ one hybrid of traumatic memories.  But they don’t isolate her and don’t inform the other hybrids of what they’ve done.  Afterwards, one of them speaks to her and points out that she’s missing a bunch of memories, and she gets even more screwed up as a result.  And the scripts turn the hybrids’ superhuman powers on and off depending on the situation.  They’re meant to be superstrong.  Indeed, at one point, we see one rip off a soldier’s jaw in a fit of pique.  But hybrids Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) and Smee (Jonathan Ajayi) spend most of Episode Seven struggling to transport a face-hugged body across Boy Kavalier’s island.  As they huffed and puffed, I was reminded of Basil and Manuel trying to shift a dead hotel-guest in the Fawlty Towers (1975-79) episode The Kipper and the Corpse.

 

Speaking of which, Boy Kavalier’s island seems to range in size from being big, with characters taking hours to cross it, to being the size of someone’s back lawn.  A young alien, newly erupted from someone’s chest and still in snake-like form, has the whole island and its foliage to hide amid.  Yet Timothy Oliphant’s Kirsh soon catches it with a small-looking piece of netting.  The diminutive alien lifeform known as ‘T. Ocellus’ – basically a tentacled eyeball – manages in a short time to escape from captivity, scuttle across the island on its tiny tentacles, and find a human body lying on a distant beach, which it parasitically attaches itself to and takes over.

 

© 26 Keys Productions / Scott Free / 20th Television / FXP

 

All the alien specimens are highly dangerous – not just the acid-blooded ones – so the lack of security protocols around them is head-scratching.  On the spaceship, scientists eat and drink in their presence.  They leave alien-housing containers improperly sealed.  They don’t fasten those containers correctly on their racks.  When one creature breaks free, no alarm-bells go off.  In Boy Kavalier’s giant complex, they’re kept in close proximity to one another.  Shouldn’t they be all be isolated?  You never see any guards near them.  Often, the only people in the Prodigy laboratory with them are Kirsh and the hybrids – who are, essentially, children.  At one point, a single hybrid is left to supervise the specimens alone.  When an external feeding-hatch breaks, he gormlessly opens a door and enters a cell to bring a couple of the beasties their food.  That doesn’t end well.

 

Hawley and his writers are simply being lazy.  When you write something, especially a science-fiction, fantasy or horror story, you’re confronted by problems of logic, practicality and consistency all the time.  A conscientious writer considers those problems and works out ways of solving them.  That’s what’s what human creativity is for – for example, figuring out how an alien creature could escape from a laboratory with a working alarm system.  It’s facile to just ignore these issues and hope the viewers won’t notice while the plot unfolds.

 

All this gives the impression I didn’t like Alien: Earth, but I had some fun with it.  For one thing, I thought the show’s retro-futuristic look was wonderful.  I loved the scenes on the spaceship, where the set-design nostalgically recreated the style of the Nostromo, the ill-fated craft featured in Ridley Scott’s original.

 

I also enjoyed the performances.  Oliphant and Ceesay are excellent as, respectively, Kirsh the Prodigy synth and Morrow the Weyland-Yutani cyborg, and the scene where they at last square up to each other is the highlight of the final episode.  The actors and actresses playing the hybrids do a good job of reminding us that, adult thought they look, these are children: variously naïve, trusting, devious, petulant, confused, frightened.  I particularly liked the hapless Laurel-and-Hardy double-act of Gourav and Ajayi.

 

And though the character is obviously a caricature of fabulously-wealthy-far-too-young sociopaths like Mark Zuckerberg, Boy Kavalier is played with entertaining, pantomime-villain flair by Samuel Blenkin.  His Peter Pan obsession disturbingly echoes Michael Jackson, another rich and powerful man who gathered children into his lair for unsavory purposes.  Also, with his tousled black hair, I thought he bore a troubling resemblance to disgraced fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, now dealing with multiple accusations of sexual assault.

 

But Alien: Earth’s breakout star is surely the afore-mentioned ambulatory eyeball, T. Ocellus, which in the course of the series plonks itself in the eye-socket of, and takes control of, a cat, a sheep and Michael Smiley.  No offence to Michael Smiley, but when the thing is embedded in the sheep, it’s most terrifying.  The sight of that bloody-faced ewe, with an outsized eyeball, staring impassively from its place of containment, is the stuff of nightmares.

 

© 26 Keys Productions / Scott Free / 20th Television / FXP  

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Farewell, Turkish Luke Skywalker

 

From youtube.com / © Anıt Film

 

Well, this is depressing news.

 

It was announced on August 19th that The Projector, Singapore’s alternative cinema, was closing its doors – immediately.  As of August 20th, The Projector would no longer exist.  A statement on the cinema’s Facebook page blamed “rising operational costs, shifting audience habits, and the global decline in cinema attendance,” factors that “have made sustaining an independent model in Singapore especially challenging.”

 

Aghast film fans who went to The Projector’s premises on the top floors of the Cineleisure shopping mall, just off Orchard Road, on the afternoon of the announcement found staff-members clearing the place out.  Reportedly, those fans were allowed to take old posters, brochures and other merch home with them as bittersweet mementoes.

 

The Projector was really the only place in Singapore where you could get to see, on a big screen, movies that weren’t the blockbuster fare of the multiplexes (though it found time to show blockbusters too).  In other words, you could watch independent and arthouse films, ones not made in the handful of big international languages, ones focused on minorities, ones that were generally offbeat.  It was also a rare venue where older movies got outings on the big screen – I remember it showing movies by Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa and the recently-departed David Lynch.  On top of that, it provided an important space for other types of cultural events, such as poetry readings, book launches, charity fundraisers and vintage markets.  And, if you just wanted to chill out with a beer, it had an agreeable bar.

 

My partner and I visited The Projector on a number of occasions and one feature of it we liked was that we could watch films there surrounded by people who actually seemed to appreciate films – and behaved accordingly.  We knew that in The Projector we had a good chance of being able to watch a movie without getting annoyed by folk around us chomping and masticating noisily on snacks, or chatting, or farting around on their unmuted phones, a frequent hazard of filmgoing in the multiplexes.  We knew we’d probably be allowed to fully focus on, and enjoy, what was happening on the screen.  Which is what the cinematic experience should be about.

 

Indeed, The Projector had a stringent policy on phones.  It preceded each showing with a short film warning patrons to keep their devices silent and refrain from using them.  This film consisted of a scene from the notorious Turkish science-fiction movie Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam or The Man Who Saves the World – though it’s best known internationally as Turkish Star Wars – which was such a blatant rip-off of George Lucas’s Star Wars that it used uncredited space / special-effects footage and music from the 1977 classic.  “It was,” its Wikipedia entry informs me, “panned by film critics and has often been considered to be one of the worst films ever made.”

 

The scene used by The Projector was one in which ‘Turkish Luke Skywalker’ trained for battle by smashing his big fists repeatedly against a desert boulder.  You were warned that if you violated the cinema’s etiquette about phones, you would suffer punishment similar to that being inflicted on the rock.

 

Anyway, that’s all over now.  My partner and I had visited The Projector three times this year – two of the three films we saw, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025) and Robert Eggars’ Nosferatu (2024), I’ve reviewed on this blog – but now, I wish we gone there more often.  Too many times, we’d planned to go and see something but had called it off at the last minute because we were ‘too tired’ or had ‘too much to do’.

 

The Projector’s sad demise is yet another unwelcome reminder that these days we live in a cutthroat hyper-capitalist world that seems to know the price of everything but the value of nothing – and if you cherish a venue, a business, a service, and don’t want to lose it, then you absolutely have to use it.

 

From facebook.com / © The Projector

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James Bond Island

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists

 

A while ago, my partner and I holidayed in the town of Khao Lak, 60 kilometres from the southeastern Thai resort of Phuket.  We saw a brochure for a boat tour in the nearby Ao Phang Nga National Park, which encompasses a large, island-strewn bay in the Andaman Sea.  Among the islands visited by the tour was Khao Phing Kan, a location used during the filming of the 1974 James Bond film, The Man with the Golden Gun.  It’s now popularly known as ‘James Bond Island’.

 

Regular readers of this blog will know I’m a connoisseur of all things Bond-related, especially the movies and the original books written by Ian Fleming.  So, could I resist an opportunity to visit James Bond island?  Of course not.

 

Not, I should add, that I’m a fan of The Man with the Golden Gun.  I think it’s one of the worst films in the Bond franchise.  It has Roger Moore in the main role, in only his second outing as 007 but already looking tired – you’re already waiting impatiently for him to regenerate into Timothy Dalton.  It has Britt Ekland, required to fill out a bikini but not to do any acting.  It has Hervé Villechaize as diminutive henchman Nick Nack (“Dom Perignon soixante-quatre…”) – according to Moore, Villechaize was a lecherous wee pain-in-the-neck in real life.  It has Clifton James as redneck comedy-relief American policeman Sheriff Pepper, who happens to be holidaying in Asia when he bumps into Bond – he refuses to have his picture taken with a local elephant, telling Mrs. Pepper: “We’re Demy-crats, Maybelle!”  Democrats?  That’s a surprise.  And it has Lulu hollering the inuendo-riddled theme song: “He’s got a powerful weapon / He charges a million a shot!”

 

In fact, there are only two good things in The Man with the Golden Gun.  One is its villain, the impeccable Christopher Lee as the super-hitman Francisco Scaramanga: “Come, come, Mr. Bond. You disappoint me.  You get as much fulfilment out of killing as I do, so why don’t you admit it?”  The other is the spectacular scenery.  Scaramanga’s island hideaway is supposed to be in waters belonging to ‘Red China’, but the sequence where Bond approaches it in a seaplane was filmed in Ao Phang Nga National Park, with Khao Phing Kan standing in for Scaramanga HQ.

 

 

Even if I had hated James Bond Island, the boat trip out to it, which first involved traversing a warren of creeks with mangrove trees cramming their sides, and then passing some of the bay’s islands – giant, towering rocks, their summits and all but their steepest slopes cloaked tightly in trees – was enough to make the day worthwhile.  Those islands, which’d looked pretty spectacular during The Man with the Golden Gun’s airborne scenes, with the cameras tracking Bond’s seaplane, seemed absolutely awesome when I was looking up at them from sea-level.  Among the things I compared the fantastic shapes of these islands to in my notebook entries that day were: ‘fangs’, ‘ruined, vegetation-shrouded fortresses’, ‘herds of grazing prehistoric beasts’, ‘monstrous haystacks’, ‘mossy tombstones’ and ‘giant standing stones’.  We passed one vaguely curved island with curious round protuberances on either side, like ears.  Our guide said it was nicknamed ‘The Dog’.

