Chopping Mall - A Film Diary

James Bond triple bill

2011-12-10T19:13:00.001Z

So, from the exciting introduction to the Bond universe that Dr No provided, I moved along (chronologically, of course) to a trio of films that pretty much embody what James Bond is. These films are the very peak of 'Bond-ness', they're so jam packed with all the exciting (and ridiculous) tropes that came to define the the Bond film as a series that it's no surprise that Austin Powers found the vast majority of its material here - some of the scenes are almost shot-for-shot identical!

From Russia With Love (1963 / Terrence Young / Sean Connery)

Goldfinger (1964 / Guy Hamilton / Sean Connery)

Thunderball (1965 / Terrence Young / Sean Connery)

Both From Russia With Love and Thunderball feature Spectre plots for our heroic agent to battle, whilst Goldfinger is much more of a one-man villain. From Russia takes us from the early form of Dr No and ramps it up by throwing a whole lot more excitement at it. Bond now has some serious gadgetry (albeit relatively basic) and his quick-assembly sniper rifle is particularly useful. We also meet some of the most fabulously English of scenes - the foreign spy on the train who gives himself away by drinking red wine with fish! What a mistake! Sean Connery, as ever, is fabulous throughout but I couldn't help feeling that, whilst From Russia threw an awful lot of exciting elements at the plot, the structure of the story itself was slightly lacklustre. Like Dr No, it had it's peaks and a few very memorable moments but as a film it was certainly lacking something.

Goldfinger, easily one of the very best of Bond, takes all the elements that From Russia contained and turned them up a bit. Rosa Klebb's killer shoe becomes Oddjob's killer hat, a comparatively timid attempt to steal a code-machine becomes an audacious plot to irradiate all of America's gold, etc. etc. Goldfinger turns the heat up - and possibly overdoes it. Here then, we find lasers! gadget cars! sprayed gas! an implausibly strong Korean! and all sorts of other madness.

I'd call it a film of hits and misses: when it gets it right, it gets it very right indeed... but occasionally it's not quite so strong. A prefect example of the latter would be the extended Bond vs. Goldfinger golf showdown. I'll repeat that: golf. I mean, whoever thought to set a dramatic encounter over a (long) game of golf? When we've been teased with bullet-proof cars and tear-gas briefcases, an elaborate ball-swapping plot that centres on Bond's recognition of the Slazenger 5 golf ball is... boring.

That said, some of the scenes are undeniable classics. The sight of Bond, strapped to a chunk of metal with a high-power metal-cutting laser edging ever closer towards painful emasculation is as unforgettable as James Bond films get. It would be sublime even without dialogue but the now classic exchange "Do you expect me to talk / No Mr Bond, I expect you to die" is so wonderfully blunt that it just makes the scene perfect.

The only thing, to my mind, that really stands in the way of Goldfinger being the absolutely perfect Bond film is the utterly ridiculous names used throughout. So Goldfinger likes gold? And his first name is Auric? Like the element? And his odd job man is er... called OddJob? And the major plan to contaminate Fort Knox is called Operation GrandSlam? And the sex-interest woman is called Pussy Galore? All this and more: Goldfinger is about as subtle as a sledgehammer. Whilst I'd never demand a thoughtful or challenging Bond film, Goldfinger does occasionally feel like it's treating us like idiots. I had absolutely understood that the sexy woman would have sex with Bond without her being named Pussy Galore (suitably mocked by Austin Powers' Alotta Fagina). It's, sadly, the kind of choice that makes this film feel so dated - even more than its two predecessors.

The last time I saw Thunderball - where we're back with Spectre and have a plot of nuclear-ransom - was before the Austin Powers films; it's hard to watch it in the same way now. We get scenes in the Spectre lair with 'number one' frying his cheating agents (whose steaming, but now empty, chairs return to the table), an eye-patched villain and a fantastic opening scene with a Spectre agent dressed as a grieving widow. Bond doesn't actually shout "That's a man, maaaaan!" but I could here it in my head...

As a film Thunderball is the most coherent and elaborately plotted yet but (for all that I teased Goldfinger) it lacks some of the more outrageous fun. There's no decent villain - eyepatch man does little besides giving grumpy orders - but there are some decent scenes (chase scene through the carnival!) and it does hang together as a pretty decent film. Sadly, there are far too many dull action sequences for it to be a true classic... Underwater scenes galore here and none of them are much fun. Some stirring music isn't enough to save a long, slow, flippers-and-wetsuits harpoon-battle snooze of a scene in what ought to be the most exciting part of the film.

Despite some flaws in each, these three Bond films are a pretty exciting triple-bill of action fun and, taking over where Dr No left off, make a convincing case for crowning Sean Connery as best Bond ever. From here, there's only one more Connery-Bond left before we come to George Lazenby's disasterous effort...

Repulsion and Happy People

2011-11-14T17:55:00.001Z

~~Three~~ Two more from the Film Festival! Something old, ~~something new~~, and something informative...
[Bellflower was going to be included in this group... It'll be coming soon instead...]

Repulsion

Repulsion is early Polanski and definitely 'classic' enough that it'd usually fall way outside the focus of this blog: I tend to lean away from writing about the classics, if only because plenty of people have already written plenty of words about these films - what's left for me to add? So I'll be brief...

[There are a couple of nice reviews to be found at Korova Theatre and Radiator Heaven]

Repulsion is a thriller in the old, almost forgotten sense of the world. It thrills. Every single person watching jumped at least once in the film, as poor Carol's hallucinatory nightmare threw shocks and scares at her in fits and starts. Polanski throws in a wonderful mix of the increasingly repulsive - an uncooked rabbit left out to gather flies and rot - the imaginatively uneasy - a crack in the wall that threatens repeatedly to burst apart - and the threat of real violence - sexually aggressive men pounce at Carol from every corner, some real, some imaginary. It's edge of the seat stuff that is propelled by a pulsing score and a camera that hovers voyeuristically around doorways and windowframes, beckoning the viewer into Carol's paranoid fears.

So little of her condition or the realities or origins of her fears is explained that you leave the cinema desperately untangling plot elements in your head, guessing and re-guessing which of the more plausible elements were imagined and which of the more outlandish were real. Great stuff.

Happy People - A Year in the Taiga

This documentary of Siberian life came with a "Narrated by Werner Herzog" tagline - surely as good a guarantee of an interesting film as there can be. Thankfully, it doesn't disappoint. We are taken, in a fairly straight-forward manner, through a calendar year in the lives of the trappers/hunters of a a Siberian village in the Taiga. Herzog contributes, as you might imagine if you've seen his (fabulous) Encounters at the End of the World, some perfectly dead-pan humour and a fair bit of admiration for the trappers. Occasionally, his wistful reminders that, out in the wilderness, they are free of government, free of taxes, free of bureaucracy, etc. etc. is a little too heavy-handed, but for the most part, his narration fits the documentary well.

Far more impressive than anything Herzog can provide are the demonstrations of traditional skills (especially the making of skis and the hollowing of a dug-out canoe), the rugged philosophy of the trappers and, above all, the sheer beauty of the landscape. The rive they live by and hunt around is an enormous sheet of ice for most of the year and comes slowly to life around May, looking something like a glacier rolling down a valley but much, much faster, carrying enormous chunks of ice as it flows. For the next couple of months it's navigable by boat, but after that it turns back to ice and becomes the domain of the snow-mobile. Happy People is a fabulous watch and, although occasionally too sentimental, it's a fascinating window into lifestyles we rarely see.

LIFF25: El Sicario, Budrus and I Am Jesus

2011-11-09T20:30:00.000Z

Ok then! Here come a few more review from the Leeds International Film Festival. I'm currently seeing more films than I can write about, so a review of Fanomonen's Night of the Dead will have to wait a day or so. For now, here are three documentaries from Monday and Tuesday...

El Sicario

This is certainly not a cheerful one! El Sicario can be summed up pretty quickly as one man in one room talking about the horrible things he has done. In a bit more depth, it is an ex-hitman in a hotel room in Ciudad Juarez, explaining over the course of 80 minutes what his life has contained. With his face masked throughout the film and no props other than a pad of drawing paper and a squeaky black marker, the hitman proceeds to explain the procedures of induction to the Mexican drug cartels and the jobs he had to carry out.

It is, as you can probably imagine, pretty gruelling stuff. He talks us through the day-by-day plan of a typical kidnapping, explains how the narcos (cartels) ensure there is at least one policeman in their pay amongst every group of new police recruits and recounts stories of strangling kidnapped people on the orders of the boss (if you strangle them before cutting them up, they bleed less, he explains).

Whilst this would all have worked equally powerfully (and in less time) if it were a written interview, his stories are compelling (and gruesome) enough to ensure that the time flies by. It's a grim but fascinating account of a lawless, dangerous life in a dangerous part of the world (Ciudad Juarez is now, apparently, the most violent city on the planet!)

Budrus

Although you might not expect it from merely glancing at the subject matter, Budrus is a much more uplifting film than El Sicario. We've moved from Mexico to Palestine and are witnessing the residents of Budrus' attempts to prevent the Israeli fence from going through their lands, particularly their cemetery. In the face of the Israeli army's tear-gas and barricades, this is a film about people coming together to protect what they love (and, thankfully, succeeding).

An especially powerful moment comes when a large group of Israeli peace-activists join the Palestinians in their village in opposition to the army. The interviewed army leader's claim that the destruction of this Palestinian village's cemetery was necessary for "Israelis to sleep soundly at night" rang somewhat hollow as a line of Israelis stood face-to-face with their own army. Perhaps even more shocking was the grumbled complaint from the army captain that they could no longer "use force" to crush the (nonviolent) opposition because "there were Israeli Jews in the group" - the implication that it was absolutely fine to violently crush peaceful Palestinian opposition remaining unspoken but unmissable...

I Am Jesus

From the serious to the ridiculous: I am Jesus is a wonderfully straight-faced documentary about three different people who fervently, honestly, astonishingly believe themselves to be the second coming of a certain Jesus Christ...

From mental ex-secret-service hippy David Shayler ("I first realised I was Jesus whilst tripping on mushrooms...") via the bearded, robed Brazilian Inri Christo, to the messianic monk of the Siberian wilderness Vissarion, I have no hesitation at all in labelling these people as deluded, ego-centred freaks. For all that, little of what any of them do could possibly hurt anyone, so they're probably just best left to it really.

Great fun to watch and worth the ticket for the followers of Inri Christo's "mystical version" of Eye of the Tiger alone...

Oh my...

LIFF25 - Convento, Battenberg and Architects of Harmonic Rooms

2011-11-05T00:26:00.001Z

Aaaaand the Leeds International Film Festival has kicked off. The opening gala of Wuthering Heights was not really the thing for me so, skipping over the first day, my festival started on day 2. There were lots of exciting sounding bits and pieces on today, including Human Centipede 2, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, 22nd May and The Beat is the Law - Pulp and the Sheffield music scene. I saw...

Battenberg

This was an incredibly fun animated short, a crazy magpie battling a squirrel armed with a fishknife in a scary guesthouse. With a train that brings battenberg cake. It's about as cool as that sounds.

Convento

This was a "poetic documentary" about a curious Dutch family who, part-way through a ballet career, moved out and bought a shabby old convent in Portugal. The (now ex-)
ballerina and her two sons live a quiet, happy life in this convent. One of them attaches motors to various animal skulls to make mechanised creepy sculptures whilst the other is er... best friends with his horse.
It's a beautifully shot and gently paced documentary but its long, lingering shots are, I thought, a weak point in the end. The three people have so many interesting things to say when they do get to speak that I left thinking it was a shame we heard so little from them. For all that, it is utterly gorgeous and definitely worth a watch.

Architects of Harmonic Rooms & Records

This was a selection of six short films put together by the same people, exploring a handful of different underground artists and their thoughts on their work. So we get the (unbelievably naïve) Josephine Foster singing re-arranged Spanish folk, avant-garde screaming noisesmiths debating the merits of playing naked and punching pianos, and and Costa and Nero, a pair who re-work Greek folk tunes on guitar and bouzouki.

The pick of the bunch though was the much longer, completely mad experimental noise trip through salvaged-from-VHS 70s and 80s Asian horror. We had bass drones accompanying vampire bats, Frankenstein-esque experiments scored with throbbing guitar and a jangling crescendo of other living-dead far Eastern monsters. I just wish they'd given out a list of the films they'd culled their clips from! Great fun!

LIFF25!

2011-10-10T20:23:00.000+01:00

Last weekend, the 25th annual Leeds International Film Festival launched its programme, ahead of the festival in November. There's heaps and heaps of exciting things to look forward to in what is, surely, one of the UK's premiere film festivals, so I thought I'd do a (very) brief preview here.

The Official Selection is the home of the big names, high-art and gruelling drama but really does host all sorts of things. It's nice to see the festival score the coup of a whole bunch of UK premier showings of European and World cinema as well as a handful of very exciting retrospectives. Psycho on the big screen is surely one not to be missed and, though I've seen them before, Waltz With Bashir and Persepolis are both great and worth a cinema trip. For the more hardy, Bela Tarr's epic Sátántangó - which is seven and a half hours long! - is screening in the Hyde Park Picture House. Thankfully it comes with two interval breaks!

In the gleefully brutal and bloody Fanomenon strand, meanwhile, there are also a few exciting treats to look forward to. Heading up the classic genre film retrospectives are Alien, Aliens and Invasion of the Body Snatchers but even these treats don't seem so tasty when compared to the bounties on offer in the new films selection. Monster Brawl, which pitches all the horror favourites against each other, looks too-good-to-miss whilst Exit Humanity's American Civil War zombie apocalypse would surely be the most gloriously insane zombie adventure imaginable, were it not for it being partnered up with Yoshihiro Nishimura's Hell Driver and Cuba's very first zombie film, Juan of the Dead. Oh my! That's three slices of very different but very exciting ZOMBIE ACTION! Hurrah!

Thirdly, and no less excitingly, comes the fabulous news that all Cherry Kino film screenings are FREE (!) this year! Cherry Kino is the semi-independent experimental film strand of the festival and hosts screenings and workshops of 'wondermental' films all year round. CK has it's own web presence in a blog (HERE!) and should bring some reliably curious, strangely beautiful experimentation to the screen. And it's FREEEEEE!

This is, obviously, a brief and over-excited preview. I didn't even find space to squeeze in a mention of the exquisitely bonkers-looking Japanese sub-section of the Fanomenon strand (hint: it'll be weird!), the Cinema Versa documentary strand or the short films strand. And the Official Selection definitely demands some more attention too. More to come soon!

Watching James Bond films. All of them. In order.

2011-10-08T19:07:00.000+01:00

So... this week I've taken on a new and exciting challenge: I'm going to watch all the James Bond films, ever single one, in the order they were made. Now, I'm not a complete masochist so I'm not going to set any kind of time limit on this: I'm not watching all 22 (twenty two!) back-to-back! I'll take it nice and slow; I'll put on the tux, shake my vodka martini and then relax and watch Bond, SPECTRE and all manner of exciting things.

Dr. No (1962 / Terence Young / Sean Connery)

And what better place to start than at the beginning? Dr. No, the film that started it all, is still a decent litle thriller by today's standards. It's packed to the brim with awesome and very memorable moments - Ursula Andress emerging from the sea! - and it cracks along at a decent pace, with attempted spider-aided assassination, fist-fights and car-chases. It doesn't have some of the classic elements we came to associate with later Bond films - gadgetry is decidedly thin here - but it does a lot of what you'd expect from a Bond film and does it well.

Sean Connery lays down a serious argument for his place as Best Bond Ever with his brilliantly suave performance, whether flirting in the casino or punching SPECTRE agents in the head - leaving the bloodied, dead agent in the car for the valet to deal with! There's no evil henchman on show (although sometimes that's a good thing) but Dr. No himself with his EVIL METAL HANDS is charismatically evil, a perfect villain.

The unavoidable criticism of the film, sadly, is that the ending just isn't very good. After such a decent story and some brilliant scenes, Bond and Dr. No's fight in what appears to be a climbing frame over the er... yellow-lit toxic bubbling water of death is really pretty lacklustre. Having built him up as a booming-voiced overseer, a metal-clawed monster, a smooth-talking SPECTRE agent, Dr. No's ignoble exit into the - oh so terrifying! - bubbling water is a complete let down really. Still, at least they make up for it a bit by blowing up the base... We all like a good explosion!

It's a good film, great fun to watch and, in many respects, just what you want from a James Bond film. But it's not perfect. Right, on with the list.... From Russia With Love next.

Massacre in Dinosaur Valley

2011-09-29T18:51:00.005+01:00

Cannibals!

Cannibals, cannibals, cannibals! A-biting and a-chomping! Snackin' on Human flesh!

For all that we might weave outrageous fantasies of Vampires and Were-wolves, of Aliens and Ghouls, of the half-dead and the undead and all manner of imaginary beasties, there's nothing quite as shocking as the atrocities and horrors enacted upon people by... Other People! From the Nazis to Human Centipedes, many of the most threatening films feature the cruelties of humans.