 

 

As it turned out, we spent just 25 minutes on James Bond Island, which felt an adequate length of time.  It was very busy with tourists.  We guessed as much when we approached it and saw the great number of long boats, with varnished hulls and club-shaped bows, lined along its landing area.  If Scaramanga was around today, he’d be erecting angry signs saying GET OFF MY LAND in response to the hordes of visitors.  Maybe even firing volleys of his legendary golden bullets at the trespassers.

 

Despite the crowds, I was delighted to see Ko Ta Pu, the 20-foot-high, precarious-looking limestone rock that stands off the island’s shore and is shaped like an extracted tooth.  In The Man with the Golden Gun, Scaramanga – who, unconvincingly, is depicted as a pioneer of green energy as well as a deadly hitman – has solar panels extend up from the top of Ko Ta Pu and collect enough sun’s energy to power an energy-beam gun, with which he destroys Bond’s seaplane.  Getting a photo of this remarkable stub of rock was difficult, with so many people posing for selfies in front of it.  But I managed in the end.

 

 

The island’s other striking feature is a huge, triangular opening behind the main beach, caused by seismic action. A giant slab of rock apparently broke free and ended up tilting steeply against the rest of the rock-mass there. Beneath it, looking up at its bulk and angles, you have a lurking fear it could topple the rest of the way and pulverize everything below, you included.  It was here that we incurred the wrath of a large, bikinied and ignorant Western woman who’d been posing lasciviously for multiple photos in front of the formation and didn’t appreciate us strolling into her camera-frame.

 

 

As well as being infested with tourists, the island’s main beach was infested with stalls selling tourist tat.  I was disappointed that no 007-themed merchandise was on sale – not even replicas of Christopher Lee’s golden gun.  I guess then-Bond-producers Cubby Broccoli and Albert Saltzman refused to license the Bond brand to the Thai tourist authorities and the vendors here could sell only generic, er, nick-nacks…  Weirdly, one Western-movie item that was on sale were figurines of Groot, the tree-like creature that features in the Guardians of the Galaxy (2014-23) movies.  That’s because if you look at Ko Ta Pu long enough, you begin to see its resemblance to the head of Groot.

 

In fact, Khao Phing Kan, James Bond Island, wasn’t the only movie-connected island we visited in the Andaman Sea.  A few days later, we went on a second boat trip, this time to the Phi-Phi-Phi Islands south of Ao Phang Nga National Park.  One of the stops we made there was at Ko Phi Phi Lee, home to the now-famous Maya Bay.

 

© Figment Films / 20th Century Fox

 

This was where in 2000 Danny Boyle filmed The Beach, based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Alex Garland.  This movie was troubled in a couple of different ways.  Originally, Ewan McGregor was lined up to star in it but, to his disgust, he was ultimately passed over in favour of Leonardo DiCaprio, then seen as a much more bankable actor because he’d played the hero in James Cameron’s world-beating Titanic (1998).  This led to McGregor falling out with Boyle and the pair didn’t talk to each other for many years afterwards.  More seriously, it was alleged that during production the filmmakers caused serious damage to Maya Beach’s ecosystems by ‘landscaping’ – i.e., bulldozering – part of it to make it more ‘paradise-like’.

 

We arrived at the northern side of Ko Phi Phi Lee and disembarked onto a precariously swaying, floating quay.  Then, filing along a slightly elevated wooden walkway – no doubt there to prevent the sand, soil, rocks and plants being pulverized under the feet of countless visitors – we made our way into the island’s interior.  The walkway was divided into two narrow lanes, with tourists streaming along in both directions.   It arrived at a wider wooden platform in the middle of the island, where there were facilities such as toilets, souvenir stalls and eateries and where you could step down onto the surrounding ground.  Two further walkways bifurcated off on its far side, both leading to the bay.  We followed the slightly less busy one.

 

 

Maya Bay itself was certainly picturesque, its white sand and turquoise water encircled by high cliffs and crags.  But it swarmed with the inevitable tourists, taking the inevitable photos and selfies.  Our guide told us we should visit it at the time of Chinese New Year.  Then, apparently, it gets really busy.

 

Although The Beach received middling reviews, it was reasonably successful – enough for it to cause the heavy tourist traffic to Ko Phi Phi Lee and Maya Beach.  Things got so bad that in 2018 the Thai government banned all tourists from it, so that work could be done to restore its now-shattered environment.  It wasn’t reopened to visitors until 2022, at the tail-end of the Covid-19 pandemic.  Tour groups, like ours, are allowed only an hour on the island, and it also gets a two-month, tourist-free breather every year, from August 1st to October 1st.

 

This makes me wonder what would have happened if Danny Boyle had made The Beach with Ewan McGregor, rather less of a draw than Leonardo DiCaprio.  (Sorry, Ewan.)  It would have meant: (1) a less successful film, seen by fewer people; (2) fewer tourists flocking to Maya Bay, which would have put it under less environmental strain; and (3) Trainspotting 2 (2017) being made years earlier than it was, because Boyle and McGregor would never have fallen out and then needed ages to make up.  Win-win all round, I’d say.

 

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All the rage

 

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

 

Danny Boyle is a venerated British filmmaker.  His resume includes nasty wee Edinburgh crime noir Shallow Grave (1993), zeitgeist-surfing ‘cool Britannia’ classic Trainspotting (1996), Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and the opening ceremony to the 2012 London Olympics that, briefly, gave Britain a little street credibility in the eyes of the world.  Obviously, the small-minded and idiotic result of the Brexit referendum in 2016, when a narrow majority of British people voted to leave the European Union, put an end to that street cred.

 

However, as a connoisseur of zombie movies, I feel Boyle’s biggest cultural contribution might be directing the 2002 movie 28 Days Later, which was written by novelist and fellow-filmmaker Alex Garland.  This follows events after the escape from a research laboratory of a virus that transforms its victims into wrathful, slavering, hyperactive zombies.  28 Days Later helped to establish the idea that zombies don’t have to lumber mindlessly and slowly, as they had in nearly all zombie movies prior to 2002.  They could be fast.  They could run.  That’s although the film doesn’t actually feature typical, reanimated-corpse zombies, but virus-infected people who are duly referred to as ‘the infected’.

 

As in all good zombie movies, Boyle’s infected act as metaphors.  In 28 Days Later, they symbolise the rage that’d lately become common in British society.  Terms like road-rage, air-rage and even shopping-trolley rage had only recently entered the country’s vocabulary in 2002.

 

In the first sequel to 28 Days Later, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s underrated 28 Weeks Later (2007), the US Army occupy Britain after the epidemic.  There’s an obvious metaphor at work here too.  The Americans set up HQ (and marshal together the survivors) in a supposedly safe area of London they call the ‘Green Zone’, their efforts to end the contagion actually lead to it spreading among those who were hitherto uninfected, and their firepower ends up killing friend and foe alike…  All horribly reminiscent of what the real-life American military was doing in Iraq at the time.

 

Now Boyle and Garland have reunited to make 28 Years Later, the first part of a projected new trilogy in the franchise – the second film is already in the can and will be released next January, and the third one will be made if the first two make money.  Later in the trilogy, Cillian Murphy, the breakout star of 28 Days Later, is supposed to be returning in the role of Jim, the character he played in the original film. And before you read further, beware – from here on, there will be spoilers for all three movies made so far.

 

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

 

Well, 28 Years Later‘s metaphor is pretty on the nose.  Britain, overrun by the infected, and with a few uninfected inhabitants surviving in isolated, heavily-fortified communities, has been quarantined from the rest of Europe.  Other European countries’ navies patrol it to make sure nobody carries the infection off its shores.  (28 Weeks Later ended with the virus making it to France, but we’re informed that that outbreak was contained.)  So infected Britain in the 28 Years Later universe is a symbol of Brexit Britain in our universe.

 

Actually, an expository map shows Ireland infected and quarantined too, though nobody mentions this in the film.  It’s a grim echo of the prediction once made by arch-Brexiter and gobshite Nigel Farage that, post-Brexit, Ireland would follow Britain out of the EU.

 

28 Years Later begins in a village on an island off the English coast, connected to the mainland by a causeway that, thanks to the tide, is underwater much of the time.  The villagers are depicted living a low-tech lifestyle: rearing sheep and pigs, growing vegetables, cooking full-English breakfasts on wood-burning Raeburn stoves, sipping home-brewed beer in the local pub and participating in singalongs under an ancient portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.  This would no doubt appeal to many of Nigel Farage’s supporters, longing for a simpler version of England back, say, in the 1940s, that never really existed – prior to multiculturalism, wokeness and other such evils.  And no, I can’t recall seeing anyone in 28 Years Later’s village scenes who’s a person of colour.

 

The movie centres on Spike (Alfie Williams), a twelve-year-old lad who’s grown up on the island and is facing a daunting rite of passage.  His father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is taking him for the first time to the mainland, where he’s expected to prove his manhood by using his bow and arrow on the infected and making a few ‘kills’.  (Bullets have run out by this point.)  Jamie’s timing of this seems tactless since his wife, Spike’s mum, Isla (Jodie Comer) is currently bedridden, stricken by a mysterious illness that has her oscillating between lucidity and delirium.

 

Following their sortie on the mainland, Spike learns of the existence of a man called Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) who’s been living there alone and has dedicated himself to building a spectacular ‘bone temple’ using the remains of, and commemorating, all those who’ve perished since the contagion began 28 years ago.  Though evidently mad now, Kelson was, back in civilised times, a doctor – one thing Spike’s island home doesn’t have.  So he brings his sick mother to the mainland, in search of Kelson, hoping he’ll be able to cure her.  Along the way, they encounter a Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding), stranded in England after the patrol-ship he was on sunk off its coast.  They acquire a baby, birthed by an infected woman but somehow uninfected itself.  And, predictably, they have to contend with the infected.

 

These are mostly similar to the infected in 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later, but some have devolved and others evolved. There are swollen, leprous-skinned specimens called Slow Lows, crawling along the ground and stuffing their mouths with worms.  Conversely, there are also Alphas: hulking, superstrong, superfast and relatively more intelligent, all beard, hair and muscles (and large, swinging willies), with a penchant for not only ripping their victims’ heads off but for pulling their spines out through their neck-stumps.

 

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

 

Well, I’ll say first of all that 28 Years Later certainly isn’t perfect.  It has much that’s inconsistent and illogical.  Firstly, scriptwriter Garland shifts the goalposts regarding the infected.  In the 2002 film, the survivors realise they only need to stay alive for the length of time it takes for the infected to starve to death because, basically, they’re too crazy to eat.  They bite and infect their victims but don’t munch on them.  In 28 Weeks Later, they have all starved to death and the US Army decide it’s safe to enter Britain.  When the virus strikes again, it’s because of a survivor (Catherine McCormack) who’s a medical anomaly – she unwittingly carries the virus without showing any symptoms of it.  In the new movie, though, it transpires the infected can eat.  They’ve sustained themselves mostly by preying on the red deer that now roam Britain in huge herds.

 

It’s Boyle and Garland’s franchise, so they can reboot it any way they like, I suppose.  But it’ll be interesting to see how they square this with the return in the upcoming sequels of Cillian Murphy from 28 Days Later.

 

Also, the contagiousness of the infected’s bodily fluids that was so dangerous in the earlier films – Brendan Gleeson succumbs when a drop of blood falls into his eye in 28 Days Later, Robert Carlyle when he gets saliva on his lips in 28 Weeks Later – is disregarded here.  Humans cheerfully impale and hack at the infected at close quarters without fearing arterial sprays.  Taylor-Johnson encourages his son to fire arrows into the infected practically point-blank.  And I can’t see how a human embryo can gestate inside an infected mother for 40 weeks without the resulting baby emerging from the womb as a slavering, bite-y, red-eyed little monster itself.  Science goes out of the window sometimes.  The existence of the Alphas is explained as certain people reacting to the virus like they’re suddenly ‘on steroids’.  But I can’t imagine a virus transforming some of its victims into what are basically deranged versions of Jason Mamoa.

 

Other things are illogical too.  Fiennes’ character slathers himself in iodine until he’s almost as orange as Donald Trump because iodine seems to repel the virus.  In this post-apocalyptic world, where does he get all his iodine from?  He’s survived in the infected-infested wilderness for decades, gradually building his bone temple, but how?  He refers to a river helping to keep the infected at bay, but late on an Alpha comes stomping into his abode without any apparent difficulty.  And the temple’s centrepiece, a towering pillar of skulls, is alarmingly precarious when Alfie first encounters it.  He touches it and a few skulls immediately fall off.  Yet later, it’s strangely solid when Alfie has to climb to its very top.

 

But, despite all that, I did enjoy 28 Years Later and would probably give it eight out of ten.  Boyle orchestrates the horror sequences with customary panache, while the tension is leavened with both humour and pathos.  Much of the humour comes from Spike’s interactions with the Swedish soldier, who’s from an uninfected world where life has developed into the 2020s along lines we’re familiar with.  He talks of smartphones, being online, using delivery drivers and ladies having ‘work done’, all to the bewilderment of poor Spike (and to the amusement of the Singaporean audience with whom I saw the film).

 

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

 

Meanwhile, there’s pathos when Spike finally gets his mum to Fiennes’ Dr Kelson.  The latter is not, as we’d expected, a dangerous madman like Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, but a thoughtful, pacifistic man who, with his bone temple, has found an unconventional way of dealing with and acknowledging the massive horror he’s witnessed around him.  And Kelson helps Spike learn some painful life lessons.  I thought Gleeson’s death in 28 Days Later, caused by a freak accident that wouldn’t have happened if he’d been standing a few inches to the side, was one of the saddest scenes in horror movies.  But there’s one here that equals or surpasses it for tragedy.

 

The performances greatly enhance the movie.  Young Alfie Williams is a revelation as Spike, likeable from the start, but getting more likeable as we follow him through the often difficult and harrowing learning curves the plot throws at him.  Taylor-Johnson is effective as Jamie, a man who’s a good dad but not a good husband, while Comer makes Isla a rounded and convincing character.  During those moments when the script lets her be cogent, we understand why Spike takes the risks he does in getting her to a doctor.  But Fiennes ultimately steals the show.  After the intensity of the movie’s first two-thirds, his appearance as the kindly Kelson is a relief, indicating that some humanity and decency has survived in this brutal world.

 

But I’m not happy about the film’s ending, especially as it comes so soon after Fiennes’ gravitas.  Its final minutes have upset a few people with their unexpected reference to a dark episode in recent British history, but I don’t mind that.  I think it’s a pretty audacious move by Garland’s script.  Rather, I don’t appreciate the goofy, cartoony manner in which those last minutes are filmed, which jar with the sombre tone of everything that’s happened previously.  This makes me nervous about what the sequel will be like (and it isn’t directed by Boyle, but by Nia DaCosta).

 

One reason why I like 28 Years Later overall is its setting: northeast England, where I lived in the early 2000s.  The island the survivors are holed up on is actually Lindisfarne, Holy Island, which as far as I know hasn’t appeared in a film since Roman Polanksi directed Donald Pleasence in Cul-de-sac there in 1966.  I cycled to Lindisfarne once, and I can only assume that when Spike and Jamie go sprinting along the causeway to it in 28 Years Later, they don’t have a strong east wind blowing into their faces like I did when I struggled along it on my bike.  Here are a couple of photographs I took then:

 

 

Meanwhile, I’m no expert on northeastern accents and I couldn’t distinguish between a Geordie one, a Mackem one and a Smoggie one.  However, to me, most of the cast at least try to sound like they come from that part of the world, which is nice.

 

Also, the film is a welcome reminder of the northeast’s beautiful landscapes and I guess at least some of it was shot in Northumbria’s Kielder Forest.  Its depiction of local geography is rather barmy, though, giving the impression that you can walk in a few hours from Lindisfarne to the Angel of North (which is south of Gateshead) or to Sycamore Gap (which is off the A69 from Newcastle to Carlisle, between Hexham and Haltwhistle).  Sycamore Gap hit the headlines in 2023 when the iconic sycamore tree there was cut down by a pair of morons who deserved to have their heads ripped off and their spines pulled out of their neck-stumps.  Sweetly, in 28 Years Later, Boyle digitally restores the tree because, in the movie’s timeline, that act of vandalism never happened.

 

This brings the series full circle for me because it was in northeast England that I originally saw 28 Days Later.  Indeed, I saw it at a special premiere event at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which both Boyle and Garland attended.  They introduced the film beforehand and answered questions from the audience afterwards.   Boyle seemed laidback and was even unruffled when a member of the Geordie audience told him he hadn’t liked the look of the film, shot on digital video cameras, at all.  Garland was more combative and sounded particularly pissed off when someone mentioned the makers of another 2002 zombie movie, Resident Evil, who’d claimed he’d copied the beginning of 28 Days Later from the beginning of their film.  Garland pointed out that both films were obviously inspired by the opening chapter of John Wyndham’s classic end-of-the-world novel Day of the Triffids (1951).

 

After the screening, I was tempted to put up my hand and ask Garland why the infected took so long to die.  If they were too crazy to eat, wouldn’t they be too crazy to drink too, and wouldn’t they die of thirst a lot sooner?  But I decided not to, not wanting to infect him with the rage virus.

 

© DNA Films / Fox Searchlight Pictures

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Favourite southern gothic movies (Part 1)

 

© Paul Gregory Productions / United Artists

 

The smash-hit movie Sinners (2025), which I wrote about recently, has got me thinking about other films that fall into the ‘southern-gothic’ category.  Southern gothic is a genre Wikipedia defines as a work “heavily influenced by Gothic elements and the American South”, commonly featuring “deeply flawed, disturbing, or eccentric characters sometimes having physical deformities or insanity; decayed or derelict settings and grotesque situations”; and ingredients like “poverty, alienation, crime, violence, forbidden sexuality, or hoodoo magic.”

 

So, here’s the first half-dozen entries in my list of favourite southern-gothic movies.  I should say I’ve left out ones that are just as classifiable as horror movies or lean heavily into the supernatural.  Otherwise, the list would be twice as long.  For that reason, there’s no Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Lucio Fulchi’s The Beyond (1981), Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994) or Bill Paxton’s Frailty (2001).  I’ve even omitted Sinners, the movie that inspired this list in the first place.

 

Similarly, I’ve left out a couple of potential southern-gothic films that more comfortably exist as fantasies, for example, Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where art Thou? (2000), Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003) and Ben Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012).

 

Anyway, boys and belles, let’s cut to the chase and wade into that cinematic bayou…

 

Swamp Water (1941)

A clean-cut, somewhat naïve young lad (Dana Andrews) goes looking for his lost dog in Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp one day and discovers a dishevelled fugitive (Walter Brennan), who’s been hiding out in the wilderness since being accused of murdering a deputy.  Andrews forms a partnership with Brennan.  In the local town, he sells the hides of the animals Brennan hunts and traps in the swamp whilst also keeping a protective eye on the fugitive’s vulnerable daughter (Anne Baxter).  Later, Andrews learns that Brennan wasn’t responsible for the deputy’s death and the real killers – whose number include Ward Bond and John Carradine – decide to go gunning for Brennan and eliminate him before the truth comes out.

 

© 20th Century Fox

 

The first American movie made by the great French director Jean Renoir, Swamp Water doesn’t frighten the horses too much and even has a happy ending.  But its setting, the murky, alligator-and-snake-ridden swamp, earns it its southern gothic spurs.  Walter Brennan, whom I knew and loved in my childhood as Stumpy, John Wayne’s gnarly old deputy in Howard Hawkes’ Rio Bravo (1959), is fine; though I find the hero played by Dana Andrews – later to star in Don Siegel’s masterpiece Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) – a bit of a simpleton and rather annoying.  Meanwhile, parts of this film seem to have inspired the 2012 movie Mud featuring, in the Brennan role, one Matthew McConnaughey.  Of whom we will hear more later…

 

Night of the Hunter (1955)

Based on the just-as-good 1953 novel by Davis Grubb and directed by legendary thespian Charles Laughton, Night of the Hunter, more than any other film on this list, deserves the title ‘cinematic classic’.  The 2022 Greatest Films of All Time poll in Sight and Sound magazine, for instance, ranked it at number 25.  Sadly, it was Laughton’s sole credit as director.  Despite its massive reputation later, the critics of the day couldn’t get their heads around it and slagged it off and the film was a flop, deterring him from directing again.

 

Night of the Hunter focuses on phony preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), really a murderer and crook.  During a sojourn in a West Virginia prison for stealing a car, Powell learns from a cellmate, who killed two men during a bank robbery and is awaiting execution, that the bank money he stole is hidden away somewhere in his household.  Once he’s a free man again, Powell proceeds to his late cellmate’s town, does his preacher act, ingratiates himself into the community, and ends up marrying the dead man’s widow Willa (Shelley Winters).  The key to finding the hidden loot, it transpires, is Willa’s young son John (William McClellan Chapin) and even younger daughter Pearl (Sarah Jane Bruce) – but John is instinctively distrustful of his new stepdad.  After Powell kills Willa, John escapes with Pearl and they take the money with them.  They find refuge in the home of a tough but kindly old woman called Rachel (Lillian Gish), and it’s Rachel who has to withstand both the charms and the wrath of Powell when he comes hunting the children.