Somewhere within this tradition is the, now somewhat passé, strand of Cannibal films that excited 70s and 80s audiences. Some of these films, mostly Italian, clawed their way to notoriety, even infamy - I'm thinking Cannibal Holocaust... - whilst others drifted along in (mostly deserved) obscurity. Their sad drawback, as the 21st century viewer can't fail to notice, is that the exciting, blood-curdling thrilling tales of Amazonian savages exacting bloody acts of cruelty upon (mostly buxom and nubile) Europeans tend to extensively racist... The 'White man's burden' in this case is usually some civilizing mission to the Amazon rainforest, where civilizing usually involves (with a degree of historical accuracy) slaughtering the 'savages' they encountered.

That said, Massacre in Dinosaur Valley is obviously aware of this racist subcurrent and is careful to balance the acts of Native savagery with a good deal of Caucasian savagery too. It is, of course, sexist from start to finish but... well... it was made in Italy in the 70s...

After a spot of messing around in a Brazilian bar, a plane carrying a professor and his (beautiful) daughter, a young paleontologist, a US army vet and his alcoholic wife and a photographer and his two (beautiful) models crashes in... Dinosaur Valley! We lose a couple of the characters in the plane crash but the rest of the party set out into the jungle in a bid to escape to civilization. The story is, despite being utterly predictable, crass and unimaginative, astonishingly good fun from start to finish. As expected, we lose several of the characters along the way as they fall victim to jungle dangers such as piranhas and quicksand, until our remaining three - the brave young paleontologist, the professor's daughter and one of the models - find themselves caught up in the natives' tribal rituals, which involve dinosaur masks, claws and... gratuitous nudity! Hurrah!

Mostly unscathed, our heroes escape downriver and fall into the clutches of some rather unpleasant gem miners, who lock up the man and cart the women off to their bedrooms. Thankfully, predictably, all turns out more or less OK, as the baddies get their come-uppance and the good guy gets the girl as all her feminist leanings melt into nothing in the face of his rugged, heroic masculinity... (Hmmm)

As you should have worked out by now, Massacre In Dinosaur Valley is nothing if not trash but it is supremely enjoyable trash. It's poorly acted, poorly scripted and never really surprises but it does everything with such unabashed enthusiasm that, for a b-movie fan, it's very hard to sneer at it. Great fun!

Dirty Pictures / Oasis of Fear / An Ideal Place to Kill

2011-08-11T11:18:00.004+01:00

Some people's names just roll off your tongue. Umberto Lenzi. Ummm-berrrr-to. Ummmmm-berrrrr-to Lennnn-zi. How could you not do well with a name like that? Well, whether his success was dependent on his exquisite name or not (I guess it probably wasn't), this Chopping Mall post kicks off the first of an Umberto Lenzi two-parter. Hurrah for 60s and 70s Italian cinema!

I've already looked at one Lenzi film here, Nightmare City, which, whilst it might not be the pinnacle of zombie films, certainly has some decent and very memorable scenes. So from Nightmare City, let me drag you back in time a while... we are in early 1970s Italy and an English & Danish couple are funding their hippy bohemian lifestyle by selling smutty photos in public squares and streets.

Oasis of Fear (my favourite of the many titles) is an inconsequential but fun little film. Ingrid and Dick's porn-peddling business goes, rather predictably awry and they find themselves, after a run in with the polizia, on the run towards the border in their unfortunately distinctive car (Seriously: if you're doing something illegal, would you operate from a yellow sportscar with stencilled flowers? No, neither would I). After a series of still-more unfortunate encounters, the pair find themselves without petrol, money or food, sneaking into the house of a rather glamorous and apparently lonely woman for some sustenance.

Predictably, seeing as the couple are clinging very tightly to the sixties, their evening turns into a rather pleasant mix of food, drink and sleazy encounters. Also predictably, things don't look quite so rosy in the morning.

The main of the film takes place in and around this house, as Dick and Ingrid find themselves slowly uncovering the truth of Barbara Slater's life and, through a series of escalating mistakes, drag themselves ever deeper into a mess that was not of their making. Whilst Oasis of Fear is not particularly violent, fast-paced or exciting, there is a decent and continual build of suspense throughout: you may well find yourself shouting "No, don't do that" at the screen as the lead couple make yet more mistakes, but they thankfully rarely cross the line that separates "tragic mistake" from "irritating stupidity".

I don't really want to read much further into this film, as to do so would rob it of its tension, so I'll come to a close more or less here. It's worth mentioning that Irene Papas is a fabulous actress - playing the lonely Barbara Slater - and the film's success in many ways hinges upon her. I don't think it's giving too much away either to add that half the enjoyment of this film rests in their being no conventionally 'good' characters. Much like the Spaghetti Western, this film seems to echo American cinema but removes the tired good-bad opposition from it, instead creating a world full of unpleasant, self-motivated villains, yet all the while never quite alienating the audience.

(And yes, I wrote all that without mentioning the word Giallo. Whilst it might technically fit into the giallo genre, it just doesn't feel giallo-enough for me to consider it as one)

Coming soon: Deep River Savages / The Man from Deep River / Il paese del sesso selvaggio

----------
My copy of this came from Shameless Entertainment's lovingly restored copy, blending some Italian (and thankfully subtitled) scenes with the otherwise English dub. Definitely worth checking out. The screencaps here are not from my copy though.

La Horde

2011-07-19T13:54:00.002+01:00

Zombies were what got me into b-movies, monster flicks and horror in general. Though I was never the bravest of film-goers back when I was young, from the moment I watched Night of the Living Dead and then Dawn of the Dead, I was smitten. (But not bitten!). So I went out and hunted other zombie films, read books about zombie films (Jamie Russell's Book of the Dead is fantastic) and generally immersed myself in the world of the zombie.

Over the next few years, I watched some gems, some forgettable films and some utter atrocities (Lake of the Zombies, I'm looking at you!). Sadly, however, it doesn't take very long until you find yourself pretty saturated with zombie films. The downside of a reliably consistent mythology such as zombies is that they very quickly all become the same. Even the Great Debate of zombie cinema is only concerned with the speed they move... Plots, films, set-pieces and characters all very quickly blur into one, leaving only a few stand-out films or scenes that hang around in your memory (like Zombi 2's underwater zombie fight!)

It's certainly well-documented that zombies have, over the last few years, been very much back in fashion, but this doesn't necessarily bode well for decent movies. Whilst the Resident Evil games are fun, the film cross-over (at least, the first one) was pretty dire and Zombieland was a sentimental, overhyped, deeply-flawed trampling of the zombie legacy. There've been some decent funny approaches to the zombie - Shaun of the Dead and Dead Snow both show much love for the genre they parody but, whilst parody is fun at times, there has been little meat for the lover of zombie cinema to get their teeth into. The first half of 28 Days Later is probably the height of 21st century zombie cinema, if we're honest. All of which should go someway to explaining quite how refreshing it was to watch La Horde, France's contribution to 21st Century Zombie Cinema!

La Horde has had some pretty mixed reviews across the internet, but I must say that I thought it was great, a fabulously fun ride from start to finish that reminded me how long it was since I'd seen a zombie movie even half as good. I would quite confidently suggest that a large number of those who've been negative about this film didn't like zombie cinema in the first place. And this is important. Whilst La Horde is great fun, it's certainly no crossover hit in the sense of 28 Days. This is a film made for zombie lovers by zombie lovers.

What we get here is a film that's fast, funny, fresh and gory enough to maintain interest yet that treads very carefully within the boundaries of the zombie mythology that we know and love. The set-up is essentially a familiar one, a group of people who do not get along at all are tasked with relying upon each other to survive a relentless mass of the living dead. This has been the broad set-up for many a zombie film and, provided the interaction between the characters is fresh and interesting, it's a set-up that still has much to give. The choice to align a criminal gang and a police force in La Horde is an inspired one, and one that becomes still more inspired as it the film slowly messes with our opinions on exactly who the 'goodies' and 'baddies' are within the group. Refreshingly, the woman of the group is utterly bad-ass too. Women in zombie films have so often had to accept the role of screaming idiot, so Claude Perron's snarling, zombie-smashing character is decidedly welcome.

The Zombies, as so often in a decent zombie film, do not steal the limelight at all (there are thankfully no humorous or particularly distinctive examples) and exist to snarl, snap and splatter, bashing endlessly against locked doors and hunting down the living. They're fast - but that's fine - and they're dead. The reason for their zombification is never really explained and hardly even alluded to (cue much disgruntled muttering on the IMDB messageboards) but this is simply not a problem: anyone who thinks a zombie film is about an explanation for what might provoke a zombie attack is misunderstanding the genre. Zombies are the eternal 'other'. They embody threat, fear, isolation and death, they are nightmares; finding plausible reasons for their existence is somewhat besides the point.

Mostly, what appeals about La Horde is that it is a great fun film. A frantic dash through walking corpses full of suspense and... some good splatter.

And splatter is what a decent zombie film is all about...

Yakuza Deka: The Assassin

2011-07-05T19:28:00.004+01:00

Given that I know a fair bit about horror and thrillers (especially the lowbudget 70s European attempts!), they're not that difficult to write about or evaluate in some form. I do, after all, have plenty else to compare them with. This becomes a sort of self-sustaining reason for me not really writing about much else on this blog. You see the word 'Western' in the banner above? Not once have I written about a Western (although I have watched loads...). The same with Noir. And, for that matter, Slashers flicks too.

Nowhere in the banner above does it say 'Japanese Action'. I don't know much about Japanese action. I'd even go so far as to say I know almost nothing about Japanese action films. The 'almost' in that sentence is important, however, as I am currently sure of one important fact concerning these Far Eastern flicks: Sonny Chiba kicks ass.

---This review does, technically, contain spoilers.---
---But they won't spoil your enjoyment of the film---

I bought volume 1 of Optimum Asia's digitally remastered Sonny Chiba collection some time ago and, although I have previously watched all three of the films, a re-watch of Yakuza Deka: The Assassin last night reminded me just how good they are. Chiba is a relentlessly charismatic star, his round-ish face and wry smile grinning out from under a wide-brimmed leather hat announces his arrival in the film and, with no disrespect to the other actors, the scenes without Chiba on screen positively drag compared to his screentime.

Yakuza Deka: The Assassin gives us a fairly routine action plot: Chiba plays Hayata, a policeman is sent deep undercover by his force, infiltrating and working for a Mafia gang, a gang whom he later betrays - in a wonderful blaze of gunfire - in order to earn the respect of a rival marijuana smuggling gang. He does, of course, eventually gun the rival gang down too. Whilst none of this is exactly ground-breaking stuff, it does allow us to go on a fast-paced dash through streets, brothels, drug-dens, amorous horserides (!) and Mafia HQs.

And that's where my action flick vocabulary runs out. I think it's a mark of a decently paced action film that they do, in fact, resist description. There's hardly a moment to pause to think amongst the double-crossing, the sniper rifles, the chases and the fighting and this is very much to the film's advantage (the only slow scenes - especially a drug-induced hallucination - are pretty tiresome). All I shall add is that the movie does manage a satisfactory explosive ending, rather than limping to a quiet finish, and will almost certainly leave any fan of action films grinning from start to finish.

The Horror of Frankenstein

2011-07-04T11:08:00.000+01:00

Ahh, just as I was about to go to bed, having finished and (briefly) written up Humanoids From the Deep, I spotted that ITV4 were running Hammer's The Horror of Frankenstein. In HD.

Well, how on earth could I refuse? Horror of Frankenstein is a fabulously tongue-in-cheek offering from Hammer in their latter days. As something like the sixth in their Frankenstein films, it's much heavier on the camp action, the smiling buxom women and the smutty jokes than it is on the suspense (Sample line: "I really need to go home and complete my anatomy homework. Will you help me, Maggie?" "Oooh yes, shall I take my clothes off now or later?") but sometimes a bit of cinematic trash is more than welcome. Hell, did I say sometimes? Cinematic trash is always welcome!

Young Victor Frankenstein is played by Hammer regular Ralph Bates (Taste the Blood of Dracula, Lust for a Vampire etc.), preparing to spend a summer away from school doing all the things that normal college kids do: scientific experiments, pursuing the secret of life, re-animating dead flesh, kid-stuff like that. Bates' leering aristocratic arrogance is so wonderfully repulsive that he becomes utterly captivating. He's certainly no Peter Cushing nor Christopher Lee but, to my mind, Bates carved out his own minor Hammer legacy: a sneering, slimy legacy, but a legacy nonetheless.

As a whole, there's no denying that this is on the lower end of Hammer's output. Several of the mid-film scenes really do drag and, other than Ralph Bates, little of the actors have much to recommend them (although I don't think any of the women were cast for their acting abilities...). Despite this, the fun moments are as fun as they mean to be and even the dull moments are lightheartedly dull (everyone knows that earnestly dull is far, far worse!).

The monster, when he finally appears, is satisfyingly monstrous, although anyone familiar with the book (or any half-faithful film) will be disappointed at the monster's instinctive brutality: we all know the monster is supposed to be a sadly misunderstood mistake of nature. Instead, this film plays out as a kind of cross between Karloff's Frankenstein - as imagined by someone who's never seen the film - and Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein - albeit without much in the way of jokes.

This might all seem a fairly negative dismissal of what is, essentially a very enjoyable film; I don't mean it to be. The Horror of Frankenstein is a fairly flawed but entirely watchable blend of diluted horror folklore and camp period drama. It's hardly memorable but it is great fun.

---------------------------
Note: The HD transfer is, though better than the standard definition print, none-too-astonishing. I'm no expert - not by a long stretch - but I've certainly seen much crisper HD versions of old films. Whilst I obviously can't complain too hard (it was, after all, on TV for free) this is someway short of HD worth paying for.

Humanoids From the Deep

2011-07-03T23:55:00.005+01:00

Sometimes it's nice to follow one movie with a similarly themed one. But, I asked, where on earth do you go after The Island of the Fishmen? How could I possibly follow up this Roger Corman distributed, low-budget thriller about an island plagued by half-men, half-fish creatures?

Well... how about a Roger Corman produced, low-budget thriller about a small town plagued by half-men, half-fish creatures? It's time for Humanoids From the Deep! (1996 version)

Right from the start it's pretty apparent that this is a (slightly) more upmarket affair: the opening credits feature soldiers, flamethrowers and guns! Humanoids From the Deep, for all it's shlocky monster fun is a pretty neat little film, all told, and whilst it's missing some of the too-crappy-to-be-believed charm of the Island of the Fishmen it's definitely an entertaining film. A shady fishing company is dumping chemicals in the water, chemicals that might well be having a terrifying effect upon the local sealife. It's paint-by-numbers monster horror in many respects but it's none the worse for it.

I don't really want to say too much about the plot, suffice to say that within the fishing company we have the necessary conscience-stricken good-guy and the profit-at-all-costs badguy, content to poison the water with unknown growth hormones. Of course, the situation comes to a bit of a head when Good-guy's daughter goes missing (along with several local environmental protesters) and he starts to investigate. Before long, Government agencies have arrived, scary fishmen are grabbing people all over the place and all hell has broken loose. The film suffers from the occasional dull moment in it's opening half but, from about 45 minutes in, it's a rollercoaster of murder, mayhem and fish!

This is not the original Humanoids of the Deep (1980, IMDB page here) but rather the 1996 remake. This new version is, by all accounts, less sleazy and less splattery. While that might be a shame, as I haven't seen the original I am in no position to judge this one in relation to it. I know for sure that this is an awful lot of fun and, thankfully, doesn't take itself too seriously at all. If the original's even better... well, I'd better watch that one too!

Island of the Fishmen aka L'isola degli uomini pesce

2011-06-30T22:26:00.005+01:00

Well, it's been a while since I wrote (or watched, for that matter) anything as gloriously silly as Island of the Fishmen. Whilst I have seen it before, it was only once and somewhat over a year ago, so I thought this re-imagining of Dr Moreau's isalnd was ripe for another watch. And what a (ahem) treat it is!

It opens as you might expect a tense serious monster film to: the sea is still, several injured men look silently at the camera and a gull screeches overhead. Something has gone very wrong here, but we just don't know what! Maybe this will be, despite the name, a slow-building tense affair, all hinted-at flashes and unsettling curiosities..... OH WAIT, NO! MONSTERS HAVE ARRIVED!

The boat rocks, the men shout and scream, despite clearly being in a studio rather than the ocean they are plunged into the sea! We see flashes of fishy monster hands and eyes... and all this in the first five minutes.

The greatest thing about this film is that, unlike many of its ilk, it never really slows down. All too often, I've watched dull films with snappy titles, fun beginnings and then a tedious 45 minute crawl towards a decent finale, the kind of film that makes 90 minutes seem like a very long time indeed. Thankfully, Island... is not one of these. The pace does dip and wobble but the sense of threat and excitement never really leaves. Even within the first half hour or so most of the first characters meet grisly fates (more fishmen!) , presumably-poisonous snakes have threatened the others and native islanders have attacked and captured our heroes. Through all this carnage walks the impressive mustachioed badguy, Rackham (Richard Johnson), sneering and snarling his lines at his captive would-be wife and our shipwrecked hero.