 

Laughton imbues the film with a weird, off-kilter feel that’s almost fairy-tale-like at times.  This is most evident in the sequence where the kids escape from Powell in a rowing boat.  Powell’s ogre-ish silhouette appears above the nocturnal riverbank and comes loping down towards them.  They barely manage to get the boat into the river and Powell flounders in the mud behind them, emitting a bloodcurdling bellow of rage.  Then things get really phantasmagorical.  Little Pearl, oblivious to the danger she’s been in, sings a lullaby while their boat drifts beneath a hauntingly starry sky and past spider’s webs and croaking toads that loom spookily in the foreground.

 

© Paul Gregory Productions / United Artists

 

As Powell, Robert Mitchum is unforgettable.  He’s by turns magnetic, devious, deranged and, Terminator-style, terrifyingly unstoppable.  His warped charisma is best displayed in the famous scene where he explains why the words ‘love’ and ‘hate’ are tattooed on his knuckles.  (“H-A-T-E…  It was with this left hand that old brother Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low…”)  Mitchum’s performance here is the standard against which all other cinematic southern-gothic villains get measured.

 

Incidentally, Shelley Winters didn’t have much luck as a single mom who re-marries a guy who proves to be a wrong ‘un.  A few years later, she was in Stanley Kubrick’s version of Lolita (1962), playing the title character’s hapless mother who weds James Mason’s Humbert Humbert.

 

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Robert Mulligan’s film, like the 1960 Harper Lee novel on which it’s based, is more a legal drama, a coming-of-age story and a meditation on the evils of racism than it is a work of southern gothic.  But one character links it to the genre: the reclusive, rarely-seen Boo Radley who’s the subject of a thousand scary stories and rumours among the kids in the Alabama neighbourhood where To Kill a Mockingbird takes place.  Watching this film in my boyhood, I was scared shitless by the scene where the kids sneak onto Boo’s premises at night and, suddenly, his shadow rears up behind one of them.

 

Boo seemed so impressively scary that I was almost disappointed when the twist about his real nature came at the end, though obviously that twist is important for the story’s message about looking beyond appearances and trusting in human decency.  (The fact there was a 1990s indie rock band called the Boo Radleys, whose music I found lame, also lessened poor old Boo’s mystique for me.)

 

© Brentwood Productions / Universal Pictures

 

Now that I think about it, as a kid, I found the scene where the saintly but short-sighted Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) has to go out and shoot a rabid dog pretty frightening too.

 

Cape Fear (1962)

Robert Mitchum’s Harry Powell and Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch may be the two most famous characters in southern-gothic movies.  Thus, Cape Fear is the King Kong vs. Godzilla of the genre in that it pitches Mitchum (again villainous) against Peck (again heroic).  This time, Mitchum plays ex-convict Max Cady, out of prison after eight years’ incarceration and possessed by hatred for Peck’s Sam Bowden, a respectable Georgia man who testified against him at his trial.  Cady gets revenge by waging an escalating war of nerves against Bowden, his wife and teenaged daughter.  The latter he identifies as a particular weak spot and soon he’s hinting disgustingly to Bowden about what he intends to do to her.

 

Mitchum’s Max Cady is a less complex villain than Harry Powell.  But with his hooded eyes, bemused expression, trashy sartorial style (safari jacket, Panama hat and cigar at all times), slurred but laconic voice, slow but relentless gait and general, oily smugness – leavened with bursts of psychotic violence – he’s as memorable.  Peck doesn’t have a lot to do apart from look harassed and, later, outraged as he discovers Cady has spent his prison-time studying law and knows exactly how to needle and threaten the Bowdens without crossing the line into illegality.  As Bowden’s exasperated police-chief buddy (Martin Balsam) tells him, “You show me a law that prevents crime.”  And when Cady’s actions do reach the point of homicidal criminality, he has the Bowdens cornered in an isolated houseboat at Cape Fear, the North Carolina headland that gives the film its title.

 

© Melville Productions / Universal-International

 

Cape Fear isn’t the work of art that Night of the Hunter was but, tensely directed by J. Lee Thompson, it’s lean, compelling and, for its time, nasty.  I prefer it to the 1991 remake helmed by Martin Scorsese, which has Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte playing Cady and Bowden respectively.  Scorsese’s version has many good features, including a great cast (also Jessica Lange, Juliette Lewis, Joe Don Baker and, wonderfully, Mitchum, Peck and Balsam in supporting roles) and a haunting opening-credits sequence by Elaine and Saul Bass.  But I find it too pumped-up – there’s predictably more bloodshed, sex, sleaze and histrionics.  Its ending is particularly over the top and De Niro, simply by being De Niro, brings too much baggage to the role of Cady.  For me, it’s one of Scorsese’s least interesting films.

 

Actually, Cape Fear was remade a second time in a 1993 episode of The Simpsons, where Sideshow Bob conducts a very Cady-esque campaign of revenge against Bart Simpson.  And supposedly there’s a new TV show in the works called Cape Fear, to star Javier Bardem and Patrick Wilson.   Guess who plays Max Cady and who plays Sam Bowden.

 

The Beguiled (1971)

I’ve seen The Beguiled, starring Clint Eastwood and directed by Eastwood’s frequent collaborator Don Siegel, described as a ‘horror western’.  But it’s set during the American Civil War, not out in the wild west, and it’s more broodingly gothic than scary.  It begins with Eastwood’s character, an injured Yankee soldier, arriving on the grounds of a boarding school in Louisiana.  The southern belles in the school – staff and pupils are all female – decide to hand him over to the Confederates, though not before he’s recovered a bit and is less likely to die in the Confederates’ grim prison-camp.

 

However, sneaky Clint soon starts flirting with, wooing and manipulating the ladies around him: a middle-aged headmistress tormented by a guilty secret (Geraldine Page), her gawky, virginal second-in-command (Elizabeth Hartmann), a loyal black maid (Mae Mercer), the regulation school hussy (Jo Ann Harris) and the eccentric twelve-year-old who first discovered him (Pamelyn Ferdin).  But his schemes backfire.  By meddling with the repressed emotions of his rescuers / captors, he suffers unpleasant consequences.  The womenfolk amputating his leg in an amateur surgical operation is just the start of it.

 

Wonderfully atmospheric, The Beguiled is a reminder that Eastwood deserves respect for refusing to play it safe, in his westerns at least, with his popular, macho cinematic persona.  As well as the duplicitous prat he plays here, he’s played ones who are barely-reformed alcoholic murderers (1991’s The Unforgiven) or, basically, ghosts (1973’s High Plains Drifter and 1985’s Pale Rider).  Meanwhile, in 2017, Sofia Coppola directed a remake of The Beguiled, with Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman, which was also atmospheric and well-acted.  But I found it so similar to the Eastwood / Siegel movie I wondered what the point of it was.

 

© The Malpaso Company / Universal Pictures

 

Deliverance (1972)

Yes, I know…  Duelling banjos…  “Squeal like a pig…”  John Boorman’s Deliverance, the story of four Atlanta businessmen (Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox) whose canoe trip down a remote north Georgian river goes horribly awry when they have a run-in with the locals, has been referenced and parodied in countless other movies and TV shows.  As a result, it’s now difficult to appreciate what a punch to the solar plexus the film felt like when it first appeared.  I remember seeing it on TV for the first time when I was 11 or 12 – an age when, really, I shouldn’t have been watching it – and being utterly disturbed by it.

 

What you expect to be a straightforward, good-guys-versus-bad-guys adventure in the wilderness is something much more complicated.  The gorgeous landscapes are juxtaposed with a brooding, then claustrophobic, finally suffocating atmosphere of dread.  It’s also disconcerting how Deliverance coldly disregards cinematic notions of heroism and masculinity.  The ‘city boys’, exemplified by would-be macho, would-be outdoors man Lewis (Reynolds), think they can handle the natural environment here.  In a conventional film of the time, they probably would handle it, eventually.  But in Deliverance, they find themselves hopelessly out of their depth when confronted by the products of the environment they’re traversing, mountain men formed – or malformed – by its harshness.  Meanwhile, poor old Bobby (Beatty) gets his notions of masculinity overturned, hideously, in the film’s most notorious scene.

 

Ironically, the modern civilization the four men represent is hellbent on destroying the place they’re vacationing in, for the river is about to be dammed – the water stored and electricity generated will no doubt be channelled to some faraway city.  As Lewis says, “Do know what’s gonna be here?  Right here?  A lake.  As far as the eyes can see. Hundreds of feet deep.  Hundreds of feet deep.”

 

It wasn’t the ‘squeal like a pig’ scene that upset me most when I first saw Deliverance in my boyhood.  Possibly I was too young then to fully understand what was going on.  No, it was the bit near the end where Ed (Voigt) has a nightmare about the river, now a lake, and sees a pale, bloated hand rising out of its water.  The image of that emerging hand creeped me out for weeks afterwards.

 

And that’s the first half of my list.  More southern-gothic goodness will appear on this blog shortly.

 

© Elmer Enterprises / Warner Bros.

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Cinematic heroes 6: James Cosmo

 

© Icon Productions / Ladd Company / Paramount Pictures 

 

I’ve just realised that it’s the 30th anniversary of the release of Mel Gibson’s woad-slathered and not-entirely-historically-accurate epic Braveheart (1995).  This was the movie that added the battle-cry “FREEE-DOM!” to the chorus of things you hear outside Scottish pubs at closing time (along with “SHUT YER PUSS!” and “I’M OOT MA FACE!”).  Thus, it seems an appropriate time to post this tribute to one of the very best things in Braveheart, James Cosmo.

 

I’ll make no bones about it.  I f**king love the mighty Scottish character actor James Cosmo.

 

These days the hulking, craggy and formidable Cosmo – whose visage is usually bedecked with long white tresses of hair and a moustache that on anyone else would suggest ‘ageing hippy’, but on him suggest ‘someone you really don’t want to mess with’ – seems most familiar when he’s clad in armour and wielding a broadsword.  He’s carved a profitable niche for himself playing characters in movies and TV shows set in the ancient world, the Middle Ages and medieval fantasy lands, such as Highlander (1986), Braveheart (1995), Ivanhoe (1997), Cleopatra (1999), Troy (2004), The Lost Legion (2007), Game of Thrones (2011-2013), Hammer of the Gods (2013), Ben–Hur (2016), Outlaw / King (2018) and The Last Redemption (2024)  However, Cosmo, who was born in Clydebank and attended the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and the Bristol Old Vic Drama School, worked long and hard on television before he cornered the market for playing grizzled bear-like warriors in historical and fantasy epics.

 

He earned his acting spurs during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in a long line of TV shows and TV plays.  The better-known titles he appeared in include Doctor Finlay’s Casebook (1965 & 69), Softly Softly (1969), UFO (1971), The Persuaders (1971), Sutherland’s Law (1972), Quiller (1975), Survivors (1976), George and Mildred (1977), The Sweeney (1978), The Onedin Line (1979), The Professionals (1979), Strangers (1981), Minder (1984) and Fairly Secret Army (1984).  The most distinguished TV productions from this time to feature Cosmo were probably Nigel Kneale’s haunted-house-cum-sci-fi-horror-story The Stone Tape (1972) – its influence is detectable in many films and TV shows made since then, including the recent In the Earth (2021) and Enys Men (2022) – and the 1974 Play for Today adaptation of John McGrath’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, the most important piece of political theatre to surface in Scotland during the 1970s.

 

© Hammer Films / ITC Entertainment

 

I was in my mid-teens when I started to notice Cosmo as an actor.  He played a villain in an episode of The Hammer House of Horror (1980), which climaxed with him driving a cleaver into the skull of the fragrant Julia Foster, something that must have shocked those viewers who remembered her from the wholesome 1968 musical with Tommy Steele, Half a Sixpence.  That grisly scene made a big impression on me, although nothing compared to the impression it obviously made on Julia Foster.  He also appeared in 1981’s The Nightmare Man, a cheap but creepy BBC mini-series scripted by the great TV writer Robert Holmes about a mysterious killer stalking a fogbound Scottish island.  The Nightmare Man saw Cosmo in good company, as the cast also included Celia Imrie, James Warwick, Tom Watson and an equally craggy Scottish character actor, the late Maurice Roeves.

 

By the late 1980s Cosmo was becoming the go-to guy if you needed an imposing Scottish hard man in your production.  For example, he appeared in Brond, a 1987 Channel 4 adaptation of the novel by Frederic Lindsay, set in Glasgow and a thriller involving conspiracies and terrorism.  It tells the story of a hapless innocent, played by a very young John Hannah, who falls under the influence of the mysterious and sinister Brond of the title and ends up being accused of carrying out a political assassination.  Brond is played by the portly and menacing Stratford Johns, although Cosmo is no less intimidating as Primo, the silent, lethal hulk who acts as Brond’s henchman.  Two years later Cosmo had a similar role in the glossy Glasgow-set BBC thriller The Justice Game, in which this time he terrorised Dennis Lawson – yes, Wedge Antilles in the original Star Wars trilogy (1977-83) and real-life uncle of Ewan MacGregor.

 

Meanwhile, in 1986, Cosmo had appeared in Russell Mulcahy’s Highlander, the fantasy movie about immortal beings feuding throughout human history.  He plays a member of the MacLeod clan in the medieval Scottish Highlands and he helps Christopher Lambert to escape when their superstitious fellow clansmen get alarmed about how, within hours, Lambert’s battle-wounds miraculously heal up.  Not only does Lambert turn out to be one of the immortals but he’s also the world’s most French-sounding Scotsman.  Later in the movie he encounters Sean Connery, who’s another immortal and also the world’s most Scottish-sounding Spaniard.  (The scene where Lambert explains to Connery what a haggis is has to be heard to be believed.)  Totally scatty, but loveable, I suspect Highlander was the movie that helped Cosmo secure the sweaty, muddy sword-and-sandals roles he became well-known for in the 1990s and 2000s.

 

© Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment / 20th Century Fox

 

The key sword-and-sandals role for Cosmo arrived in 1995 with the Mel Gibson-directed, Mel-Gibson-starring Braveheart, in which he plays Campbell, father of Hamish, best friend to 13th / 14th-century Scottish freedom-fighter William Wallace.  Playing Hamish is the huge, ursine Brendan Gleeson, who later found fame in Michael McDonagh’s glorious 2008 comedy-thriller In Bruges.  If anyone is even huger and more ursine-looking than Gleeson and could convincingly play his dad, it’s Cosmo.  In reality, the two actors are only seven years apart in age.

 

Seven years old is also about the age that Isabella of France would have been in real life during the events depicted in Braveheart.  In the film, she’s played by Sophie Marceau (in her late twenties at the time), is presented as English King Edward I’s daughter-in-law and has a sizzling romance with Gibson’s Wallace.  This sums up the film’s cavalier disregard for historical accuracy.  (It also gave stand-up comedian Stewart Lee material for a routine about William Wallace being a paedophile, which he bravely delivered in Glasgow.)  The film is also anti-English to a degree that wouldn’t be acceptable against any other ethnic, national or cultural group in a Hollywood movie.  But in the film’s defence I’ll say that the battle scenes, for their time, were excellent.  And the supporting cast that Gibson assembled – Cosmo, Gleeson, Marceau, David O’Hara, Patrick McGoohan, Catherine McCormack, Angus McFadyen, Ian Bannen – is excellent too.

 

As Campbell Senior, Cosmo comes across as a near-unstoppable force of nature.  He gets skewered with an arrow at the initial uprising in Lanark but ignores that and carries on fighting.  He gets his hand chopped off at the Battle of Stirling but ignores that and carries on fighting too.  Even when someone embeds an axe in his stomach at the Battle of Falkirk, he keeps going long enough to deliver a moving farewell speech to Gleeson.

 

A year later Cosmo appeared in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, the movie that gave the world an equally potent image of Scotland, if a rather different one from that given by Braveheart.  In fact, Trainspotting, based on the 1993 novel of the same name by Irvine Welsh, is the modern-urban-Scottish-junkie yin to Braveheart’s heroic-medieval-Scottish-warrior yang.  In Trainspotting, he plays another dad, this time of Ewan MacGregor’s Renton character, a junkie so desperate for his next fix that he’ll crawl into the shit-encrusted bowl of the Worst Toilet in Scotland to get it.

 

While it’s nice to see his face in the film, Cosmo is kept very much in the background.  Gratifyingly, he got more to do when Boyle, MacGregor and the rest of the Trainspotting crew finally reunited in 2017 to make Trainspotting 2, based loosely on parts of Welsh’s original novel that were left out of the first film and on its 2002 literary sequel Porno.  Trainspotting 2 concludes — in an ending that radically differs from that of Porno — with Renton deciding home is the best place for him.  So he gives his now-widowed father a hug and moves into the latter’s spare bedroom (where, of course, he promptly starts dancing to Iggy Pop’s 1977 classic, Lust for Life).

 

© Material Pictures / Highland Midgie / Amazon Studios

 

After Braveheart, Cosmo was kept busy with sword-wielding roles, including 12 episodes as Jeor Mormont in Game of Thrones.  However, he’s also become something of a fixture in recent British and Irish horror / thriller movies – he’s appeared in Urban Ghost Story (1998), Outcast (2009), The Glass Man (2011), Citadel (2012), January (2015), Dark Signal (2016), Malevolent (2018), The Hole in the Ground (2019), Get Duked! (2019), The Kindred (2022) and The Beast Within (2024).  Of these, I enjoyed the horror-comedy Get Duked! the most.  It’s the story of four lads tramping around in the Scottish Highlands whilst trying to earn their Duke of Edinburgh Award – and realising they’re being hunted by a weird pair of aristocratic psychopaths (played by Eddie Izzard and Georgie Glen).  Cosmo turns up in it as a farmer the boys encounter in the course of their misadventures.

 

It’s normal for secondary characters in horror films to be nothing but cannon fodder – they soon get killed off to ratchet up suspense and demonstrate the power and evilness of the monster or villain.  But Get Duked! makes those secondary characters interesting, keeps them around and has a lot of fun with them.  Which is smart because it has a splendid supporting cast: Cosmo, Jonathan Aris and, as bumbling police officers, Kate Dickie, Alice Lowe and another veteran Scottish actor, Brian Pettifer.  Despite first being sighted in a boiler suit and at the wheel of a tractor, Cosmo’s character proves to have a side not normally associated with Highland farmers.  He has a fondness for certain hallucinogenic substances and is soon grooving to a mix CD that the lads give him.

 

Unexpectedly, Cosmo has a further speciality, which is for playing Santa Claus.  According to his IMDB profile he’s now filled the furry boots of Saint Nick on three different occasions, most famously in the 2005 Disney version of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

 

He’s a pleasingly ubiquitous and varied performer.  In the past decade I’ve seen him in things as different as SS-GB (2017), the BBC drama serial based on Len Deighton’s 1978 alternative-history thriller and set in a Nazi-Germany-controlled London in 1941; Wonder Woman (2017), one of the few decent DC Comics movie adaptations, in which he plays Field Marshal Douglas Haig; and the HBO miniseries Chernobyl (2019), where he’s one of the miners drafted in to dig a tunnel under the stricken plant’s melted uranium and prevent it from leaking into the Black Sea.  His IMDb page currently lists no fewer than eight upcoming projects, so clearly he’s keeping busy.  Meanwhile, on the non-acting side, he was a contestant in the 2017 series of Celebrity Big Brother and has recently been doing a speaking tour entitled An Evening With James Cosmo.

 

Though he’s well into his eighth decade, James Cosmo looks as daunting as ever.  His visage, bulk and general demeanour suggest a man whom you definitely don’t want to give any cheek to.  And if you are foolhardy enough to give him cheek, he’ll probably kebab you on a long rusty medieval pike and simultaneously slash your throat with a sgian dubh.  That’s the sort of guy I’d like to be when I become eligible for my bus-pass.

 

© HBO Entertainment / Television 360

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Even bloodsuckers get the blues

 

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

 

A few days ago my partner and I went to see Sinners, the new horror-cum-gangster film directed, written and co-produced by Ryan Coogler.  Here are my thoughts on it.  And before I go any further, a word of warning: there will be spoilers.

 

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting a great deal, as I’d heard something about its plot and it sounded horribly like 1996’s Robert Rodriguez-directed, Quentin Tarantino-scripted From Dusk till Dawn.  Although a few misguided souls nowadays look back on that film as a neglected and misunderstood classic, I have to say I f**king hated it.  In part, this was because From Dusk till Dawn began so well, as a nastily-effective little crime thriller wherein two fleeing bank-robbing brothers (Tarantino and George Clooney) kidnap a pastor (Harvey Keitel) and his family and force them to smuggle them over the US / Mexico border.  Disappointingly, things then go south in all senses of the phrase.  The group arrives at a mysterious Mexican bar called the Titty Twister where the staff and many of the patrons prove to be – surprise! – vampires.  The rest of the film is a ludicrous, tongue-in-cheek splatterfest where the humans battle against waves of bloodsucking undead.  While From Dusk Till Dawn’s sudden change of tone has been praised in some quarters for its audacity, I found it a vertiginous plunge into cheesy bollocks.