From here on in it just gets sillier. We learn about the rediscovery of Atlantis, the origin of the savage clawed fishmen and the dastardly Rackham's true plans. It's chaotically silly stuff that makes little sense to anyone but it romps on through with gleeful abandon. And it is great fun.

I don't want to give too much of the fabulous plot away but I couldn't help but mention the volcano shots... Every now and then the camera cuts to some very impressively shot footage of erupting volcanoes - obviously lifted from a nature documentary - which, when contrasted with the unspeakably silly Fishmen costumes, makes them look even more ridiculous than they otherwise would have done.

N.B. This was re-cut and re-released in the US as Screamers. I'm not really sure in what ways that version was different, as I watched the Italian print, but I do know that Roger Corman re-shot the intro to add more gore... The poster for Screamers bears almost no relation to what happens in the Island of the Fishmen!

Banning the Human Centipede II

2011-06-07T19:36:00.005+01:00

A day or two ago, the UK's national organisation of stopping-you-watching-things, the BBFC, announced that they had rejected The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) as a work too depraved to be released in the UK, a film that couldn't be salvaged by any measure of cuts, a story that would corrupt and damage our all-too-fragile sensibilities.

In one word, this is ridiculous.

To explain why, I'm using this post to write out three of the reasons I believe this. Namely, that 1) this move reveals awkward things about what we do and don't accept, 2) that the evidence upon which we base the 'dangers' of watching bad things is pretty slim and 3) that censorship simply doesn't work.

What we ban.

The BBFC have always had a major downer on sexualised violence. This might not be such a surprise in itself but it becomes more unusual when you consider that they are considered one of the more lenient bodies in almost all other forms of violence or abuse. Although this has always been the case (see David Pirie's New Heritage of Horror) it is becoming more and more obvious as other very violent films or very explicitly sexual films are released uncut, whilst any combination of the two tends to fall foul of the censors' scissors.

David Cox's Guardian article is spot-on in picking out this detail and makes the following point (quoting the BBFC's explanation):

The board explain that the original film was OK (if "undoubtedly tasteless and disgusting") because its centipede was the product of a "revolting medical experiment", whereas its successor is unacceptable because its own centipede is "the object of the protagonist's depraved sexual fantasy"

So there we have it. Apparently, the minute someone is enjoying their disgusting creation, rather than simply experimenting, it becomes something which no-one should watch. The inconsistency here is phenomenal: this is, as Cox says "an ideological step", exposing a curious belief that repulsive violence, sadistic actions and grisly surgical detail are in someway only bad if someone in the film derives some kind of sexual pleasure from them.

And if this is the case, as the BBFC seems to think it is, then there had better be some good evidence to support it, right? Oh...

Why we ban.

There really still isn't very much clear evidence that watching something nasty in any way makes you nasty.

I should point out, I'm talking about censorship rather than restriction. I have no problem at all with limiting children's access to films but I think we're on much more troublesome ground when it comes to adults.

The BBFC state:

It is the Board’s conclusion that the explicit presentation of the central character’s obsessive sexually violent fantasies is in breach of its Classification Guidelines and poses a real, as opposed to a fanciful, risk that harm is likely to be caused to potential viewers.

Oh. So this film "poses a real risk that harm is likely to be caused to potential viewers", does it? Even when we get around the incredibly vague probability of this sentence (risk...likely...potential..) it is quite a bold statement. What kind of harm do they mean? And how is it measured? Even more interestingly, why is it that sexualised violence poses more risk than non-sexualised but equally brutal and graphic violence?

In fact, do they have any evidence to suggest this at all?

It would seem not. Ah well, it hardly matters really because, as anyone with half a brain could tell you...

Censorship doesn't work.

It's a curious thing. In a world in which movie and film industries are having remarkable difficulty in forcing their 'customers' to actually pay for their 'product', how does the BBFC think a ban will effect the viewing figures of The Human Centipede?

It was not submitted for a cinema release, so we can already discount cinema screenings. What the BBFC's ruling does is to make DVD sales of the film illegal in the UK. Despite this, we can absolutely take it for granted that the moment this film actually hits DVD somewhere in the world, it'll show up on the internet in high quality, just waiting to be downloaded.

Not only will it be available, however, but it now has a whole heap of free publicity. At the time of writing this, the BBFC's decision is reported as news on the front pages of several national newspapers' websites (inc. Guardian, Daily Mail, Independent) and is now something that people have heard of. The classic censor's argument about protecting the children is also obviously poor: nothing makes a fifteen year old want to see a film so much as being told it's been banned! And, with the internet, they (and everyone else) will be able to access it easily.

***

So, in short, a disaster. For dubious reasons, the BBFC have inflicted an unenforceable ban which will almost certainly massively increase the number of people who see the film. Gee, that was smart, wasn't it?

Why You Should Watch The Tunnel

2011-05-30T22:36:00.005+01:00

A week and a bit ago, The Tunnel, an indie Australian horror film was released for free online. The creators have taken a daring approach to film distribution, attempting to cover the $135,000 production cost of their film by selling individual frames on their website, releasing a deluxe DVD and organising a couple screenings. A lot has been said already about this side of the project so... let's ignore it all together and focus on the actual film.

The Tunnel is a pretty damn decent 'found-footage' style movie. As such, comparisons to other similarly styled/gimmicky (delete-as-per-your-taste) are absolutely inevitable. Amongst such competition, by my reckoning, The Tunnel mounts a pretty strong defence and, whilst it's by no means the best around, it certainly holds its own. And kicks Paranormal Activity all over the park (although, in truth, that isn't exactly hard...)

The unique selling point in this case is the presentation of the story as a documentary, with talking-heads style interviews with several of the lead characters involved in the story. This, as should be immediately obvious, has a fairly massive downside... You. Know. Who. Survives. I'm not giving anything away here at all (I do seriously hope lots of people will watch this) but, given that we expect people to die in horror films (that's what happens!), the fact that the film makers show us two of the four lead characters talking to the camera from the start leaves the audience to draw some fairly easy conclusions!

Minor documentary-gripe aside, they do succeed in setting up a genuinely intriguing story. With contemporary fears over water-shortages, the New South Wales government have come up with a new plan to use the miles of abandoned train tunnels that run underneath the city for water storage. For various reasons, this leads to our starring group of intrepid (and possibly implausibly stupid...) band of journalists to go exploring in the dark. Sadly, they've told no-one they were going (they clearly haven't seen 127 Hours). And they're staggeringly under-prepared and under-equipped. Even Theseus took a thread with him when he went into the labyrinth!

Needless to say, all sorts of tragedy, violence and scary noises ensues.

Again, I don't want to go into too much detail about what actually occurs. The camera wiggles, night-vision comes and goes, screams and cries echo through the tunnels. It's stylishly and competently put together and puts their sub-Sydney environment to good use. The only criticism I can really level at the film, however, is that with such an interesting background story created for the film, much of the detail and interest gets forgotten about from around halfway through. They're not the only ones who do it - District 9 forgets entirely about its mockumentary format from about 30 minutes in - but it did leave me wanting a little bit more from the story. I'm not the kind of viewer who likes to be spoon-fed an easy solution, but having interested me in the story, to forget about it was a bit of a let down. Perhaps, like the creators of [REC], they intend to reveal a lot more of the story, the causes, etc. in a future instalment. Perhaps they don't.

Either way, The Tunnel is a well-made, decently paced and enjoyable film. It's interesting, genuinely creepy in places and leaves you wanting more (or though not in an entirely positive way). Oh, and did anyone mention that it's free?

Who cares what I think? Head over to VODO and grab your free copy
or go and buy the DVD.

Cannes ban von Trier...

2011-05-19T23:46:00.006+01:00

Oh dear, oh dear, Lars von Trier has certainly upset the Cannes-folk, hasn't he?

Does anyone really not see how ridiculous this is? Has anyone who does insist that it was a very serious issue actually seen/heard the video? He preceded the comments by pointing out that his next film was a four hour long hardcore porn film starring Kirsten Dunce. With no dialogue.

This man is bored. This man is bored of the dull routine of press conferences and he rambles off on a provocative wander. He clearly has no idea where this ramble is going and laughs at himself throughout. So you don't like the humour? Fine, I can't say I'm wild about it either, but the "von Trier is a Nazi" headlines that everyone has been churning out just seem like willful media aggression. Which is pretty pathetic.

But the media are the media, they're always been smug hypocrites. ~~Luckily,~~ the Cannes organizers are ~~above all that~~ ... just as bad. It'd be bad enough that they were dismissing him for what was clearly a joke, given with all the other stuff they've put up with, if it weren't for the smiling face of Emir Kusturica who's running this year's Un Certain Regard competition at Cannes. This is the same Kusturica who has very seriously made comments suggesting an extent of support for Milosevic.. Suddenly, Lars jests don't look so important...

Edit: The Daily Beast have a very interesting post with a response from von Trier.

“It was stupid and the wrong place to be sarcastic,” von Trier admitted. “Of course, I don’t sympathize with Hitler. And, as we all know, the Holocaust was the cruelest and most barbaric crime against humanity of the last century … My only excuse is that if I think a press conference is getting boring I start to perform. [...] The reason that I make these Jewish jokes is that, for half my life, I thought I was Jewish. If you’re Jewish, you’re allowed to make Jewish jokes. So it’s hard to break that habit when you find out that you’re not really Jewish. All of my children have Jewish names. I’m sorry that people took it the wrong way. But I know why; I was stupid enough to talk to the world like I talk to my best friends.”

What we have here, as so many times before when the world reacts with shock to particularly callous/offensive remarks is an absolute lack of context. The people at the press conference are familiar with von Trier's style (there is plenty of laughter or at least nervous tittering through the video) and the people who watch von Trier's films are familiar with his style. It's only when remarks given in a closed circle spread (inter)nationally that things start to kick off and the apoplectic rage blinds everyone...

Anyway, if nothing else, this gives me an excuse to stick a couple of awesome Nazi-themed posters from sleazey films in this post. So without further ado, here's

Deported Women of the SS [rate:4.9] 154 votes

and

Red Nights of the Gestapo [rate:4.7] 104 votes

. Quality, family-friendly entertainment, I'm sure...

Cannes 2011

2011-05-10T00:35:00.006+01:00

So Cannes 2011 starts tomorrow, everyone's favourite round-up of often pretentious, frequently over-serious and yet still usually fantastic film. There's almost no point getting too excited about any of the films on the actual bill because, months down the line when they actually get a release, the interest usually wears off before I get to actually see them. So I'm taking a fairly laid-back approach to it this year, mostly just reading the occasional review or summary. Or I might read everything I can find. We'll see...

Neither Empire nor Total Film have much up yet for Cannes besides the month-old line-up announcement. More from them to come soon, I'm sure... The Guardian's Cannes section has a predictably thorough-but-earnest Peter Bradshaw analysis of the main contenders up, whilst Mark Kermode is not going (he's not much of a fan).

But what about the films themselves? Well, to be honest, very few of them are really shouting to me. I'll keep half an eye out for the Lars Von Trier contribution (Melancholia) and Almodóvar's latest (The Skin I Live In) whilst Takashi Miike's Hara-Kiri: Death Of A Samurai certainly has potential (Peter Bradshaw, needless to say, is not interested!).

Half the fun, however, is usually to be found in keeping an eye on the mad as can be films in the marketplace, fighting desperately for distribution deals. There're almost always a good few horror and other indie gems to look out for there, so I'm sure that's where my attention will be focused.

The death of cinema?

2011-05-05T00:10:00.003+01:00

So I've been meaning to write this for a few days now. Shame it's taken me so long...

As reported in the Guardian and many other places on Sunday, several big-name directors have joined the cinema industry in attacking movie-industry plans to shorten the amount of time between the cinema debut of a film and its home availability, by making video-on-demand (that's streaming) films available as little (?) as two months after the film's release.

They roll out some interesting claims to fight these plans: VOD releases will increase piracy, they say, and will force cinemas to close. These are BAD THINGS and, if big, important names are saying them they MUST BE TRUE. Right?

Wrong.

One of the marks of almost any cultural industry (ugh, I hate pairing those words) is that those who've climbed their way to the top tend to have an (entirely to be expected) fondness for the status quo. Things are how they are and should be as they should be. Why would you change anything?

Sadly for them (but not for us), life doesn't work like that. We like progress. We like exciting new things. We like big shiny fun things that no-one else in the history of mankind has ever had. Hence we invent stuff, we find new ways to look at the world, we radically alter our relationship with life, culture, art and the environment. I am by no means suggesting that this is always positive - it's not, the obscene quantity of human-created human suffering is testament to that - but I am suggesting that it's inevitable: we're just not adapted to maintaining the status quo. Things will change.

So let's return to Earth for a moment and go back to look at their claim. It will increase piracy. It will. Will it? The evidence that it would is very shaky. Let's be blunt: it's very easy to find films on the internet. I (obviously) am not about to link to anywhere you can get it but the current box office smash Fast and the Furious 5 is all over the internet. I have no idea what kind of quality it is, but it's there and that's enough.

Now, what we have here is the Film Industry's Music-Industry-Moment. For the music industry, this happened somewhere around the whole Napster deal. Faced with a very clever technology (hello internet!) capable of delivering high quality content at (even then) fairly decent speeds, they were poised to make an industry revolution. They bottled it. Years later and the Beatles music has only just been made available online (November last year). No-one was keeping count, but thousands of Beatles albums were certainly downloaded in that time. Today's online music sites still often provide higher quality music than some shops sell.

The point I'm approaching (slowly) here, is that refusal to engage with digital distribution for fear of increased piracy is futile and narrow-minded. The Film Industry has to take the initiative and provide a decent service that people will pay for before they get used to downloading films. If they wander blindly into the same place as the music industry there is no way back.

The second point, and I think the one I object to more, is that it will mean cinemas to close. This relies on out automatic linking of "closing things = bad" without pausing to think about the relation in question: why will people choose to watch a film at home rather than in a cinema?

Some of the answers are related to progress again - we have bigger better TVs with bigger better speakers, the gap between home and cinema has narrowed - but there's also an implicit condemnation of the way cinemas are run and have been run for years.

Cinema visits in the UK are horrendously expensive. The price for a single ticket is already bordering on the price for a DVD in some cases. I might like the cinema but I can't afford to go as much as I'd like. If me and four friends each bought a DVD we'd have spent little more than it'd cost the five of us to go to the cinema and we'd see five times as many films.

It's also astonishing (and, depressingly true) how regular it is to hear serious film-fans describe the cinematic experience as being deeply disappointing. We brave the ticket prices, stump up and march in. The sticky floors and chewing-gum covered seats are what welcomes us. The bunches of screaming kids chucking sweets at each other and talking continues throughout. You leave thinking, 'I wish I could've seen that in my own house'. Seriously, what would it cost a cinema to have a member of staff to kick out the people who ruin a film for everyone?

So there we have it. Cameron, Bigelow et al are clinging to what they love. The cinemas are using this as another excuse to neatly avoid considering why less people go to the cinema and they're all intent on digging in their heels to slow the inevitable. And, I should add, by the inevitable, I certainly don't mean the death of cinema. This is not the end. This is another chapter. I love the cinema and will continue to go but it shouldn't need to be carefully protected: to survive it must make progress too, it must work to provide an absolutely inimitable experience that we're prepared to pay for.

European Post-2000 Horror

2011-04-27T21:22:00.006+01:00

Rather splendid zombie, by 'scabeater', under a CC-by-nc-nd licence

So... after the brief but exciting burn-out that was the intensive Argento-fest in March, it's time to move to a bit of a new project. This one, rather than the as-much-as-possible-in-a-week format, will be somewhat more drawn out, allowing me to do other stuff in between. Like eating. And sleeping.

The project plan is to watch more Horror. Specifically, Horror from Europe (this is not a slight on the rest of the world, honest! I'd just like to see more Euro-Horror). Even more specifically, European Horror from the last 'decade'. I'm taking decade to mean Y2K onwards, so perhaps should better say the project's full name ought to be: 21st Century European Horror.

Now I've seen a few of these already - I expect you have too. I'm not going to be strict about only watching new things, about the boundaries of Europe or... well, about anything really. This is supposed to be fun, after all.

There's a nice list by someone called 'propelas' here of some of the highlights of C21EH (as it shall now be known). 'ratty1984' also contributes a short list over at IMDB. Although I love lists (I really do...), my intention here is not to make a list, I have no plans to be comprehensive about this, I just want to watch some horror.

And with films like Martyrs, El Orfanato, [Rec] (and [Rec]2) and Sauna (AKA Filth) on the list, it should be good fun. c21EH, here we come...

Edit: And new project means new banner, hurrah!