 

Anyway, the structure of Sinners is not dissimilar.  Its first half plays out as a period gangster story, then vampires show up and its latter half becomes an exercise in horror.  Set in the Mississippi Delta in 1932, it’s about the homecoming of black gangster twin brothers Stack and Smoke (both played by Michael B. Jordan) who’ve recently left Chicago where, it’s suggested, they worked for Al Capone.  On their home turf, they embark on a new project – purchasing a disused sawmill and turning it into a juke joint, i.e.. a place for live music, dancing, drinking and gambling whose customers are from the local African American community.

 

To ensure the juke joint’s opening night is a success, they staff it with trusted friends, family members and associates: Smoke’s ex-wife, the occult-dabbling Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), and Chinese shopkeepers Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo (Yao) to handle the catering; hulking buddy Cornbread (Omar Miller) to man the door; and boozy old bluesman Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), slinky singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson) and young, startlingly-talented guitarist Sammie (Miles Caton) to provide the music.

 

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

 

Despite a few obstacles – two thieves who soon regret tangling with the take-no-prisoners Stack, the fact that the sawmill’s former owner is head of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, and the disapproval of Sammie’s dad, a preacher who believes music is only virtuous if it’s used to further the word of the Lord – the juke joint opens, pulls in the crowds and is soon swinging.  And then the vampires arrive.

 

Yes, I was dreading this moment – because I had really enjoyed the non-fantastical part of the film.  Coogler did a great job depicting the minutiae of the 1932 Mississippi Delta.  This was a world where the black population was just a couple of generations removed from the official slavery of the Confederacy and most of them now toiled in the racket that was sharecropping, a form of unofficial slavery.  At the same time, they were crafting a musical culture, the blues, that would ultimately revolutionise American and global music through its influence on rock and roll.  One touch among many that I liked here was the portrayal of the Chinese shopkeepers, Grace and Bo, who thanks to their ethnicity are able to run stores in both districts of the Mississippi town of Clarksdale, the black one and the white one.

 

Anyway, when the vampires show up, does the film turn to shite as From Dusk till Dawn did?  Thankfully, no.  Coogler provides some foreshadowing to prepare us for the twist, so it doesn’t come as a credibility-straining bolt from the blue.  During the opening sequence, a voice-over talks about certain types of music being “so pure it can pierce the veil between life and death, past and future” and attract supernatural creatures – an idea that’s echoed later when the vampires admit Sammie’s miraculous guitar-playing has drawn them to the juke joint.  (Even before the vampires arrive, Coogler treats us to a phantasmagorical sequence where Sammie’s playing seems to conjure up among the dancing crowd the spectres of music past and future – West African shamans, Chinese Xiqu performers, hip-hop DJs and an electric guitarist who looks like he’s a member of George Clinton’s P-Funk collective.)

 

Also preparing viewers for the tonal switch is an earlier sequence where a white man, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), flees from a squad of Choctaw Native Americans and takes refuge in a cabin inhabited by a hard-up white couple.  The pursuing Native Americans politely warn the couple that they’re sheltering something evil.  But as KKK robes are visible inside the cabin, it’s no surprise that the couple believe the story of their white visitor rather than that of the ‘Injuns’.  Noticing the sun is setting, and with a shotgun pointed at them, the Choctaw decide discretion is the better part of valour and retreat.  Which leaves Remmick to reveal himself as a vampire and infect his two saviours.

 

Coogler leaves this bit of world-building unexplored – which makes it wonderfully intriguing.  Why are the Choctaw acting as vampire hunters?  It also reminds me of the start of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), where a dog – actually the titular thing in canine form – is chased by a pair of wrathful Norwegians in a helicopter.  Compared to the Norwegians, though, the Native Americans are more pragmatic and level-headed.

 

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

 

Later, Remmick and the vampirised Klan couple appear on the threshold of Smoke and Stack’s new juke joint, bearing musical instruments and pleading to be let in (“We heard tell of a party”) so that they can have a jamming session with Sammie.  Sinners makes much of the belief that to get onto a premises, a vampire has to be invited – and Smoke and Stack, suspicious of white folks, are in no hurry to invite this trio inside.  So they bide their time outside, biting and vampirising anyone who goes home early or nips out of the building for a pee.  While they wait for their opportunity to get inside, their numbers grow…

 

In a smart move, Coogler makes Remmick Irish and gives him a taste for music as strong as his taste for blood.  So, lurking outside, the vampires knock out a few tunes themselves – a charming version of the Irish / Scottish folk number Wild Mountain Thyme, for instance, and when there’s enough of them to stage a full-scale vampire hooley, a raucous rendition of Rocky Road to Dublin, during which Remmick indulges in some step-dancing.  This makes being a vampire look like fun and Remmick, entreating the folks in the juke joint to surrender to him and his horde, makes a persuasive-sounding case for being vampirised.  Once you’re a vampire, it doesn’t matter what skin-tone you have.  Black vampires are treated no worse than white ones: “This world already left you for dead.  I can save you from your fate.  I am your way out.”

 

There’s a snag, of course.  Remmick, as the Count Dracula / Mr. Barlow-style lead vampire, calls the shots and his minions have to do his bidding.  Indeed, they seem parts of a giant hive-mind – evidenced by their chorused singing of Rocky Road to Dublin, which contrasts with the individuality Sammie expresses with his guitar.  And Remmick’s interest in Sammie and his music isn’t motivated by an impulse of sharing but by a desire to assimilate them.

 

It’s fun to speculate who or what Remmick symbolizes.  When he makes his first pitch at the juke joint’s door, begging to be let inside while Sammie, Delta Slim and Pearline perform, I was reminded of those white British rock-and-roll bands of the 1960s, like the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Yardbirds.  Influenced by the likes of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, they started their careers desperate to play blues music and become known as bluesmen themselves.  Which prompted Sonny Boy Williamson II to quip caustically: “These English boys want to play the blues real bad… And they do, real bad.”

 

But maybe it makes more sense to compare Remmick to the white-owned American music industry.  His hunger for Sammie parallels how that industry gobbled up black artists, of blues, jazz, gospel, soul, funk, whatever, and made a fortune off their music whilst giving them as little credit, money and control over their work as possible.  Often, their songs ended up being sung by someone else, someone white – see Pat Boone singing a version of Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti just five months after its release in 1955 – with precious few royalties making it their way.

 

Incidentally, late on, Remmick comes out with a sob story about how he was persecuted and deprived of his land in Ireland – presumably at the hands of the British and presumably back in the days when he was still human.  That a victim of oppression has become a supernatural killing machine, one with a fascistic disregard for the lives of the people he feeds on, is Coogler’s way of reminding us that many poor white people, treated like dirt in their home countries, emigrated to other parts of the world where they treated indigenous people and black people like dirt too.  It’s a sad reflection on human nature that people near the bottom of the pile have a psychological need to believe there are people even further down the pile whom they can mistreat and regard as inferior.  Though this observation would no doubt delight Elon Musk, who recently grumbled that the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”.

 

I’ve spent a lot of time analysing Sinners but I should also say it’s a supremely entertaining movie.  It’s exciting, scary, funny and atmospheric.  Furthermore, it proves a point that many filmmakers overlook – if you want a horror film to grip an audience, give them likeable and sympathetic characters to identify with.  That way, they have an investment in those characters and things feel much more tense when bad stuff starts happening.

 

© Cedric Burnside Project

© Silvertone Records

 

It goes without saying that the soundtrack is great too.  I’m particularly pleased to see that Cedric Burnside had a hand in performing some of the blues tunes – I attended a cool gig by Burnside at the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival in 2015 and afterwards got his signature on a CD as a present for one of my mates.  Also, don’t rush off when the credits start rolling at the end.  There’s still a scene to come, one set in the early 1990s and featuring the venerable bluesman Buddy Guy.  (By a coincidence I saw Guy perform in the early 1990s, though obviously the early-1990s Guy in Sinners is a good bit older than the one I witnessed.)  It’s a coda that’s both sinister and affecting.

 

And the acting is excellent.  Michael B. Jordan is impressive in the twin roles of Smoke and Stack.  I soon forgot that both characters were being played by the same person.  It’s a pleasure seeing Delroy Lindo again, whom I fondly remember as the villain in the 1995 adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty and from numerous Spike Lee movies.  And as Sammie, Michael Caton is a revelation.  He’s young and naïve, as the script demands, but he’s blessed with a deep, prematurely-old voice that totally persuades you this lad can sing and play the blues.

 

One thing about the casting, though.  Jack O’Connell is perfectly fine as Remmick.  But since the character is a scary old monster who’s Irish and musical, I don’t know why they didn’t cast the obvious candidate for the role: Van Morrison.

 

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

Posted on

Eggers’ banquet

 

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

 

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) has finally reached Singapore and a few days ago I watched it in the city-state’s excellent arthouse cinema The Projector.  This is Eggers’ reimagining of the 1922 silent horror-movie classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, which was directed by F.W. Murnau and based surreptitiously on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula – though not so surreptitiously that Murnau and his producers escaped being sued by Stoker’s widow for breach of copyright.

 

The new Nosferatu has provoked some extreme responses.  The reaction has been as polarised as the weird relationship at the film’s core, wherein the beautiful, fragrant Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) gets intimate with the gaunt, rotting, pustuled Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), the dreaded nosferatu – vampire – of the title.  A while back, I read a very positive review of it by Wendy Ide in the Guardian but was taken aback by the negativity of the some of the comments below the line: “A turd…” “Just awful…” “Absolutely terrible…” “Beyond boring, absolute crap…”

 

Well, I lean towards the Wendy Ide end of the Nosferatu debate because I thought the film was great.  At least, I thought so during the two hours and 12 minutes I sat before it in The Projector.  When my critical faculties started to function again – they’d been in a daze during the film itself – I became aware of a few flaws.  But generally, thanks to its atmosphere, its visuals, its sumptuous (if drained) palette and its overall craftsmanship, I found it the most impressive version of Stoker’s novel I’ve seen.  And yes, though it retains the original Nosferatu’s German setting and German character-names, this is essentially another retelling of Dracula.

 

Not that I’m saying it’s my favourite version of Dracula.  That accolade belongs to the 1958 Dracula made by Hammer Films, directed by Terence Fisher and starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as Dracula and Van Helsing, which I saw when I was 13 years old.  13 is a formative age, when certain things tend to imprint themselves on your consciousness and become your favourites for life.  Also, I feel uncomfortable saying this Nosferatu is better than Murnau’s Nosferatu.  More than a century separates the two films, with huge differences in their historical contexts, themes, styles and filmmaking technology, and to me they’re like chalk and cheese.  That said, I noticed some of the flaws in Eggers’ Nosferatu when I did compare it with the old one.