Suspiria

2011-03-28T18:34:00.004+01:00

SUSSSSSSSSPIRIA! On a great big screen!

Last night, after a week of Argento film's, I got to see his spellbinding masterpiece Suspiria on a cinema-screen in the National Media Museum as part of the Bradford International Film Festival. I'd obviously wound myself into a bit of a frenzied excitement about it through the week and it certainly did not disappoint.

Every time I hear someone say they choose to watch films at home rather than at the cinema, mostly due to all the other film-goers, I think to myself "You've just been going to the wrong films with the wrong people!". Last night's audience had almost all seen the film before and sat in captivated silence, tittering nervously at the occasional gentle comic moments and - even before fun - audibly anticipating oncoming moments of horror. If a bad crowd can ruin a film, a great crowd can make one. Not that Suspiria needed any help in that respect...

My first and only minor gripe is that it was very sadly the cut version. This was an original cinematic print taken from the Media Museum's extensive archive and so was a print of the X-rated version that the BBFC approved in 1977, after demanding 1m13 of cuts (Cut info at Melon Farmers). Now, to those not familiar with horror film, particularly of BBFC-butchered horror film of a couple of decades ago, 1m13 might not sound very much. It also might not sound so important if I tell you that the full extent of the cuts involved removing a series of close-ups of stabbing, someone struggling through barbed wire and a dog biting a man's throat. Cuts, however, do make a difference to the rhythm and pacing of a film. Suspira is a film that, like so many Argento, thrives on the atmospheric build-up, to the point that the death scenes actually become a kind of release. For a couple of them to be dramatically shortened here was a shame.

Still, whilst that was the downside to it being an original theatrical print, there were certainly upsides. The first (and some would reject this) was that the image did have a wonderfully scratchy look. Anyone who's seen a film in cinemas that was filmed entirely in HD-digital knows how clinical and sterile it can look (I'm looking at you Public Enemy!) and, whilst I'm not suggesting scratchy is the way forward, there was certainly something enjoyable about watching a 70s film I thought I'd never see in a cinema, complete with all the visual wear and tear that a 30 year old 35mm reel has experienced (even if carefully looked after by the Museum)

The second benefit was the sound. The sound! Anyone who's seen Suspiria, an Argento film or evne read any of my blog from this week will know that sound makes up an enormous part of Argento's films. Suspiria is (arguably) the very best of these, scored again by the ever wonderful Goblin, and positively throbs, jangles and crashes at you. Original print, combined with cinema sound system made it an utterly fantastic experience that I'm sure I'll never be able to repeat (especially as most commercial releases saw the soundtrack savagely remixed).

The film itself is a whirling, semi-nonsensical, breathtaking journey of colour and sound, moving from the giallo murder-mystery into something a whole lot more supernatural, with savagely brilliant results. I really don't want to say too much more about the actual film, save to say that it is pretty much the best example of all the techniques I've been seeing this week in all his other films. It's not perfect (the scene-with-the-bat is awful) but it's brilliant, beautiful and should be seen by everyone.

Argento Week's FINALE!

2011-03-27T16:38:00.003+01:00

Of course, all that Dario Argento film watching wasn't just for fun, it was all to build up to the fantastically exciting screening of Suspiria tonight in the Bradford International Film Festival. It's hardly going to be worth me reviewing it - I love the film so much already a review will probably be just a string of superlatives and smiley faces - but I'm hoping that, given the big screen treatment, I'll find even more to love about it!

Cat O' Nine Tails

2011-03-27T16:12:00.003+01:00

So here we are! Last night's film, which was number 7 and brought my week of Argento films (before Suspiria tonight) to a close, was Cat O' Nine Tails, another one that I hadn't seen before. I was, I must say, pleasantly surprised. It falls, again, into the giallo camp more than the horror side - although they all show elements of both - and, being another very early film I must admit I didn't expect as much fun as I got.

Several online reviews - especially those from Argento fans - are really quite negative about this film, describing it as a fairly ham-fisted follow up to Bird with the Crystal Plumage, but I couldn't agree less. The story telling here was tight and interesting, the dialogue was er... no more clunky than we might expect and the characters and motivations were interesting.

Having watched it the day after watching Profondo Rosso, it was all too easy to see this as a blueprint for the later, more superior murder thriller; many of the aspects that were to become Argento staples are still in nascent form here. The camera is subjective and active but... not as intelligently so as in later films (some of the camera angles here seem less surprisingly wonderful and more just 'different'), the music is absolutely instrumental (no pun intended...) in the creation of a dens atmosphere but never quite matches the iconic heights of later films - it definitely isn't particularly memorable - the plot is full of red-herrings and hidden clues but the denouement is nowhere near as satisfying as later Argento, particularly Profondo Rosso.

It would be certainly true to call this one of the least "Argento-esque" Argento film but that's not necessarily a bad point. I'd suggest that the film stands up pretty well on its own merits and, if the ending is perhaps a little rushed, is definitely an enjoyable watch. It's a film that's perhaps best recommended to those who aren't as keen on the more flamboyantly visuals of the later films, or to those keen to see where those visuals came from. It's certainly not perfect but it's far from the weak slasher I had been lead to expect.

Profondo Rosso [aka Deep Red]

2011-03-27T00:34:00.003Z

Well, after the (comparatively) low point of Four Flies..., the week got right back on track with the superb Argento masterpiece that is Profondo Rosso. This is a film very much in the Bird with the Crystal Plumage vein; it's giallo murder mystery through and through. On top of that, it's done extremely well.

Here, more than anywhere, I'll have to tread very carefully in not giving away spoilers. Deep Red, you see, has a more carefully constructed plot than most Argento films and, as well as not knowing to the very end who's responsible, we actually care! It's a film that is more perfectly balanced than his other movies. Phenomena, for all that it was a great watch, has a very long period of almost-nothing-happening through the middle (although the awesomeness of the end makes this easy to forgive!), but Profondo Rosso is a much more polished piece. Information is given away little by little, red herrings and genuine clues are tumbled together into a mix that is never less than enthralling (Enthralling seems a little too fancy a word, but I'm aware that I've called nearly every Argento film this week 'compelling'...). And never fear, the end certainly lives up to the standard set by the rest of the film!

On top of a much more involving plot, the film retains all the other Argento staples, all feeding into the near perfect mix. The Goblin theme tune is piercing synth-perfection, creeping gently into a previously silent scene as the camera bobs and weaves. Like all the best Argento moments, the atmosphere here is tense and threatening. You only need to hear the bass-line fading in as the camera slides slowly across the scene and your heartbeat rises.

This is, as I have said repeatedly already this week, an experience more than a narrative (even if the narrative is stronger here!). Argento films play to the senses, appeal to the nerves, excite your pulse and quicken your breath. To an extent, these work best if you can disengage your brain slightly: we tend to watch films with a keen critical eye, removing ourselves emotionally in order to pass sterile judgements on acting quality, narrative etc. Forget that. Don't analyse an Argento film, watch an Argento film. The hardest part of writing about these films is remembering the finer details of the films; I know I had a thoroughly enjoyable two hours, that I was shocked at times, tense at times, laughing at times (Gianna's knackered car provides welcome comic release).

Profondo Rosso is an excellent film, a fantastic journey and a great starting place for anyone who hasn't seen an Argento film. It's perhaps not my favourite - I lean toward the psychological horror rather than the murder mystery - but it's a great film to watch.

Excellent theme tune:

Four Flies on Grey Velvet

2011-03-26T02:47:00.004Z

[AKA 4 mosche di velluto grigio]

This is certainly going to be the slimmest write-up of any of this week's Argento films. I'd seen Four Flies... before but I could remember almost nothing about it, something which is very rarely a good sign!

To be fair to Argento, before I'm critical, this was only his third film as director. Following in much the same vein as Bird with the Crystal Plumage, this is a film that is far more closely linked with more traditional crime and mystery films than with the tense horror he went on to make. Four Flies... shows many early versions of what would become Argento tropes; it treads a line somewhere between murder mystery and actual horror but is always slightly unsure of where it really lies.

Several of the elements that came to be used so potently in future films - suggestions of the occult, witchcraft and magic - are present but in much more basic forms, forms which occasionally work but often don't. By way of example, (and although I would never invest too much hope in an Argento plot), the use in Four Flies of a radical new science technique that captures exactly what the eye saw before death is not supernatural, it's just silly. This is the kind of thing that undermines a film, especially a film of the kind Argento produces; suspension of disbelief can be carried a long way (especially when we're enjoying ourselves!) but when something strikes the viewer as being silly, all tension is lost.

This is, much like the other criticism/faint praise this week, not to suggest that Four Flies is a bad film. It's not. It's enjoyable, it has a couple of good murders in it. It leaves you guessing for much of its duration. It is not, however, a great film. It is, to my mind, a far cry from the 'classic' Argento and, although we might excuse it for being a formative exercise in style, it doesn't stand on its own legs as a powerful or memorable film. One to watch in a spare moment but, if you've never seen an Argento film, not a great place to start.

Phenomena

2011-03-24T23:46:00.004Z

Another new (to me) Argento film, another next-day post. The problem this time, though, is that I still don't know what to think. Phenomena has me confused; it could either be my least favourite Argento film yet or it could even be - whisper it- my favourite. I certainly will need to see it again beofre I'm sure.

It has all the faults you could accuse an Argento film of, and it has them by the bucketfull. The story is pretty much nonsensical. The dialogue is clumsy. The acting is as wooden as it gets. If I wanted (and several IMDB reviewers have wanted to) I could make this sound like a truly awful film. It's about a half-mad girl who communicates with insects, for heaven's sake!

So... it's a bad film right?

Wrong.

Phenomena is, as with so many of these films, not really meant to be a narrative to follow, a dramatic performance to astound or a literary tour-de-force. It's an experience. It's a film you have to sit and give your full attention to. So surrender your art-critic pretensions and just immerse yourself in it. There's a lot to like!

She does, after all, communciate with insects! This, predictably, does not mean talking to ladybirds but rather invokes biblical-plagues of flying terrors, ready to sting, nibble and smother anything in their way.

It also has Donald Pleasence (always a good thing) and a monkey.

And...

Welll.....

If I seem to be struggling to find useful things to say about this film it's really only because it has such an absolutely brilliant, arresting, throat-grabbing, mind-boggling wonder of an ending. The film was good, sure, but the last quarter of an hour or so utterly trumped it. It's not frightening as such (there's certainly no scene to equal the dog-chases-girl in Tenebrae) but it is tense, it is shocking and it is delivered with enthusiasm and panache!

It would be such a shame to spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it, so I'll carefully guard my tonguer (er... keys?) and leave you with a very unsatisfactorary conclusion. Phenomena is quite possibly utter rubbish with a chilling ending. Or it is quite possibly a stunning film that needs to be experienced. I'm just not sure.

Either way, I certainly need and want to watch it again.

Tenebrae (pt II)

2011-03-23T19:59:00.005Z

It it, I'd say, quite fitting that Tenebrae, as the first Argento film of the week that I hadn't previously seen, is the first that I write about with a little more space to reflect on it. And yet... still, I just don't quite know what to make of it. Was it absolutely stunning? Was it run-of-the-mill? Was it powerful and tense? Or was it just a bit silly?

As I was watching the film - up to about 2/3 of the way through, at least - I was none too taken in by it. It seemed pretty much your typical slasher. As per usual, it was shot beautifully, as per usual the deaths were gleefully brutal but... there really didn't seem an awful lot that marked it out from the crowded field. It has people being killed. It has ransom-note style anonymous letters. The lead character just happened to be in Italy at the time (this seems to be quite an Argento trope...). Mysterious phone-calls! Someone wearing a mask! The basic plot elements are all just a little too... average.

But this is Argento! So perhaps it was unreasonable of me to be concentrating too hard on the plot, after all. Again, however, I found myself feeling disappointed. Although there were a handful of interesting camera angles I felt like something was missing; why wasn't the camera taking such an excitingly active role as in some of the others? In this, I must now admit, I was just plain wrong. The camera work in Tenebrae is fabulous. It does half of the same things as in his other films but - crucially - you hardly notice it at all. This is surely the best cinematography of all, camera work that grabs you, changes the way you relate to the story and yet remains unobtrusive.

I'm still not sure, though. My appreciation of the film languished at a low-point throughout much of the film, rose unexpectedly to a fever-pitch of wow-that-was-awesome at the end but, with a day's reflection, has returned to something middling really. It's not that it's not an awful lot of fun, it's simply that it doesn't cry out in quite the same way as something to be remembered. It doesn't feel as gloriously unique as some of the others.

I should add, however, that whilst that assessment might be true of the film as a whole, there certainly were a few memorable moments. The extended scene in which a girl is chased by a dog (I really don't want to give too much away) was Argento at his sublime best. No dialogue, just a building tension (carried wonderfully by Goblin's score) that makes the scene almost painful to watch but impossible to turn away from. When Tenebrae gets it right, it gets it very right!

Tenebrae (AKA Tenebre)

2011-03-23T01:07:00.002Z

Tonight's film was Tenebrae, the first one that was new to me. Sadly, I'm way too tired to write about it now, so it can wait until the morning.

For now, fans of Justice's 'Phantom Parts I & II' should probably check out the Tenebrae theme tune, contributed by repeated-Argento-collaborators, Goblin.

Justice:

Goblin:

Bird with the Crystal Plumage

2011-03-22T00:47:00.005Z

From one to the next!

Tonight's film was Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L'uccello dalle Piume de Cristallo) which was another that I'd seen before but, once again, was none the worse for it.

My entry for this one will be much shorter. Mostly because I'm much more tired today, but partly also because the film is, in my eyes at least, somewhat less remarkable. It makes a fairly neat comparison against Opera though, mostly because nearly every flaw I found in Opera is corrected here.

Yesterday I pointed out that Opera's music left something to be desired; here, a certain Mr Ennio Morricone steps in to create a score that bursts with energy when it needs to, broods menacingly at times and jangles its merry way through the film. Similarly, the actual plot - another weak spot in Opera - is phenomenally tight here. Mystery and suspense lurk at every set-piece and in ever shadow. I challenge any viewer not to spend the entire film guessing at who's responsible for the series of grisly deaths handed out to the poor victims.

Yet, for all this, it simply doesn't have the sheer atmosphere that makes Opera so thrilling. The camera, although rarely short of wonderful, doesn't drag us, biting at our nails, into the story in the same way as yesterday's film and this is telling of the film as a whole. It's fascinating, it's captivating, it's beautiful but yet it never quite achieves the intensity of Opera.

If I'm damning it with faint praise, I must apologise. Bird with the Crystal Plumage is by no means a bad, or even mediocre film. It's a great film. It tells a compelling story and it tells it very well indeed. But this is perhaps all it does; it is a brilliant story, but never quite manages to be a brilliant cinematic experience.

Note: It only occurred to me to check the date of this film as an afterthought. This is Argento's first film as director, some 17 years before he directed Opera and perhaps this explains the points I highlight. This is a much more 'traditional' film than Opera, a film that obeys more of the normal 'rules'. In some respects, it's the better for it, but in terms of a cinematic experience it merely hints at what he was to achieve later.

Opera

2011-03-21T00:06:00.003Z

So, part one of Chopping Mall's Dario Argento Week is his 1987 masterpiece Opera.

This is pitched, as a few of his films are, somewhere between straight up giallo whodunit and a tense psychological horror. With gruesome death scenes. So, you could say, it manages to do a bit of everything that's awesome about Italian cinema. Except Westerns. There are certainly no cowboys...

The basic premise sees Betty called in at the last minute to perform in the opera of MacBeth. The famous curse of the Scottish play has struck down the intended Lady MacBeth, leaving the role wide open for the young and inexperienced Betty. She steps up to the mark - and gets rave reviews - but from this moment on things really start to go wrong: lights crash to the floor on the opening night, staff members are found dead and then Betty encounters a mysterious masked man...

This guy, it turns out, has quite a sadistic edge to him and happily tied her up, tapes needles to the bottom of her eyes - so she can't close her eyes in horror, of course - and then precedes to stab her lover in front of her. Through the throat.

I shan't elaborate too much on the rest of the plot, as that would spoil the surprise, although perhaps that wouldn't matter too much. To my mind, the weakest element of Opera is that I really don't care that much who's responsible for the murders and - I suspect - Argento doesn't either. The combination of surprisingly few clues or half-remembered vital details (especially in comparison to some of his other films...) and the sheer indulgence of the murders (lookout for the one with the keyhole...) suggest that this is a film that's concerned less with who's doing the crime than er... simply enjoying watching the crime.

Its real strong point however is the astonishingly brilliant camera work. I suspect I'm going to have to spend most of this week hunting out alternative superlatives for the cinematography in Argento's films, but for now I must say that the visual element of Opera is simply stunning. It's hard to do it justice in screenshots, simply because this is less about camera angles than about camera movement; Argento's camera leads us through the film, ducking behind curtains, drawing back ominously, following the heels of characters as they walk. This is the real magic of the film; we never simply watch the action but rather are immersed in it. Argento throws the viewer into the scene, compelling us to watch the grisly details as surely as if it were our eyes that were forced open by needles.

Opera is certainly not everyone's film, it's certainly not simply a murder mystery and it's certainly not the best constructed story you'll watch/read/encounter. What it is, however, is utterly compelling viewing, visually astonishing and an awful lot of fun.

The only remaining points to note are the brilliance of the crows - surely the most threatening birds in cinema after those of The Birds - and, less brilliantly, the appalling choices made in the soundtrack. With brilliant excerpts of opera music, it seems such a shame to throw in the odd chunk of metal-ish guitar rock, which in most cases simply kills the atmosphere. It's a far cry, say, from the dipping-with-tension(-and-blood) soundtrack to Suspiria....

Dario Argento week!

2011-03-20T18:51:00.006Z

CC licenced photo by Brian Eeles via Wikimedia

This Sunday, the National Media Museum, as part of the Bradford International Film Festival's Widescreen Weekend - a festival strand devoted to screening classic examples of gorgeously presented films - are showing Suspiria by Italian director Dario Argento.

Now I love the Dario Argento films I've seen. More than that, I consider Suspiria one of my favourite films ever. Although the story might not be anything too remarkable, the visual style and the brooding music add up to create one of the most beautiful, tense and atmospheric pieces of film I've ever seen. And I never thought I'd get to see it on a big screen!

Needless to say, I am ~~slightly~~ very excited!

So, between now and Sunday, what better way to anticipate the event than by watching seven other of Argento's films? And writing about them here, of course.

Over the next seven days, I shall watch (in an as yet undecided order)
Profondo Rosso, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Opera, 4 mosche di velluto grigio, Tenebrae, Cat O' Nine Tails and Phenomena.

Buy Tickets to Supiria
Check out the Bradford International Film Festival

One Day Later...

2011-02-28T17:42:00.003Z

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

The Oscars results are quite astonishingly, gloriously, exquisitely DULL!

Best Picture - T** K***'s S*****
Best Director - T** K***'s S*****
Best Actor - T** K***'s S*****
Best Original Screenplay - T** K***'s S*****
Best Title - T** K***'s S*****
Best Coffee On Set - T** K***'s S*****
Best Taste in Shoes -T** K***'s S*****
Best Idea - T** K***'s S*****
Best friend - T** K***'s S*****
Best best - T** K***'s S*****
Best ever - T** K***'s S*****
Best cute Brits - T** K***'s S*****

Oh and the Social Network, The Fighter and Inception got some for nice sound and/or supporting people. Or for making films that we've basically seen before. Thanks.

Last Minute Oscars Choices

2011-02-28T00:27:00.003Z

[CC Licenced image by Dave_B_]

Ok, ok, so they're about to give out some supposedly important film awards very soon.

I haven't seen loads of the films that are nominated. Does this matter? Psshhh, nah! Where's the fun in making informed, reasonable choices. These are made on hearsay, fragments of knowledge and instinct alone!

Here's the list, we'll see tomorrow if the real people got it right and matched me.

Best Picture
"Black Swan," - Nah. It's good but... not really all that.
"The Fighter" Nah, not seen this.
"Inception," If we make it open-ended, will people think it's half-assed or will they think it's genius? Apparently, the latter.
"The Kids Are All Right," Wha'?
"The King's Speech," Seriously. I never want to hear these three words again.
"127 Hours," James Franco chews his own arm off. Well done.
"The Social Network," No. I don't want to watch this. Go away.
"Toy Story 3" Has deserved winner stamped all over it.
"True Grit" Fabulous. Better than Toy Story? Probably not.
"Winter's Bone" ...Same as with True Grit. Love it, but it doesn't beat Toy Story.

Actor in a Leading Role
Javier Bardem in "Biutiful" I like Javier Bardem. Haven't seen this though.
Jeff Bridges in "True Grit" Yes.
Jesse Eisenberg in "The Social Network" RraaaRRrrGGHH, Go away.
Colin Firth in "T** K***'s S*****" Stop it! Stop it!
James Franco in "127 Hours" But he's the Green Goblin...

Actor in a Supporting Role
"T** K***'s S*****" again? Make it stop! This one clearly goes to:
John Hawkes in "Winter's Bone"

Actress in a Leading Role
Loads of good choices here. Both these are good:
Jennifer Lawrence in "Winter's Bone"
Natalie Portman in "Black Swan"
but we have a winner:
Michelle Williams in "Blue Valentine" She was brilliant.

Actress in a Supporting Role
I've seen almost none of these.
Hailee Steinfeld in "True Grit"
wins by default. "T** K***'s S*****" can go take a hike.

Animated Feature Film
I really want to see
"The Illusionist" Sylvain Chomet
but if I made Toy Story my Best Film, it'd peobably better take this prize as well.
"Toy Story 3" Lee Unkrich

Art Direction
I don't really know what this award means

Cinematography
"True Grit," by Roger Deakins, was beautiful

Director
Either
"Black Swan," Darren Aronofsky which was amazingly well put together.
or
"True Grit," Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Not "T** K***'s S*****"

Aaaaaaand I think I'll stop there. The other categories can sort themselves out. The Documentaries award should be interesting and I plan on watching most of them but... as I've basically seen none of the shorts listed, it seems a little pointless even to speculate.

The one massively embarrassing thing to admit is that I've not seen a single one of the foreign film selection. How has that been allowed to happen? Best sort this out soon!

Just for the record, they are:
Foreign Language Film

"Biutiful," Mexico
"Dogtooth," Greece
"In a Better World," Denmark
"Incendies," Canada
"Outside the Law (Hors-la-loi)," Algeria

Women In Horror

2011-02-22T23:43:00.000Z

....yeah. Despite what that banner says, we're 3/4 of the way through Women in Horror recognition month and I've done nothing. Whoops :(

In lieu of me doing anything worthwhile about it, check out:

Official site: http://womeninhorrormonth.com/

Facebook page (updated regularly!)

The brilliant Day of the Woman blog

The ever-wonderful Lightning Bug's Lair

And the fabulous Horror Digest

And there's a whole tonne of other treats and goodies out there for you to find if you look around a bit!

CRUNCH CRUNCH BANG

2011-02-21T23:09:00.004Z

[CC Licenced photo by Katerha]

Now, I love going to the cinema. And I take it pretty seriously. Your behaviour in the cinema should be determined by the kind of film you're watching.

Tense psycho-drama? Don't talk, mutter, mumble or make a noise.

Comedy? Laugh.

Splatter horror at a film festival? Laugh along with everyone else at all the inappropriate gory moments that you all love.

Ok? Are we agreed? Good.

Now let's move ourselves swiftly along to the contentious topic of eating in the cinema. Here, I make no apologies: I am near-fascist in my hatred of noisy food. There's a certain kind of action film (hello Die Hard 4.0!) that totally permits the slurp of mega-sized fizzy drinks and the crunching of popcorn but... in most other respects, it's just irritating. I love popcorn. I love eating popcorn at the cinema. But I also love those tense moments of cinematic silence, as we wait with baited breath to see if... CRUNCH MUNCH CRUNCH GUZZLE CHOMP ..oh. You just ruined that moment by scoffing a faceful of popcorn. Thanks.

Sometimes I wish say to myself "I'm going to kill that guy if he keeps rustling those sweets"

I am, however, a moderate and restrained kind of person, and so have never actually followed through with this mental threat. Sadly not everyone is quite as calm! The Telegraph reports that a 27 year old Latvian shot a fellow cinema-goer dead for the volume of his popcorn munching!

Eesh! Now bear that in mind next time you eat noisily at the cinema!

(Thanks to Cineshock for alerting me to this!)

Matrices?

2011-01-24T15:47:00.004Z

Ohhh my. The hot news - a cynic might say rumour at this stage - is Keanu Reeves and the Wachowskis being in talks about a two movie picture deal for sequels to the Matrix trilogy. See The Register, The Guardian, EmpireOnline and the news-breakers Ain't It Cool.

Cue, of course, all manner of beard stroking and mumbling about Hollywood lack of imagination, about ruining beautiful things with unnecessary extensions but... wait a second, back up there. This is different, isn't it? Normally when unnecessary sequels get added years after the originals, we're concerned about protecting the originals. Indiana Jones is a perfect example: three glorious films and a sequel full of aliens some years later.

With the Matrix, however, we're looking at a similar yet crucially different scenario. No-one likes the second Matrix film. No-one remembers the third Matrix film. They've already trampled mud all over the beautiful carpet. I played my vhs of the first copy to death. I watched it over and over again. I bought Empire magazine for the first time to read the previews of the sequel. And they broke it.

The first one was fantastic.
The second one was visually stunning but dire in narrative terms.
The third one... um... there was a bit with lots of computer generated people, right? And maybe some fighting? Yeah, definitely some fighting. Story? Hmmm.... something about Oracles. No wait, that was a different one... or.... wait... no, no, it's completely gone. I'd re-watch it to remind myself but I remember already having been crushingly disappointed by it the one time.

So yes, I'm not worried about what they'll do to the series as a whole and honestly believe they couldn't possibly make a film that was even worse (could they?) but despite all this, my love for the first one still exists so, please Mr Reeves et al, don't break it even more.

Of course, with such sketchy details, it could all still be a hoax.

Short Films: Treevenge

2011-01-05T12:10:00.000Z

It's hard to know what to say about a short film as funny, gory, mad and wonderful as Treevenge.

The short, clocking in at about 16 minutes, is a couple of years old and comes recommended by a sackful of film festival awards, including an honourable mention at Sundance and audience-fave short at Torronto After Dark, as well as Best Short from Rue Morgue magazine.

I can see why!

The premise, though nothing especially inventive, is enjoyable and clearly gave the film-makers enormous scope to have some fun. It's Christgmas, the goose is getting fat, and all over Canada Christmas trees are being butchered by chainsaw-wielding, slack-jawed lumberjacks intent on inflicting maximum pain on the poor trees. After a very funny opening with snarling mencutting up hilariously subtitled and squealing trees, we see the trees brought into the typical family home, ready for the "best Christmas EVER!"

I think you know what follows. Several minutes of top-notch, tongue-in-cheek, laugh-out-loud slaughter, splatter and gore as the enraged trees go on a killing rampage, wreaking havoc upon their would-be tormentors.

It's gory, it's funny and it's beautiful. I can't recommend it highly enough.

The whole thing, in it's 16minute glory, is available to watch on youtube here, or embedded below. I *presume* Yer Dead films don't mind it being there, and I can't see any purchase details on their website.

Treevenge Website
Yer Dead Productions Inc. website.

Looking Back: 2010 in VAMPIRES!

2011-01-04T19:09:00.002Z

First were Zombies, next it's Vampires! This is the first of my "Looking Back at 2010" posts, in which I plan to have a look at what I watched this year and see what was great (and not so great...). This is based on the list of films I watched in 2010, not necessarily (or at all!) on those released in 2010.

My 2010 count of Vampire flicks clocked in at some 27 different films, although the vast majority were Hammer films. Last year was the first time I really got to grips with Hammer Horror films and I certainly watched a lot of their Vampire outings! I'm a massive fan of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, so any of the films with them in leading roles were certainly winners. Dracula (1958), Dracula, Prince of Darkness and Taste The Blood of Dracula were particular favourites from the Dracula cycle, with an honorable mention due to Dracula AD 1972 for being so completely mad. Scars of Dracula was a pretty thin addition to the series and The Satanic Rights of Dracula was nice enough but decidedly underwhelming.

Amongst Hammer's non-Dracula vampires there are some gems and some... well... not-so-gem-like films. At the crap end of the range were Lust for a Vampire and the Vampire Circus, whilst others such as The Brides of Dracula (yeah... it might say Dracula, but it's not) and Kiss of the Vampire, both of which were fab. As for Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, a Hammer-Shaw Brothers collaboration.... I have no idea what to say. It was certainly different but I think the basic premise looked a lot better on paper than it did on screen. This was certainly not a demonstration of how best to mix the gothic and the oriental!

Much more skilled at relocating the Vampire to the Far East was Chan-Wook Park, whose staggeringly wonderful film, Thirst, is surely a must for anyone who likes Vampires. Or Korean films. Or cinema. Chan-Wook Park seems a little cursed by the fact that everyone who's seen his films seems to just want him to make Oldboy again. And again. And again. Thirst isn't Oldboy. But it is brilliant. And you should watch it.

Similarly unmissable, although in a VERY different manner was the sublime Vampire Girl Vs. Frankenstein Girl. I hardly need to say very much about this. If the title entices you and/or you've seen (and liked) any of the Machine Girl, Tokyo Gore Police etc then this is definitely one for you. If not... well it might be better if you gave it a wide berth. This is definitely one for the bonkers, genre-horror fans.

Back in Western cinema, Let The Right One In and Dusk Till Dawn both entertained me this year, but everyone knows about them so I shan't really bother banging on about them too much. Instead, I'll come to the Vampire films that I watched shortly after the stars/directors died this year. Both Lesley Nielsen and Jean Rollins were (very different) losses for cinema this year and to commemorate I watched (amongst other, non-Vampire films) Nielsen's Dracula, Dead and Loving It which was entertainingly mad and then Jean Rollin's Requiem For A Vampire and The Nude Vampire, both of which were slow, poetic films with symbolist tendencies.

And that pretty much brings me to the end! There were a couple more, the oddball Blood and Doughnuts, the brooding English Vampyres and - possibly my favourite film, possibly to be reviewed shortly - the Spanish masterpiece Arrebato, but we'll save them for later...

Looking Back: 2010 in ZOMBIES

2011-01-03T19:00:00.005Z

This is the first of my "Looking Back at 2010" posts, in which I plan to have a look at what I watched this year and see what was great (and not so great...). First up: Zombies! This is based on the list of films I watched in 2010, not necessarily those released in 2010.

Last year I sat through a fair number of Zombie films and, much like the genre, I have to say they were a pretty mixed bag. My film list contains 29 that I would describe as either being Zombie films or at least significantly featuring zombies. Of these, there were a handful of true genre classics - several of which I'd seen before - including Umberto Lenzi's zombies-with-weapons masterpiece Nightmare City (which I reviewed here), Hammer's brilliant Plague of the Zombies, the creepy Spanish Tombs of the Blind Dead and cult-classic no-budget cheese-fest The Video Dead.

By brokensbone at 2011-01-03

Somewhat less memorably, I also endured Zombie Cop and Zombie Nosh, neither of which I'd recommend even to Zombie film-fans! At this end of the scale The Asylum's I Am Legend rip-off I Am Omega sneaks in too, falling just about on the right side of watchable, but not by far.

Big name Zombie offerings were perhaps a little thin. Although Zombies are supposedly making a bit of a come back (from the dead, heh) Hollywood and big name studios are yet to put out much of any worth. As much as I love Shaun of the Dead, I'd like a few more not-comedy Zombie films, and Hollywood is not exactly leaping at the idea. George Romero's newest, Survival of the Dead, went straight to DVD and, though not a bad idea or unwatchable film, it certainly isn't comparable to his best. Zombieland was pretty disappointing too: although it started out well, it was as if some Hollywood executive had stepped in at around the half-hour mark to tell them what they were doing wrong. What's starts promisingly turns into a predictable, warm-n-fuzzy feeling inside, relationship drama with predictable characters. You mean the big mean one is actually sensitive? And the nerdy one who looks like Michael Cera will get the girl? Who'd have thought it? Come on Hollywood, get some guts and kill off lots of main characters in a depressing, violent and gory ending. Please?

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Away from the US, this year confirmed to me (as if it needed confirmation) that the Spanish are just damn good at zombies. Mucha Sangre, Kárate a Muerte en Torremolinos and [Rec] were all brilliant fun in their own ways but it was (new to me) Una De Zombies that really astonished me. It's some months since I watched it and I don't want to give too much of the plot away, but it's an incredible and clever film that plays with the viewer from start to finish. Highly recommended! It's also worth mentioning here that, although not a feature film, the Spanish short Zombies and Cigarettes is just about as much fun as you can have in 17 minutes. And it's free to watch online!

Back in the English language, I saw the compelling but utterly horrible Deadgirl - think carefully about whether you'll enjoy it before you watch it: I did, many wouldn't - and the ruthlessly intelligent Pontypool (which I shall be re-watching as soon as possible), both of which I'd recommend. Nazi Zombies made an appearance in both the hit Norweigan Dead Snow and Brit-classic Outpost, whilst I was puzzled and thrilled in equal measures by a handful of mad-as-can-be zombie flicks, including Killer Shrimps, Wild Zero and the brilliantly titles Holy Virgin vs. The Evil Dead. Excellent!

The film that eclipsed all others for this year though was the world's first zombie film set in West Africa - Burkina Faso if we're being precise - The Dead. I don't know quite what made it so much better than any zombie film I've seen in recent years. Maybe it was seeing it for free. Maybe it was sipping a pint of ale as I watched it. Or maybe it's just fantastically good. It was introduced by one of the Ford brothers who directed it (I'm afraid I don't remember which) as being a Romero inspired Zombie epic and I think they certainly achieved that. The Dead is like Zombie films used to be. It's sprawling, rural and slow. The Zombies themselves are not especially threatening, but it's the endless, lonely tension that builds and builds that brings the sense of despair.