 

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

 

While we’re on the subject of comparisons, I should say I massively preferred this film to the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola one, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Despite having the peerless Gary Oldman in the title role, it was one of the few films I’ve come close to walking out of in a cinema.  I stayed the course in the hope it would improve in its later stages, but it didn’t.  Eggers’ Nosferatu is as operatic in its tone and as flamboyant in its visuals as Coppola’s Dracula.  However, while Coppola threw everything at the wall – restless camera movements, gimmicky special effects and make-up, over-the-top costumes, hammy performances – in the hope at least some of it would stick and hold the attentions of the raised-on-MTV teenagers he assumed would be the film’s audience, Eggers doesn’t merely show off In Nosferatu.  There are also moments of stillness and silence, of subtlety and holding back, of allowing atmosphere to ferment and ripen.  Actually, for my money, comparing it to Coppola’s Dracula is like comparing a moody and detail-laden work by a Dutch Master to a hyperactive kids’ cartoon.

 

Nosferatu’s storyline follows the Dracula template.  Young estate agent Thomas Hutter (the stand-in for Stoker’s Jonathan Harker, here played by Nicholas Hoult) is despatched from the fictional German port-city of Wisburg to a castle in Transylvania, where he has to supervise the paperwork for the purchase of a Wisburg mansion by the mysterious Transylvanian aristocrat Count Orlok.  Hutter’s sojourn in Orlok’s castle becomes a terrifying ordeal as he discovers the vampirical nature of his host.  He ends up plunging from one of its windows, into a river, while the Count sets off for Wisburg.

 

The Count’s chosen mode of travel is by ship – Romania, which Transylvania is part of now, borders on the Black Sea and Germany’s coast runs along the North and Baltic Seas, so this is evidently a long voyage – and he brings with him a horde of plague-carrying rats, which first destroy the ship’s crew and then start infecting the citizens of Wisburg when he reaches his destination.  These plague-rats are both a physical manifestation of Orlok’s evil and, presumably, a way of disguising his activities – with people dropping dead of plague left, right and centre, nobody’s going to notice a few blood-drained corpses.

 

But Orlok’s presence has been felt in Wisburg long before his arrival there.  Hutter’s wife Ellen – the Nosferatu equivalent of Stoker’s Mina Harker – has had an inexplicable psychic link to the ghoulish Count since her childhood and has already, in her dreams, pledged herself to him.  Also, Hutter’s boss Knock (Simon McBurney) has been communing with Orlok via some occult rituals.  Sending Hutter off to Transylvania was clearly part of a plan to relocate the vampire to the feeding-grounds of Wisburg.  Knock is the film’s version of Milo Renfield, the asylum-inmate who in Stoker’s novel becomes Dracula’s disciple.  Accordingly, Knock goes insane, gets incarcerated,  escapes and does Orlok’s bidding in the city.  Meanwhile, the thirsty Count makes a beeline for Ellen and those around her…

 

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

 

Eggers’ cast-members acquit themselves well.  Lily-Rose Depp is extremely impressive in a role that requires her to be frightened, helpless, yearning, lascivious, possessed and defiant – often a couple of those things in one scene.  As a female foil to Dracula, she’s as good as Eva Green’s character Vanessa Ives in John Logan’s gothic-horror TV show Penny Dreadful (2014-16).  Likening someone to the mighty Eva Green is big praise from me.

 

Playing Jonathan Harker in a Dracula film is a thankless task.  You have to be bland and bloodless enough to add spice to the forthcoming dalliance between your missus and the Count, to suggest she’s a desperate 19th-century housewife who might actually welcome the vampire’s kiss.  But you also have to be interesting enough to make the audience root for you while you’re trapped in Castle Dracula.  And Nicholas Hoult does what’s required as the Harker-esque Hutter.  His restraint contrasts with the silent-movie acting of the original Hutter, Gustav von Wangenheim, who spent the early scenes of the 1922 Nosferatu grinning like a maniac.

 

On the other hand, Simon McBurney is unnervingly off-the-scale as Knock.  The 1922 Knock, Alexander Granach, was off-the-scale too, but McBurney’s one is allowed to slather himself in some full-on, 2024-stye blood and gore.  (He follows the hallowed Renfield tradition of chomping on small animals.)  If there’s a criticism, it’s that he doesn’t get enough to do.  More on that in a minute.

 

Ralph Ineson and Willem Dafoe respectively play a beleaguered Wisburg physician, Dr Sievers, and a Swiss expert on the occult, Professor Von Franz, who correspond to Stoker’s Dr Seward and Professor Van Helsing.  When Hutter gets back to Wisburg, they team up with him to put a stop to Count Orlok’s onslaught.  Willem Dafoe won’t replace Peter Cushing in my affections as the ultimate cinematic Van Helsing, but he’s delightful as the eccentric, cat-loving Von Franz.  Kind old gent though he is, Von Franz concocts a plan to destroy the vampire that may have tragic consequences for the people he’s supposed to be protecting.

 

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

 

As for Bill Skarsgård and the film’s depiction of Count Orlok…  I can see why it’s been controversial.  Some have been disappointed that Eggers and Skarsgård didn’t replicate the iconic look of actor Max Schreck, who played the Count in 1922 as a bald, gaunt creature with rodentlike incisors, Spock ears and unseemly tufts of ear and eyebrow hair.  Indeed, in the first part of the film, we hardly see Orlok.  During the scenes set in his castle, he’s unsettlingly obscured by a haze of firelight, candlelight, shadows and darkness.  But when Eggers’ cameras finally reveal him, he’s an icky, mouldering thing, from the neck down at least, and he sports a monstrous and frankly distracting moustache.

 

I know Dracula had a moustache in the novel, and certain actors have played him with one, such as John Carradine in the Universal movies House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), and Christopher Lee in Jess Franco’s Count Dracula (1970).  But this must be the droopiest, shaggiest Drac-tache ever.

 

Maybe Eggers avoided the Max-Schreck look because he was sensitive to the accusations of antisemitism that dogged the old Nosferatu – that Schreck’s Orlok played on common German stereotypes and caricatures of Jewish people at the time.  Or maybe he just decided that look had become too much of a cliché.  As well as a slap-headed, pointy-eared vampire featuring in the previous remake of Nosferatu, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1977), similar ones have appeared in the 1979 TV version of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, the original film version of What We Do In The Shadows (2014), and Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II (2002), where the leader of the baldy-vampires was played by Luke Goss.  (Yes… a Bros-feratu.)

 

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

 

It’s also debatable if Eggers and Skarsgård made the right choice for Orlok’s loud, guttural voice, which booms out of the screen like the Voice of the Mysterons from Gerry Anderson’s TV show Captain Scarlet (1967-68) with a Slavic accent.  At least it’s different…  And Skarsgård put a lot of work into creating those vocals, training with an Icelandic opera singer and even studying Mongolian throat singing.  But I actually found Yorkshireman Ralph Ineson’s deep, gruff, north-of-England tones more menacing, even though his character, Dr Sievers, is one of the good guys.  (Sievers must have had a medical practice in Leeds before moving to Wisburg.)

 

Elsewhere, not a great deal happens during the second half of the film, though Dafoe’s charming performance keeps us engaged.  The latter part of the 1922 film is enlivened by a sub-plot involving Knock, who gets blamed for the mayhem in Wisburg after Orlok’s ship arrives.  Believing him to be the real vampire, the townspeople pursue him through the streets and the surrounding countryside, in scenes that are still impressive today – Knock perched like a gargoyle atop a vertiginous rooftop, for instance, or the mob mistaking a distant scarecrow for him, rushing at it and tearing it to pieces.  Eggers removes this sub-plot, however, and Knock (who in the original film didn’t even meet Orlok physically) serves as a conventional vampire’s acolyte.  If nothing else, this gives the Count someone to transport his coffin from the Wisburg docks to the mansion he’s bought.  In the 1922 Nosferatu, he suffered the indignity of having to carry the coffin himself.

 

So, the film drifts somewhat later on and I’m not fully convinced by its portrayal of Count Orlok.  But overall I really enjoyed Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu.  It’s a feast – an Eggers’ banquet – of gorgeousness, gloom, sensuality, repulsiveness, grue, humour, absurdity and tragedy.  It has fabulous visuals, entertaining performances and a smart balance between the aesthetically pleasing and the grotesquely yucky, meaning it should satisfy both cerebral arthouse types and horror-movie aficionados more interested in blood, gore and plague-rats.

 

And I can’t understand why some people disliked it so much.  This Nosferatu isn’t Dross-feratu, it’s the Absolute-boss-feratu.

 

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

Posted on

The man from another place has gone to another place

 

From wikipedia.org / © Georges Biard

 

For the past few days, I’ve felt like wearing a black armband while I sip my cups of coffee.  That’s because David Lynch, visionary maker of movies, short films, TV shows, web series, music videos and commercials, and artist, musician and actor to boot, passed away on January 15th.

 

In his cinematic output, Lynch was surely one of the most American of film directors. His work was suffused with Americana, both the cosy variety populated by porches, picket fences, lawns, sprinklers, diners, coffee, pie and kindly, neighbourly folk; and the flashier variety whereby bequiffed, leather-jacketed Elvis wannabes and peroxide blondes cruised along endless highways in big, finned sports cars.  This being Lynch, though, submerged beneath the Americana and frequently bubbling to its surface were things altogether weirder, darker, more surreal and twisted.  There was as much Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel and William S. Burroughs in his work as there was Edward Hopper, Frank Capra and Ray Bradbury.  Meanwhile, though Lynch’s themes, motifs, imagery and stylistic touches felt unique – no wonder ‘Lynchian’ became a word – he wasn’t afraid to dress his visions in the clothes of familiar genres: horror, thriller, crime noir, science fiction and – something Lynch didn’t get enough credit for – comedy.

 

Anyway, here’s a guide to my favourite parts of the David Lynch film-and-TV universe.

 

Favourite Lynch cast

Lynch’s version of Dune (1984) was a box-office flop and received much abuse from critics.  (Dung, I remember the New Musical Express calling it.)  Unfortunately, Dune’s old-school producer Dino De Laurentiis wanted the doorstop-sized and labyrinthine Frank Herbert novel on which it was based crammed into a regulation two-hour movie.  The condensed result didn’t make much sense.

 

© Dino De Laurentiis Corporation / Universal Pictures

 

But Lynch never worked with a better troupe of actors.  It even outshone the cast that, four decades later, Denis Villeneuve assembled for his telling of the story in 2022 and 2024.  The Lynch Dune features Kyle MacLachlan, Jurgen Prochnow, Francesca Annis, Kenneth McMillan, Paul Smith, Patrick Stewart, Richard Jordan, Freddie Jones, Sian Phillips, Virginia Madsen, Jack Nance, José Ferrer, Everitt McGill, Brad Dourif, Max von Sydow and Dean Stockwell.  Oh, and Sting – more on him in a minute.