I'm certainly no hater of the modern-day speedy zombies (and having watched Nightmare City this year I was reminded they're not actually that modern a creation at all) but The Dead is a film that throbs with the pessimistic, end-of-the-world threat that characterised early Romero and Fulci films. It's also great fun. I have no idea if/when a DVD release is scheduled but I'd recommend it to anyone!

CHOPPING MALL 2011

2011-01-02T17:59:00.004Z

Well, I don't think there's any point denying that the 2nd half of 2010 was pretty disastrous in terms of keeping this blog updated... Five posts in as many months? And one of those was a post saying that I hadn't been posting enough, a post where I promised all sorts of exciting film reviews that I then never wrote.

Part of the problem, it would appear, is that I watched too many films. Early in the year I set myself the goal of watching 365 different films in the year and, though I did manage that, the goal did rather take over a lot of my free time - time that I would and could (and should?) have spent writing about films here.

I certainly did see some wonderful films over the last year. And some not so wonderful. And some utter dross. Over the next couple of days I'll write about a few of the best individual films or genres but then it's onwards into 2011!

List of 365 Films I watched last year!

Huacho

2010-11-19T10:57:00.004Z

[as these films were all seen on cinema screens rather than DVD, screenshots are much harder to include. I'll stick to poster/cover images and trailers where possible]

One of my first films of the festival was the Chilean film-cum-documentary Huacho. I describe it as such because, the film is so very 'real-life' as to feel as if we are watching the reality of their existence - an idea only supported by the cast only being credited with a single name.

The basic premise of Huacho is that we enter into the world of one poor Chilean family, living in very rural setting, as they struggle on through their lives. The film takes place over the course of a day; the opening scene is breakfast; the closing scene is the family all heading off to bed. Between these scenes we follow each member of the family in turn.

It's a decidedly minimal venture in film making. There are scarcely any named characters outside of the central family and we're shown them in happiness and in sadness. What's crucial to the film - and what makes it so interesting - is apparent lack of agenda. Although their lives are certainly difficult and you could easily read all sorts of criticisms into it (rural-urban poverty gap etc) there is no escaping from the fact that, at the end of the day, each of them is smiling. This might not sound much, but in a film quite as subtle as this it certainly is. We are invited into their lives to see how they cope with a normal day; there is no heavy handed, dramatic plot-line that, by a stroke of luck, sees them all become rich and famous. Nor, to the other extreme, are we lead to believe that their existence is impossible or too miserable to cope with. Rather than either of these false creations, we see how people simply get on with life, even if it is hard.

Huacho is an incredibly sensitive film which takes us on a journey through lives we would otherwise not see and, thankfully, never uses them to make a point or send a message. It's not a thrilling watch but it's definitely worthwhile.

The only trailer I found is only in Spanish but it does give a sense of the film:

Some time later...

2010-11-19T01:52:00.003Z

Ok, ok, it's been a while. This blog hasn't been updated in faaaar too long.

Not to worry though. Half of the reason for this is that, in volunteering at the Leeds International Film Festival (the UK's biggest outside London, apparently), I've been way too busy watching films towrite much about them!

So, coming very, very soon will be reviews of every single film I've seen as part of the festival. Let's go! Dr Strangelove, Huacho, A Town Called Panic and many many more to come!

Starts tomorrow, stay tuned!

The Idiots

2010-10-04T12:26:00.002+01:00

[NEAR THE END THERE ARE A FEW SPOILERS! ]

I've not seen a lot of Lars Von Trier's films (Antichrist, *shudder*) and generally know more about him from interviews and reviews than from his films. What I do know, however, is that clear meanings and easy answers tend not to be big in his films. The Idiots is a perfect case-in-point and, whilst I would never say I want a director to be heavy handed, to spell things out in an overly laboured manner, I do sometimes, just sometimes think that, when you finish a film and think, "uh..... what?", the director has actually failed slightly.

The basic set-up here is that we follow Karen and her time with 'The Idiots' who are a bunch of white, middle-class hippies in Denmark who are living together peacefully enough in a commune (well, Stoffer's uncle's house) and get their kicks by prancing around in public pretending to be mentally retarded. They call this 'spazzing'.

Now sure, top marks for potentially offensive material but this is nothing unique in itself. In fact (and yes, I realise it's actually a later example) the League of Gentlemen springs to mind as a comparison (Legz Akimbo theatre group have a day pretending to be disabled). The difference however is that whilst the League of Gentlemen's characters are awful, horrible people who you watch whilst peeping through your fingers, unsure whether to laugh or cry, the characters of The Idiots by contrast are sympathetic, funny and friendly (for the most part). They have a good time "spazzing" and then go home to laugh about it.

Ah, ok then. So if we're not groaning at the characters' sheer insensitivity we must be laughing at their targets, right? After all, this is a projected social-attack. They pretend to be retarded to draw responses from the people in society, to demonstrate how poorly most people know how to react or engage with the mentally handicapped, right? This is about sticking it to the man!

Hardly. Although lead Idiot, Stoffer, firmly believes they are challenging societies values, von Trier goes out of his way to make it clear they are a long way from that. Most of the people we see reacting to the Idiots are a little awkward, sure, but generally pretty nice. If anything, Stoffer must have been fuming and just how accepting their victims were. In an excruciating scene in which Stoffer dumps his pretend-idiot friend in the hands of a group of Hell's Angels and scarpers, the director shows us extreme and selfless kindness on the part of the bikers; it becomes clearer and clearer that the cold, unsympathetic, economy-lead society that the Idiots are kicking against are simply all too accepting.

So what is the point? Well that's less clear.

Let's turn briefly to the more simple goods and bads: the acting is simply fantastic. You don't have to understand, agree or approve of a film to notice the acting and, whatever you think of the Idiots, there is no doubt that von Trier was working with a fabulous team of actors; they're just so credible it's er... incredible (!). Similarly the (wonderfully unconventional) sex-scene is simply brilliant, jaw-dropping and unforgettable. I don't want to say too much and spoil it but let's say it involves lots of people and a bit of running around the garden...

Where the film falls down however are the unexplained or implausible points. For such a well acted film, the occasional structural hole is just irritating. For one, much of the film is shot as a documentary. We have interviews with the Idiots looking back at being Idiots yet the story has no real close. This is simply irritating (and very similar to the drifting approach to documentary that plagued District 9) as it makes no sense; if we can talk to the characters afterwards it doesn't follow that we leave the story and such an undecided ending. There are certain characters missing from the interviews - why? what happened to them? why doesn't anyone finish their story? This is not ambiguity; this is a set of lazily loose ends that go nowhere.

[THE NEXT PARAGRAPH CONTAINS SPOILERS]

My major problem with it though is, when all is said and done, not a very major problem. It only sticks out so much because it is the last scene in the film, from which we fade to black and so it obviously hangs around in the memory. In it, we see Karen go home to her family and pretend to be an Idiot there. It turns out that she actually joined the Idiots the day before the funeral of her child and had been hiding from the reality of it ever since. Ok. So a woman disappears the day before her child's funeral? What do you do? "We thought you were dead" says Karen's sister... so why wasn't there a police hunt for her? Since when did almost-certainly-depressed women vanishing before a very depressing funeral get shrugged off with a "oh she's probably just dead"? Seriously? I totally understand that part of the point was the uncaring, heartlessness of her family but you still don't just presume someone's dead and do nothing about it. Even more impressively, her piggish brute of a husband jumps to the staggeringly illogical conclusion that, seeing as she is, in fact, alive, her disappearance for two weeks from the funeral and her family demonstrates that she "didn't care about it very much". If this were a less realist film, if the characters and reactions were all so implausible I might let this slide as but in this context it just sticks out as patently unrealistic and silly. No-one could come to the conclusions her family and husband come to.

If that seems like a bit of a rant over a comparatively minor point, well, it is. But it's a point that did irritate me and certainly lessened my enjoyment of the film. Generally, however, it's an enthralling, interesting and funny film which is definitely worth watching. You do feel slightly uncomfortable afterwards when you realise that, without any clear message, your enjoyment of the film is derived mostly from watching people pretend to be retarded but... perhaps that guilt is the point?

[no screenshots, sorry]

2LDK - Stop pushing boundaries!

2010-09-16T11:06:00.004+01:00

Let's look at modern films. With a few notable exceptions, cinema seems hellbent on the bizarre (and frankly WRONG) notion that more = better. From Lord of the Rings (MOAR FIGHTING PEOPLE!), to Avatar (MOAR DIMENSIONS!, MOAR MONEY), to Inception (MOAR LAYERS OF REALITY!) there is a definite trend towards the idea of giving you "more bang for your buck". As cinema prices skyrocket, some bright spark seems to have formulated an idea:

If we throw millions of characters, a mountain of subplots and the biggest special effects ever made at the audience, all spread across roughly 3 hours, then they can't possibly leave the cinema disappointed and wanting their money back.

Can they?

Well yes. They can. Every time I leave the cinema with a numb rear-end from 3hrs in a seat, having just watched special effects equivalent to the GDP of a small country I feel slightly hollow inside. Modern blockbusters tend to be simply too sprawling, too epic, too mammoth. They need to be cut down to size. Even Inglourious Basterds (my favourite of last year) clocked in at 3hrs or so and would've benefitted from being much shorter. Tarrantino had talked about having enough material to make several films; he should've done just that, rather than bashing them together into a film which (although wonderful) was simply too much.

So imagine my delight when I stumbled upon this:

The Duel Project was a challenge issued to Ryuhei Kitamura and Yukihiko Tsutsumi by producer Shinya Kawai during a night of drinking. The challenge was for the two directors to see who could make the best feature film with two principal actors/actresses battling in one principal location in the time span of one week.

Quote from wikipedia.

So... hardly any characters, a single location and an incredibly tight schedule? Fantastic. This is the kind of back to basics approach that cinema needs.

To date, I have only seen 2LDK, Tsutsumi's half of the project. It clocks in at about 70 minutes. It has only two speaking characters. It's entirely set in one flat (2LDK is a Japanese term to describe a 2 bedroom shared apartment). It's fast, funny, witty, brutal and violent in equal measures.

The two characters are rival actresses, competing for the same role and discussing their chances. The two very different people begin to needle each other, moving from gentle jibes to cutting remarks and finally escalating to full-on fighting. It's fantastic. There's not a single dull moment as the tension is slowly cranked up from a relatively mundane beginning until the outbreak of violence is almost a relief.

I clearly wouldn't want every film to follow this pattern (though I'm certainly anxious to see the other half of the Duel Project) but it is very refreshing to be shown what can be done with so little. Hollywood terms would have us believe that "low budget" meant only "crappy horror" (no bad thing!) or "over-earnest indie dirge" (which is all too often true!). 2LDK is a timely reminder that there is a lot more to a film than the MOAR IS BETTER fallacy that blockbuster cinema perpetuates.

Driller Killer (or "The Trouble With a Reputation")

2010-08-11T18:11:00.004+01:00

Abel Ferrara's Driller Killer is a film far better known for its reputation than for its content. For those that don't know, the film is a slasher flick from the US in 1979 and gained it's level of notoriety in Britain in the early 1980s when it was included in the Director of Public Prosecutions list of films to be charged under obscenity laws. This list became known as the "video nasties" and would eventually prompt the creation of the UK's Video Recording Act 1984, a piece of law that, for the first time, meant it was a legal requirement to have any video sold in the UK approved by the BBFC (the UK film regulatory office).

Driller Killer, available unrated on VHS at the time was promptly banned. It was not approved for release by the BBFC until 1999, some 15 years later.

All this excitement does, of course, make it a 'must-watch' for any self-respecting lover of trashy, gorey, sleazy cinema. Sadly, the film itself isn't very good. And let's be honest: my standards are pretty damn low!

Let's start with some plot; Reno is a struggling artist living in New York. He does some moderately good paintings and gets the occaisonal comission but is having some difficulty making ends meet and paying the rent is becoming a pressing issue. And then blah blah blah stuff happens and he turns into a psycho with a drill. It's hardly riveting stuff.

But we weren't watching it for the plot were we? We were watching it for the DRILLING! The KILLING! The depraved mess that saw it banned for 15 years from shops in the UK. As might be expected, time has not treated this shock factor well; we see more and bloodier films all the time, a slope that leads Abel Ferrara's sick and twisted video nasty looking like a film we might catch on evening television. Yeah there're a couple of fairly powerful scenes (I'm thinking the drill in the tramps forehead...) but it's hardly the stuff nightmares are made of and it's hard to imagine it having a corrupting effect on anyone really - video nasties were blamed for violence in the 80s as much as violent computer games are today.

The most damning thing you can say about this film is that, far from being especially good or bad, far from being impressively depraved or tame, this is really quite middle-of-the-road. I wanted to love it, I wanted it to live up to its reputation but I came away feeling vaguely disappointed.

Stonehenge Apocalypse: What's the disaster genre about?

2010-07-22T11:25:00.005+01:00

BOOM! BLAM! SMASH! KABOOM!

There's something so captivating about the end of the world. Pretty much ever since someone thought "hey, who needs a plot when I have special effects?", the apocalyptic disaster has been a mainstay of the cinema world. It's pretty much the ultimate one-upmanship in cinematic disaster terms (speaking on a terrestrial level at least). Why blow up a car when you could blow up a house? Why blow up a house when you could blow up a whole street? Why blow up a whole street when you could... And so on and so forth until someone says: "Let's destroy the whole damn WORLD!". And everyone high-fives him/her for their brilliant idea and they all go down the pub to have a drink and to bask in how awesome they are.

At least that's how I imagine the boardroom discussions that precede a disaster movie.

From H.G.Wells' War of the Worlds through to last year's 2012, the disaster movie has a pedigree of at least 60 years. It's risen and fallen in popularity over that time but, for a genre in which special effects play at least as large a part as characterisation, plot or any of that "traditional" stuff, as special effects improve the genre will find new heights. Or... it'll find bigger and better explosions at the very least.

On the flip-side to this, though, is the fact that - as trashy low-content, low-brainpower movies, they fall squarely into the b-movie half of our (conceptual) cinematic Venn-diagram. As everyone know, B-movies and big-budgets do not exactly go hand in hand. This can spell awkward difficulties for the disaster movie, the very definition of a "the-more-cash-the-better(bigger)" genre.

So who will rise to the challenge and step up and create the low-budget disaster flick? Well... just about everyone in fact. There's heaps of them. Puzzlingly, for a type of film whose continued existence is only validated by special-effects improvements, everyone seems to take a gleeful pride in churning out disaster movies with craptastic effects. Perhaps they're confident that their obvious enthusiasm will override any technical issues. Perhaps even more surprisingly, this mostly seems to be true.

The film that sparked this post was the SyFy channel's very own Stonehenge Apocalypse. There are certain things you expect from a SyFy original: bad acting, crap CG effects, a silly idea and 90 minutes of good, solid FUN. Stonehenge Apocalypse takes these values very much to heart and delivers each in spadefuls.

The basic plot-line is that all the world's ancient monuments are connected by lay-lines (or something like that) and channel electro-magnetic fequencies all over the place. When Stonehenge moves and starts to vapourise people (yes!), the world begins to get worried; the British scientists want to study it, the British military want to nuke it and only the once-superstar-but-now-discredited physicist from Maine can offer an explanation. Except of course no-one listens to him because he's waving around a device that looks like a portable tv and babbling about undiscovered ancient civilisations.

This film has quite literally everything you could ask for: Agressive ancient monuments, over-zealous military, a cult, gunfights, a lone hero who sees things clearly. And they blow stuff up too! I shan't give away too much about which places get blown up (though would it really matter if I did?) except for the Pyramids (which I just HAD to include a picture of) and um,.. the ENTIRETY OF INDONESIA. We don't really see Indonesia explode, but it's passed off with a bit of a shrug; "oh yeah, Indonesia just exploded".

So thank you SyFy channel; thank you for reminding me that actually I was wrong. THe disaster movie is not about the quality of the effects, not at all. The disaster movie is about blowing stuff up and having a lot of fun. Stonehenge Apocalypse ticked both those boxes.

A few of my favourite shots now:

THE PYRAMIDS EXPLODE! KABOOOM!

And a COmputer-Generated Plane! Wow!

Seriously, this film is brilliant. Go watch SYFY NOW! (Sky 129 in the UK)

Please remember to check out our new sister blog Cult Collage!

Poster Hunt #11 - Nightfall (and New Blog! New Blog!)

2010-07-16T13:31:00.003+01:00

First up, here's a Poster Hunt for July.

Here are a couple of posters for Jaques Tourneur's Nightfall (IMDb) from 1957, starring Aldo Ray, Brian Keith and Anne Bancroft. I don't write much about the films for these Poster Hunt posts (as I select them for artwork rather than the film - most of them I haven't seen), so if you do want to know more about the film I'll direct you to this comprehensive blog post at Noir of the Week.

Every day for five years? That's quite a claim!

*************************

Secondly, I'd like to introduce you to Chopping Mall's new sister blog, Cult Collage. The focus of this one will be mostly pictures (although music might feature occasionally too) and it'll pick up on interesting film and non-film related ephemera. It's pretty difficult to describe what I intend it to be; I think a collection of interesting images sums it up best, with a leaning towards pulp-art.

Currently it only has the 11 Poster Hunt pages from this blog but it'll be updated often (far more often than this one) with other interesting posters, leaflets and ephemera.

So head over to:

Sherlock Holmes or Have The Asylum Upped Their Game?

2010-07-08T10:55:00.005+01:00

[Screenshots and pictures coming soon]

Nowadays, with golden age of the b-movie so far behind us, with double screenings a rarity and everyone so enthralled to the big-budget CGI of Hollywood, the b-movie has become a self-conscious postmodern creation. No longer does it just happen to be bad, trashy, sleazy or cheesy; the b-movie style is actively sought, a nostalgic re-creation of the kind of films that were once so important and are now generally obsolete.

There seems to be three different directions that the modern b-movie goes, with all of them falling somewhere within this triangle of styles/intentions. At one extreme we have the indulgent nostalgia of films like Planet Terror, Death Proof etc; these are big-budget films made by big-name stars - their link the b-movies is through being a loving recreation of the tropes and cliches of this kind of cinema - we get girls on bikes, exploding heads, senseless killing and big guns.

Another extreme is the ironically crappy film; though they might not have started out intending to be such a thing, Troma Films have become the standard-bearers of this variety of b-movie. They're awful films. We know they're awful, they know they're awful, but they clearly have such fun making them and throw everything they can at making them silly fun to watch (the recurring continuity-smashing car crash has become an incredible in-joke) that we can forgive them an awful lot. They're certainly not to everyone's taste but you can't doubt their love for what they do for an instant; Lloyd Kaufman's passion and constant championing of independent craptastic cinema is astounding.

Now we come to the third point of the triangle and it's by far the least interesting; b-movies churned out for cash. Of course, that's what a b-movie always was, although by now it's so far removed from creativity and any pretensions of art that it tends to be very dull. As much as Troma represented the previous point, this one belongs primarily to The Asylum (although Video Brinqueado have a fair claim to make for this title too...). Asylum films tend to me send-ups or rip-offs (depending on your point of view) of major budget Hollywood productions. From Transmorphers through Alien Versus Hunter to Sunday School Musical. Whilst some of these might sound funny, that's exactly the point; Asylum's creativity rarely extends beyond a humourous title. These films are cheaply made, imagination-less cash-ins, trading on selling cheap films with funny titles that no-one will enjoy. Death Racers their rip-off of the Hollywood remake of Death Race 2000 that starred the Insane Clown Posse was impossibly awful; not bad in a so-bad-it's-good way but in a please-god-rip-out-my-eyeballs way.

Of late, however, Asylum seem to have upped their game somewhat. First came last year's Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus which - as well as not actually being a direct rip-off of anything - was actually, as far as Asylum films go, pretty damn good. So much so that it generated enough internet hype to earn it a limited cinema release and the director a handful of interviews in film magazines and broadsheet newspapers. I watched it, I enjoyed it but I noted it down as a one-off fluke for the Asylum and didn't get my hopes up for more.

********

I have just finished watching Sherlock Holmes (NOT the Guy Ritchie version, but the Asylum's) and... though I find it hard to admit, it was really quite good.

We have lesser-known but not unknown actors, a good fun story and... DINOSAURS.

The dark of Victorian London fortunately encouraged them to make a film with (slightly) less crappy CG effects than many of their previous efforts; smoky moonlit streets creating far more atmosphere than I can recall in an Asylum film before. The story is indeed completely bonkers - possibly blending elements of Conan-Doyle's other masterpiece The Lost World - but is certainly never dull. Strange deaths and reports of prehistoric monsters are haunting London and only Holmes will be able to put together the clues to discover the answer.

It's at it's best when it's being mysterious and - to tell the truth - does fall apart somewhat around the hour mark as they swap intrigue and mystery for a bombastic last half-hour but hopefully by then you'll already have been suckered in.

I should make it very clear; I am by no means claiming that this is some masterpiece; it's crap... but it's not nearly as crap as you might expect and, above all, it's entirely watchable crap. If the Asylum can ~~churn out~~ produce more like this, I'll have to revise my opinion of them.

(They currently have Titanic 2 in the works! Keep an eye out for that...)

Let Me In // Let The Right One In

2010-07-05T00:33:00.009+01:00

This is just a short and grumpy post.

Let Me In. If you've been paying attention you'll know that it's the forthcoming remake of 2008's (?) Let The Right One In, a Swedish film that is easily one of the best horror productions of recent years (maybe even the decade?) and an antidote to the sparkly fang-less prancing of the Twilight saga.

Matt Reeves, the director of the remake is reported in Empire as saying that he simply can't understand the furore around the remake, claiming it should be normal as Hollywood has been churning out remakes for years. Quite apart from the fact that the "it's happened lots of times before" argument is a completely pathetic method of avoiding the point entirely, he has also chosen to ignore that the remake culture he refers to is usually concerned with remaking films that are twenty or so years old. Not two.

As an example, the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street, although completely unnecessary, is clearly catering to an entirely new audience, a younger generation who haven't seen the original but are (perhaps unwittingly) just waiting to be shepherded in to the world of gory horror flicks.

Let Me In, however, is surely only really being made to cater to those who are too damn lazy to read subtitles. The recent Spanish zombie masterpiece [Rec] was given the same treatment and turned into Quarantine, a move almost universally condemned, and I really struggle to see how the situation will be any different here.

For anyone who's read the (fantastic) original novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, there is perhaps a glimmer of hope that they'll go back to the text and pick out some of the interesting sub-plots that were stripped in the first transition from page to screen. This is surely the only thing which could justify a re-make. It is, however, pretty unlikely as Lindqvist wrote the screenplay for the original and hasn't touched the new version (as far as I can see, anyway)

So, it's fingers crossed hoping for increased faithfulness to the text, but I'm afraid I'm entirely sceptical. I'll still watch it, but it'll have to work twice as hard to convince me that it's a worthwhile film.

Trailer for the original:

Just like Dracula... it rises, it rises!

2010-07-01T22:24:00.005+01:00

Sigh.

Once again I've ignored this blog for way too long (not one singe post in June! Eesh...) and it's become dormant and sleepy.

Once again I have a handful of "real world" reasons that I can mumble in an ashamed manner until I feel I've justified myself.

But more importantly: once again it's time to kick Chopping Mall's battered corpse into life! There it was, thinking that it could finally slip happily into the afterlife of eternal peace, only to discover that one quick occult-magic session, half a pint of roosters blood and a little bit of typing were all that was needed to drag it kicking and screaming and frothing at the mouth back into some sort of life. Much like Christopher Lee's Dracula, however many times it dies, we can always pull it back from the grave.

Last time I pulled the blog back from the abyss I gave it a spangly new banner and fiddled with the look of it. That isn't happening right now but here we go anyway... (not entirely true; I have replaced the banner with a slightly more minimal alternaternative I made a while ago)

June was a fairly slow month for films for me. Between other excitements though, I did manage to watch the following:

1. Fear In the Night – Hammer psychological horror set in an ex-school. Really rather fab and surprisingly menacing for a Hammer film.

2. Terror En Tren de Medianoche (Terror on the Midnight Train) – Set in a quiet Spanish town, the Station-Master discovers some eerie secrets about a train that arrives in the dead of night to ferry the dead. Ever so slow to get going but rewarding if you can stick through it.

3. Black Snake – Dreary Russ Meyer flick set in a slave plantation. Dull as anything.

4. Dr Moreau’s House of Pain – Bad prosthetic monsters, bad plot, bad acting, bad film. For all that it is still quite light-hearted silly fun. If you know anything about Dr Moreau you'll know what kind of thing to expect.

5. El Asesino del Parking – Spanish slasher flick about a guy who kills in carparks. One of the highlights of the month's films; this manages both to be gripping murder mystery and also rather wonderfully gruesome. I'd recommend it to anyone, though it's not for everyone.

6. Opera – Argento slasher. Easily one of the best; bloody and great fun. There really isn't much else to say; if you've seen an Argento film you'll know the kind of thing to expect - beautiful cinematography, grisly deaths - and if you haven't then I'd say here was a good place to start.

7. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – You have to be in the right kind of mood to appreciate the very introspective gritty British dramas. Luckily I was, and this is fascinating and rewarding. Not a popcorn-and-laughs kind of film but certainly essential viewing.

8. Sunshine Cleaning – Crime-scene cleaning comedy. This was fun in a light-hearted and frivolous way. I think I'd expected a little too much from it really and was left a little disappointed, but it's amiable enough stuff.

9. Blade Runner (Final Cut) – Awesome sci-fi fun with Han Solo and robots. Yeah? Does it really need any more words? You've already seen it right? (If the answer to that was 'no', stop reading now and go hunt out a copy)

10. Solarbabies – Cheesy 80s dystopian roller-blade flick. Quite fantastic in a bonkers sort of way, although it does carry it's share of sickeningly sweet sentimental fluff. Definitely worth it for the roller-blade action and the synth soundtrack though.

11. Quarantine – Awesome Canadian dystopia with sickness and oppression. Power-crazy leaders, a brutal law-enforcement force and a mysterious terminal illness have created a futuristic America of nightmares. It's a surprisingly enjoyable and well put-together film.

12. Dragon Lives Again – Awesomely dubbed bonkers martial arts with “Bruce Lee” - a character, not the actor. This is something quite surreal, involving other worlds, 'Popeye', 'Dracula', a whole host of reanimated mummy-ish creatures and some fantastic marshal arts.

Son Of Hitler

2010-05-27T18:27:00.005+01:00

Sometimes you just can't understand how or why a film was forgotten about. Sometimes you really can. Let's just start with the title: it doesn't bode well (or perhaps it does, depending on your opinion!). Son Of Hitler. Ok. Right. It's a film about the son of Adolf Hitler. Unless of course it's another Hitler or some kind of clever metaphor for... no, no, no, it's that Hitler. Yes.

Well... - you might say - perhaps it's some kind of historical documentary about Hitler's ideas living on (no...) or... let me see.... could it be some kind of conspiracy theory about real surviving heirs? Again.. no. This is a fictional film about Hitler's son. It is also a comedy.

Wow. A comedy, you say? Yes, a comedy.

Peter Cushing stars as nazi-saluting Heinrich Haussener, camping it up rather as he stomps around in a desperate attempt to find young Wilhelm Hitler, Hitler's surviving son who was raised in the mountains in complete ignorance of the war. Or of reading. Or writing. Or what his name is. (He's also implausibly young, given that this is set when it is filmed - some 30 years after the war - but that's another issue)

And herein lies the er... 'comedy'. Young Wilhelm is coming down from the mountains, birth-certificate (that he can't read) in hand and is completely mystified by everyone's astonished reactions. A local post-master chases him out the shop, he goes to a bar and drinks beer wearing full Nazi insignia, a judge declares his 'lies' the workings of a damaged mind and commits him to a mental institute immediately.

It's a bizarre mix of political 'humour' and slapstick fun. The slapstick element in fact almost succeeds in it's complete bizarre senselessness - the straight-jacketed mental patients being forced to play football in the mental institute is a stand-out scene, the institute officer acting as referee finding it impossible to understand why they can't master a simple throw-in... - as well as some mildly diverting comedy involving a paternoster lift - although whilst watching you can't help but wish there were more skilled slapstick comedians diving in and out; it's ever so Marx brothers but with none of the finesse.

This should hardly come as a surprise, as finesse is surely a word that few could associate with this film. Quite what poor old Peter Cushing is doing in this film, making over young Wilhelm in the desperate hope that he can continue the work of his father, is anybody's guess. You really hope that he told his agent to get him back onto a Hammer Horror set as fast as possible. This was just one year after his appearance in Star Wars! Surely there must have been some mistake in signing up for this?

For those of us who can sit through anything with Peter Cushing in, it might well be worth a look, and for the rest? Well, it's not entirely without merit.... merely almost entirely without merit! The handful of semi-humorous scenes do relatively little to make up for the tragically unfunny script, appallingly bad central concept and cack-handed production. You really do wonder at point this seemed like a good idea. And how many of the cast and production team kept coming back each day fully aware of what kind of monster they were making.

This film should never have been made. But as it has been made, you certainly ought to watch it. Sadly, it's rare as hell and - I WONDER WHY? - appears never to have had a very limited release and has never made it to DVD. Let's hold out for the Blu-Ray copy then, yes? Fingers crossed.

Big Screen Big Tune #3 - Zombi 2

2010-05-20T14:50:00.000+01:00

This month, after a short break, Big Screen Big Tune is the brooding, stormy masterpiece by Fabio Frizzi for Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2. Enjoy.

Poster Hunt #10 - Suspiria & Giallo

2010-05-10T14:29:00.000+01:00

Whilst most of the posters I've selected for Poster Hunt have been classic style, painted scenes, I thought that this time I'd go for a more modern, minimal look: clean lines and bold block colours.

So here we have two posters, the first for Dario Argento's Suspiria (a truly fantastic film, I recommend it highly) and the second for his much more recent Giallo (which I haven't seen and which received very mixed reviews)

Regardless of the quality of the films though, the posters are certainly both gorgeous.

Zulo (Hole)

2010-05-04T11:59:00.003+01:00

Right. Zulo. Hmm...

Zulo is, despite being clever, intriguing, mysterious and a whole host of other good adjectives, at it's heart a 77 minute long short-film.

For reasons I've never entirely understood, we don't seem to have much of a tradition of short-films in the UK (or the US as far as I know). Sure, there are handfulls of short-films screened at film festivals but compared to the Spanish, we're a bit thin on the ground in the short film category. Just google cortomentraje to see the wealth of - often free-to-watch- Spanish language websites devoted entirely to the short-film. It's a difference that's even reflected in the language; in English we say short-film, implying a mini version of a 'real' film, whilst in Spanish the words cortomentraje and largomentraje are given equal standing. Each exists in it's own right, rather than one being a diminished form of the other. (As an interesting aside, the same happens in literature: the Spanish have cuentos and novelas whilst we only manage story/novel and short-story/novella)

With the cultural differences out the way, the puzzling aspect about Zulo is that, by rights, it ought to be a short film. To summarise the plot briefly (it can only be brief): a man awakes to find himself in a hole. He is kept there, fed but imprisoned by two monosyllabic balaclava-sporting captors.

That's more or less it.

It's decidedly well done; the cinematography is never less than beautiful, it's claustrophobic and intense and you can really feel for Manuel as he slowly goes mad, desperately trying to keep hold of his physical condition (running in circles around his tiny prison) and cling to his sanity. Jaime Garcia Arija is fantastic as the imprisoned Manuel and, generally, it's hard to find fault with the film.

Except for there being 77 minutes of it.

I feel ungrateful for moaning about this - I definitely enjoyed it as a whole - but it was simply too long for the content. With a few of the endless broodingly slow scenes clipped, this would be a tense and brilliant psychological thriller I'd recommend without hesitation. As it is, it's merely good. Damn with faint praise, yes, but still worth a watch if you've got a quiet hour and a bit.

Poster Hunt #9 - Blood Bath

2010-04-25T21:18:00.002+01:00

A fairly late-in-the-month Poster Hunt, this classic and enticing poster comes from the B-movie super house that was American International Pictures.

This actually sounds pretty intriguing! From IMDb:

Roger Corman, noted producer/director, hired Jack Hill in 1964 to write and direct a horror film with the condition that he make liberal use of footage from "Operation Titian", a thriller Corman produced with Francis Ford Coppola (!) in Yugoslavia, but deemed unworthy of USA release. Hill was given actor William Campbell, Titian's star, and hired Lori Saunders (still using her original name of Linda Saunders, and soon Petticoat Junction-bound).

However, Corman didn't like the resulting film about a murderous sculptor possessed by the spirit of his ancestor, who was killed by a beautiful witch. So he shelved it for a year, bringing it out for director Stephanie Rothman to revise. Rothman turned the possessed sculptor into a vampire, shot extensive new footage (using a few members of the supporting cast) and---bingo!---"Blood Bath" was out in the theaters at last,

Might have to hunt this one out!

Terror on the 40th Floor

2010-04-20T23:37:00.007+01:00

Sometimes, a review just doesn't tell you whether you want to watch it. Sometimes, writing a review just isn't appealing.

With these two things in mind, I present to you the ultimate im gimmick-y blog posting: the first 30 minutes of the film, blow by blow. There's no spoilers (there's hardly a plot), but hopefully it'll give you an idea of whether you want to watch it (you don't).