 

Favourite Lynch collaborator

That would be Jack Nance, who played Henry Spencer, lead character in Eraserhead (1977), the film that put Lynch on the map.  With his impassive features, bouffant, tight suit and peculiar gait, Nance contributes as much to the film’s atmosphere as the elements that today we’d regard as typically Lynchian – the mutant baby, the lady in the radiator, the flickering lights, the industrial noise.  Thereafter, he was in all Lynch’s film projects (apart from 1980’s The Elephant Man) up to 1997’s Lost Highway.  He most famously played the amiable, fishing-and-chess-obsessed Pete Martell in Twin Peaks (1990-91), Lynch and Mark Frost’s oddball, sometimes barmy, occasionally confounding TV murder whodunnit, which coincidentally was a soap opera, comedy, horror story and science-fiction drama too.

 

© AFI Center for Advanced Studies / Libra Films

 

Nance’s life was hardly a bed of roses.  His film work was intermittent and in the mid-1980s he worked as a hotel clerk to make ends meet.  His second wife Kelly Jean Van Dyke (Dick Van Dyke’s niece) committed suicide.  And he had severe alcohol problems.  During the filming of Blue Velvet (1986), he was in such a state that Dennis Hopper – Dennis Hopper! – had to drive him to a rehabilitation centre.  In 1996, Nance died of a subdural hematoma, resulting from a ‘blunt force trauma’.  The previous day his face was bruised and he told friends that he’d been punched during a brawl he’d got into with some strangers in a doughnut shop.  Lynch said in tribute: “There’s not another actor I can think of who could fill his shoes.  I had roles in my head for future films that I was saving for Jack.  I cannot think of anyone else who could do it.”

 

Favourite Lynch funny bit

The other day at work I was discussing Lynch’s passing with a colleague.  I started enthusing about the sequence where Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe try to rob a feed store in Wild at Heart (1991) and how funny it was: “Willem Dafoe trips and falls on his shotgun and it goes off and you see the top of his head flying up in the air…  Meanwhile, there’s a wounded clerk who’s had his hand blown off at the wrist…  His colleague comforts him by saying modern surgery can reattach his hand… And then you see a dog running away outside with the hand in its mouth…”

 

At this point I realised my colleague wasn’t laughing with me, but was looking decidedly queasy.  He didn’t seem happy to be reminded of that sequence.  Which shows humour is subjective.  Still, I think the attempted robbery in Wild at Heart is Lynch’s funniest moment.

 

© PolyGram / Propaganda Films / Samuel Goldwyn Company

 

Favourite Lynch musical bit

Lynch was a musician, so music played a big role in his films – right from Eraserhead, when the lady in the radiator sings In Heaven.  In his final major work, Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), the long-awaited third season of his celebrated TV show, music wasn’t so much an element as a fixture.  Each episode ended with a scene in the Roadhouse, the bar / concert venue in the town of Twin Peaks, where a musical act would be performing.  Given Twin Peaks’ small size and remote location, the Roadhouse attracted some unfeasibly big names: Julee Cruise, the Cactus Blossoms, Rebekah Del Rio with Moby on guitar, and one Edward Louis Severson – Eddie Vedder to you and me.

 

But in my opinion, the act that rounds off Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return is best of all.  It’s the fearsome electro-metal juggernaut Nine Inch Nails, whom the Roadhouse MC introduces as the Nine Inch Nails, no less.

 

© Dino De Laurentiis Corporation / Universal Pictures

 

Favourite Lynch musician in an acting role

Lynch was also fond of putting singers and musicians in his casts.  Many remember Sting playing Feyd-Rautha Harknonnen, evil nephew of the equally-evil Baron Harkonnen, in Dune.  I’m not a fan of Sting’s acting but visually, with his spiky blonde hair, lean frame and daft codpiece, he was striking.  Indeed, when I saw Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part 2 and Austen Butler strolled into view as Feyd-Rautha, my first thought was: “Oh look, there’s what’s-his-name in the Sting role!”

 

© Twin Peaks Productions / New Line Cinema / CiBy 2000

 

However, my favourite Lynchian musical-cameo comes in the middle of Twin Peaks’ cinematic prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992).  This is when David Bowie pops up as Phillip Jeffries, an FBI agent who’s been mysteriously missing for two years.  One morning, he suddenly steps out of a lift at FBI headquarters.  He proceeds to babble gibberish at FBI agents and Twin Peaks regulars Dale Cooper, Albert Rosenthal and Gordon Cole (Kyle MacLachlan, Miguel Ferrer and Lynch himself): “Who do you think this is, there…?  I found something.  And then there they were!”  Then he narrates a trippy dream montage involving dwarves, killers, masks, disembodied mouths and long-nosed spectres.  And then he vanishes into thin air.  “He’s gone!” squawks McLachlan.  “He was never here!” retorts Ferrer.

 

Bowie died early in 2016, before Twin Peaks: The Return began filming, which seemed to rule Philip Jeffries out of the third series’ storyline.  However, Lynch did include Jeffries.  Only now the disappearing agent is a giant teapot voiced by an actor called Nathan Frizell doing a Bowie impersonation.

 

David Bowie turned into a teapot.  Only David Lynch could do that.

 

© Lynch-Frost Productions / Showtime Networks

 

Favourite Lynch sad bit

Because of the nightmarish aspects of his works – it’s not the majority of their content, but it’s the stuff that lingers in viewers’ minds – Lynch isn’t readily associated with pathos.  Yet there are moments in his films that I find incredibly sad.  In The Elephant Man, for instance, it’s when the titular character John Merrick (John Hurt) escapes from the freak show owned by the evil Bytes (Freddie Jones), with the help of the show’s other inmates.  A dwarf, played by Star Wars’ Kenny Baker, remarks ruefully: “Luck, my friend, luck.  Who needs it more than we?”  Or in Twin Peaks: The Return when Deputy Hawk (Michael Horse) says a final goodbye to the ailing Margaret Lanterman, aka the Log Lady.  This is made more poignant by knowing that Log-Lady actress Catherine Coulson died early in the third season’s production.

 

But my number-one Lynch sad moment is probably the ending of The Straight Story (1999), when Alvin (Richard Farnworth) finally makes it to the shack of his unwell brother, Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton).  They’re two old codgers, one using walking sticks and the other a Zimmer frame, and clearly aren’t used to expressing their feelings.  But Lynch, with some basic dialogue (“Did you ride that thing all the way out here to see me?” “I did, Lyle.”), some silence and some anxious, exhausted looks and expressions from his actors, conveys a huge amount of emotion.

 

© Asymmetrical Productions / Film4 / Buena Vista Productions

 

Favourite Lynch scary bit

Obviously, there are lots of scary bits in Lynch’s oeuvre.  I imagine he’d have been miffed if you described his works as ‘horror’ films, but he more than earned his entry in any ‘Encyclopaedia of Horror’.

 

Particularly freaky to me were several things in Twin Peaks and its 2017 sequel.  The image of Killer Bob (Frank Silva) crawling over a sofa in the original series was terrifying.  Twin Peaks: The Return featured in its first episode a strange experiment involving a big glass box and a mass of surveillance equipment that eventually conjures up a phantom entity.  Unfortunately for the guy monitoring the experiment – who’s inopportunely chosen this moment to have it off with his girlfriend – the entity is equipped with kitchen-blender fingers and It proceeds to reduce their heads to bloody confetti.  Also horrific is a sequence in a later episode wherein Deputy Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) tries to calm a hysterical woman at the wheel of a stalled car and a convulsing, vomiting zombie-like creature slowly rises out of the seat beside her.  This is never explained or referred to again – a perfect, scary Lynchian moment in other words.

 

And I remember sinking into my cinema seat, not wanting to look at the screen too much, during Lost Highway (1996), when Lynch’s camera starts prowling deep – deep – into the black recesses of the house belonging to Fred (Bill Pullman), the film’s initial hero.  That sequence had a real primordial chill to it.

 

But for my money, the scariest Lynch moment is the ‘Winkie’s Diner’ sequence in Mulholland Drive (2001).  A man sitting in the diner (Patrick Fischler) recounts two dreams he’s had, both of which take place there.  In each dream he’s been possessed by an inexplicable fear – and a man with a hideous face living behind the diner, whom he can see ‘through the wall’, seems to be responsible.  When a companion suggests he exorcises the memory of the dreams by checking behind the real diner, he reluctantly complies.  So they venture along the side alleyway, and…  What follows is one of the very few jump-scares in cinematic history that actually made me jump.

 

© Lynch-Frost Productions / Spelling Entertainment

 

Favourite Lynch speech

Miguel Ferrer’s Albert Rosenthal, the arrogant FBI pathologist who assists Kyle MacLachlan’s Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, gets my vote here.  During the first season, Albert is very vocal about his low opinion of the town of Twin Peaks, which results in him getting punched out by Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean).  During the second season, when Truman’s ready to punch him out again following a cutting jibe – “You might practise walking without dragging your knuckles on the floor” – Albert responds to the threat of violence with an impassioned speech explaining that he’s happy to be a knob-end if it helps him in the greater scheme of things, i.e. in the struggle against evil.  Oh, and he’s a committed pacifist too.

 

“While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I’m a naysayer and hatchet-man in the fight against violence.  I pride myself in taking a punch and I’ll gladly take another because I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King.  My concerns are global.  I reject absolutely revenge, aggression and retaliation.  The foundation of such a method is love.  I love you, Sheriff Truman.”

 

No wonder Cooper tells the dumfounded Truman afterwards, “Albert’s path is a strange and difficult one.”

 

© De Laurentiis Entertainment Group

 

Favourite Lynch villain

There are a good many contenders for this too: Killer Bob in Twin Peaks, Willem Dafoe’s Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart, and Kenneth McMillan’s Baron Harkonnen in Dune, who’s basically a levitating, leering sack of pus.  But at the end of the day, my ‘Favourite Lynch Villain’ award has to go to Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth in Blue Velvet.

 

The scene where the black-clad, slick-haired Frank assaults Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) whilst acting out a deranged sexual fantasy, screaming things like “Baby wants to f**k! Baby wants to f**k blue velvet!” and slurping gas out of a canister is astonishing.  It’s made even more harrowing by the fact that the hapless Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is hiding nearby in a closet and has to witness it all.  This is the moment when the preppy, clean-cut Jeffrey discovers life is a lot more complicated, in a bad way, than he thought.  No wonder he laments: “Why are there people like Frank? Why is there so much trouble in this world?”

 

So, thank you David Lynch.  Your oeuvre was sometimes comfortingly genial, sometimes perplexingly weird, sometimes shockingly dark – but it was always fascinating.  I raise a damn fine cup of coffee in your honour.

 

© Lynch-Frost Productions / Showtime Networks

Posted on

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