Here, then, is Terror on the 40th Floor. A disaster movie about a skyscraper. Die Hard, this ain't.

29secs: Awesome synth tune kicks in. This has started well. And look! Father Christmas. It must be set at Christmas.

1min: The strings kick in. The music’s nice, but the credits are otherwise pretty dull.

2mins: There’s an office party going on and they’re all drunk.

3mins: Woman on the phone is arguing with her mum about whether she should be with her son,
rather than at the party. She probably should. This is all going to end badly.

5mins: A guy sneaks off with two girls and bursts in upon his morose father brooding in his office. They’re invited in for a drink.

6mins: It’s champagne. Wow.

7mins: Another guy burst in with two girls. Suddenly the party is relocating to the office.

8mins: Most of the drunken revellers are heading home, the security guard shepherds them out.

9mins: Kelly who should be locking up and checking the building is clear is encouraged out of the building by the boss.

10mins: Charley arrives and er… rather implausibly has been demanded to perform maintenance work on the building ON CHRISTMAS EVE.

11mins: Back to the remaining party group upstairs. Champagne flows as they begin to flirt…

12mins: Oh noes! Charley the maintenance man is drinking from a bottle of liquor! How terribly irresponsible. He just knocked something on the floor too.

13mins: More boring flirting. The dialogue is pretty crappy.

14mins: Charley is doing something strenuous in the dark. Not sure what. He takes another big swig of liquor.

15mins: Ahahaha, he just kicked over a tiny lantern, which set everything on fire. Including his legs. What a shame. The security guy is running around too.

16mins: Oh, the ambulance has arrived ever-so speedily. But one of them has already died. Hard luck, buddy. The other man, merely injured, was the security guard who has informed the emergency services that there’s no-one inside the building. BUT THERE IS!!!11!!!!

18mins: The fire has climbed seven floors in the last three minutes of film. What’s going to happen in the next 80 minutes?

20mins: There’s a little bit of boozy seduction going on here. And some comparison of notes between old flame and new.

20mins + 30secs: He has a wife! Eeek!

21mins: Guys are fighting fire. It’s not very clear what’s going on. Sirens wail. They’re cutting the power.

23mins: He seducing her by describing the boardroom. What a player…

24mins: The music’s gone really dramatic… not a lot’s happening though. Until…. Snogging!

25mins: Ah! But up comes the topic of his wife.

26mins: Hazy flash-back (or is it flash-forward) to games of badminton in the sunshine. And then she drops the bomb: “Jim.. I…I’m pregnant”

28mins: “So.. we can have an abortion or get married?”

29mins: He’s gotta think about it.

29mins: Back to the now, sirens wail. Not a lot else is happening.

In conclusion: unless you're gripped by these details and care about the cheating businessman or any of the other boring, thin characters... I really wouldn't bother with this one.

Thank you and goodnight.

Angel Blade

2010-04-11T15:59:00.003+01:00

The last thing I posted here (see below) was a rant/argument about how the "b" in "b-movie" didn't mean bad. Sadly, as is so often the way when you try to make an argument, the next thing to come along so totally undermined my point that I'd have quite happily pretended it didn't exist. But I shan't, if only because admitting that there are exceptions to any argument is a good thing to do.

That next thing that came along was Angel Blade.

[WARNING! SPOILER ALERT! THIS REVIEW REVEALS THE PLOT OF THE FILM]

Now, I'll be straight about this from the begining; I bought Angel Blade on DVD for £0.99 at the nearest er... 99p shop. So I'll admit that I wasn't necessarily expecting a masterpiece (although I did pick up a couple of Dario Argento films there too... Wine some, lose some). And masterpiece it most certainly wasn't.

I would have no hesitation in naming Angel Blade as one of the worst films I have watched in recent memory.

The creative 'team' doesn't exactly bode well. From the "Deavid Heavener Entertainment Group" comes a film that is written by David Heavener, produced by David Heavener, directed by David Heavener and starring David Heavener. The guy has taken the role of the auteur to a higher degree. You feel it was only really physical impossibility that stopped him giving himself all the other parts in the film. Oh yeah, and the fact that his (and only his) numerous sex-scenes wouldn't have been as fun for him to write/direct/star in if there wasn't anyone else around...

I'm getting ahead of myself though. I'll go back to the premise of the film. A mysterious killer is murdering prostitutes in LA. So far so good. Anyone who's seen Franco's New York Ripper or indeed pretty much anything made in Italy between 1960 and 1980 can tell you that this is a fine starting point for a film. It guarrantees you a good dose of sleeze, gore, intrigue and action. Perfect. Who could mess this one up?

David Heavener, that's who.

By null at 2010-03-30

The plot manages to be both confusing and dull, the sex scenes bear very little relation to the film - more like sexual interludes than actual scenes - and the 'astonishing' secret of the film is laughable. (Oh yes, here come the spoilers...) Not content with merely being writer/producer/director/lead policeman character, David Heavener's character is also the psycho killer. His reasons? Just wait and see... (drumroll) The reason that David Heavener, once-good cop, has gone on a pregnant-prostitute killing rampage in LA is because... his pregnant girlfriend/wife walked off a roof and died.

Yes.

I'll write that again. The reason that David Heavener, once-good cop, has gone on a pregnant-prostitute killing rampage in LA is because... his pregnant girlfriend/wife walked off a roof and died. It wasn't that she was killed in the line of duty. It wasn't that she was even killed at all. She was looking through the viewfinder of her camera and, in perhaps the most implausible moment in cinema history, she walked. off. the. roof. of. a. building. Splat.

Oh dear.

If however, all this gives the impression that I didn't enjoy this film, you're very much mistaken. Cinematic genius apart, Angel Blade is a stunning example of just how badly you can tell a nonsense story and, as such, is totally worth a watch! I might leave it a while until a second viewing though...

The 'B' in B-Movie Doesn't Mean Bad: A Rant.

2010-03-30T14:20:00.004+01:00

As you can probably tell from just the briefest glance at this blog, I watch a lot of what would commonly be called ‘bad films’. Before we go any further, it should be made clear that this is a misleading and unfair label for these films. Films today tend to break down into depressingly few categories. They are either Big Budget, Independent, ‘Art-house’ or Foreign. Anything else tends to get labelled as bad. What’s even more disappointing is that, in the vast majority of cases ‘independent’, ‘art-house’ and ‘foreign’ often run together. So we’re left with: Big-Budget-Small-Brain-Blockbusters (the kind you eat popcorn with), Arty/Weird/Intellectual/Foreign/Independent (the kind you sip red wine with) and ‘the rest’ (the kind you drink lots of beer with).

robot intersection dance; zombie attack-bird!
Originally uploaded by ٭betenoir٭

This ‘the rest’ category has a bad image nowadays. Once-upon-a-time, in the days of the b-movie, these films were important. They didn’t have the cash of the Hollywood hits, nor the intellectual/pretentious (delete as appropriate) element of the indie/arty/weird/foreign film. No. They were made on tight budgets, with tight time-limits and tight resources. They were made to be enjoyed. This is pulp cinema. Nowadays we associate the term ‘b-movie’ and perhaps even ‘pulp’ with ‘bad’. This is simply not (necessarily) the case.

Compare film to literature. Again, we find the blockbusters (your Dan Browns etc), an appreciation for ‘classics’, an appreciation for the experimental/philosophical/foreign/intellectual but you also find an considerable about (albeit way less than there used to be) of pulp literature. Whilst you might very well want to label Dan Brown as pulp (and are probably correct…), there is a difference. By pulp I’m talking about the books that are churned out at an astonishing rate. The detective stories and murder mysteries that fill shelves in bookshops and libraries and lie discarded on trains, benches and café tables.

These are not high-art. Nevertheless, they are also – to put it simply – not bad. The most essential thing whilst writing genre-fiction to be sold, read and forgotten about is obviously not to be inventive, challenging or weird – that’s not what your readers (or perhaps better, customers) want – but the author is required to at least write a cracking story. It’s got to be exciting. It’s got to be mysterious. It’s got to keep you turning the pages. They might not be books you’d recommend to a friend, see reviewed in the newspaper or ever want to read again, but they should be books that are gripping reads.

The same applies to film, or at least used to.

Most of the films I prefer to watch do not have brilliant special effects. They don’t have exquisite cinematography. They don’t have big name stars neither in front of nor behind the camera. They don’t have challenging dialogue, open-ended ambiguity, subtleties or philosophical concerns. They are simply good fun.

Sadly it seems that nowadays many people can’t help but sneer a little at the thought of watching Hammer Horror, Toho Godzilla films or anything that wasn’t made by James Cameron or Michael Bay. At the opposite end of the spectrum there are those that sit and smirk at everyone else, whilst claiming there is no such thing as cinema outside of the masterpieces of Michael Haneke, Kurosawa et al.

What confuses me still more is that we seem perfectly content to watch the same kind of material on TV. We watch hours of detective shows, crime dramas etc, many of which are feature length and produced with no greater budget nor skills than the films we have been content to ignore. Is it simply the element of laziness? Is it just because we can sit down on the sofa, sip our mug of coffee and let it all wash over us? The answer, sadly, is probably yes.

El Crack

2010-03-19T17:29:00.003Z

When you think of film noir, you think of it's true home - America. We think of corrupt cops, mean streets, whisky on the breath of hard-working loner detectives and screeching tyres through the city.

As you turn towards the 70s, the real Noir has long ceased to be and is now replaced by the neo-noir. The relationship between these films and the original classic Hollywood output is confusing and often contradictory. They are at once parodies of classic noir, re-imaginings of the genre and cinematic love-letters to a genre left behind.

This brings all sorts of other concerns; unless they go to the extent of setting themselves within the time period of the classic noir, contemporary issues become involved, the world had changed between the 40s and 70s and so the hard-boiled detective story had to as well. Similarly, if we move the narrative away from America, the different geography brings it's own tensions, styles and attitudes. The final product is, in many respects, a million miles away from the film noir, yet somehow remains linked.

In real terms, films like El Crack (Spain, 1981) are as far removed from true noir as American teen slashers of the 90s are from Italian giallo thrillers. Only a few core elements are left to connect the two genres yet somehow you can't help but see a link.

In making El Crack, they certainly intended the link to be visible; from the opening dedication to Dashiell Hammett to the corruption, gunshots and nighttime city, this is both desperately seeking comparisons to American noir and making a statement of Spanish independence. It is both derivative and original. It's also pretty good fun.

Alfredo Landa plays the central detective, Germán, excellently. It is his performance that both links and distances this from the American noir. He is an ex-cop, a workaholic detective who is too honest and honourable for his own good. He passionately works late into the night on his case - a missing girl - fuelled by coffee, cigarettes and (asserting the Spanish-ness) the odd calamari sandwhich.

The other characters are mostly 'by-numbers' hard-boiled characters; Germán has a slimy ex-thief assistant and lives in a world populated by crooked cops and businessmen who think themselves above the law. Where it branches far from Noir however, is Germán's love interest. I don't know whether it came about as a result of Spanish Catholiscism, a deep-routed belief in the family unit or whatever else but, rather than the femme-fatal of the American noir, charged with sex and danger, Germán is pursuing a relationship with a pretty but conservative nurse. It's all very civilised; he picks up her daughter from school while she works, they go for strolls in the woods or off to see a film. It's all very... nice.

These niceties only serve to make the brutality of the last third of the film more brutal. Germán may be a much milder man than the creations of Chandler or Hammett, but when he's pushed he acts surprisingly coldly in pursuit of justice.

The only real criticism of the film is that the pacing is a bit awkward. European films do tend to be a lot slower than American films; we seem to prefer slow build rather than a rollercoaster of climactic moments, but this one is decidedly on the slow side of 'slow-build'. The first half and hour to forty minutes do drag somewhat but, I promise you, it's worth persevering as the film builds slowly but surely towards a thrilling ending.

Poster Hunt #8 - Goliath and the Vampires

2010-03-07T14:25:00.001Z

This gorgeous piece of retro poster-art looks back to a day when a film could be sold entirely on the strength of a poster. And looking at this one, you can see why!

SEE: The Revolt of the Faceless Humanoids? Count me in!

Big Screen Big Tune #2 - Django

2010-02-28T16:54:00.002Z

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know that Ennio Morricone was the true king of the Spaghetti Western soundtrack but there were definitely some others out there too!

For the second Big Screen, Big Tune, we present Luis Bacalov's theme song for Django.

Chorus: django!

Django, have you always been alone?

Chorus: django!

Django, have you never loved again?
Love will live on, oh oh oh...
Life must go on, oh oh oh...
For you cannot spend your life regreatting.

Chorus: django!

Django, you must face another day.

Chorus: django!

Django, now your love has gone away.
Once you loved her, whoa-oh...
Now you've lost her, whoa-oh-oh-oh...
But you've lost her for-ever, django.

When there are clouds in the skies, and they are grey.
You may be sad but remember that love will pass away.

Oh django!
After the showers is the sun.
Will be shining...

[instrumental solo]

Once you loved her, whoa-oh...
Now you've lost her, whoa-oh-oh-oh...
But you've lost her for-ever, django.

When there are clouds in the skies, and they are grey.
You may be sad but remember that love will pass away.
Oh django!
After the showers is the sun.
Will be shining...
Django!
Oh oh oh django!
You must go on,
Oh oh oh django...

Emily Booth

2010-02-28T14:48:00.002Z

Emily Booth has, on reflection got to be pretty much the coolest women in horror. There are precious few people who take horror and genre-films very seriously and fewer still who try to drag it kicking and screaming, bleeding and oozing, into the mainstream's attention.

In this respect, we ought to forget about Emily Booth being one of the coolest women in horror. She is one of the coolest people in horror. I mostly know her from the sublimely awesome show Shock Movie Massacre. You could probably count the number of recent television programmes about genre film on the fingers of one hand. Perhaps even after several of your fingers were sliced off in a Hong Kong based revenge epic...

But Shock Movie Massacre IS a genre-horror tv programme, and best of all: it's really good. I've read interviews with the producer (I think) who sadly claimed that it was unlikely ever to get a proper release as a series on DVD as the numerous gory cult-movie clips were only ever licensed for TV. This is sad. But don't get too down about it, the entire series is (sssshhh, wisper it!) available online if you hunt around a bit.

Perhaps we shouldn't bother turning back to this series though; she's now presenting a new series, Gorezone Movie Massacre that you can get on the cover DVD with Gorezone magazine (which I sadly haven't seen) as well as producing her own (excellent) series Emily Booth's Behind The Screams (available on YouTube). The most recent of these takes a peek behind the filming of Doghouse, in which Booth played the awesomely terrifying "Snipper", zombie hairdresser on a rampage!

What comes out most clearly when watching her shows - whether she was chatting with Paul Naschy, diving out of cars or learning how to fake a good decapitation - is that she clearly loves the films she's talking about. As the horror-fan is typically confined to basements and attics, shying away from daylight as if they were vampires, it's refreshing to see people speaking publicly and passionately for horror films.

Keep doing it, right?

Emily Booth on Twitter

World Gone Wild

2010-02-18T19:54:00.002Z

After wading through a lot of horror recently (especially Vampires!), I was begining to feel the need to turn my gaze to something a little different. At this point, I usually sit down to choose between my other two favourite genres; is it to be Spaghetti Western or camp 80s Dystopian thrills?

I chose the camp 80s dystopia and World Gone Wild certainly didn't disappoint.

Made in the 80s? Check.
A desert world where water has become the most precious commodity? Check.
Adam Ant as a bad guy? Check.
Killer frisbees, motorbikes, gunfights and moonshine? Check, check, check, check.

It would be grossly unfair to call this a b-movie by numbers - it's not, it's exciting and original - but I think it'd be true to say that it does more or less some up my idea of what a b-movie is.

From the opening voice-over telling us just how ruined the world is (no rain in 50 years), the crappy camera effects in the opening credits and the entirely amazing theme song (AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE HERE) you just know what kind of movie this is going to be. The bad guys will sneer, the world will be full of wreckage and rubble, people will have regressed into a shouting, snarling, gambling, boozey mass, a dashing hero will save the day, everything will be fine. Needless to say, all of these things are true. The thrill of World Gone Wild is not that any part of it is unexpected, shocking or particularly innovative, just that it's really good fun!

Disengage brain, open a beer, cook some popcorn; this is a film that is made to be enjoyed. From Adam Ant's wonderful smirking bad-guy to the villagers with their 80s haircuts, defending their livelihood with a wall of abandoned cars, if you like dystopian films, 80s cheese or b-movies in general, you can't fail to enjoy this.

The Best Laid Plans...

2010-02-16T21:44:00.002Z

...can go somewhat awry.

February started well but suddenly it's the 16th and I haven't posted in nearly 2 weeks. Damn. That wasn't meant to happen. All sorts of other things (real life!) got in the way for a bit; but there'll be some good new posts up soon. I've promised a WomenInHorrow post on Emily Booth, I NEED to write about Birdemic (the world's best worst film) and a whole host of other things I've watched.

For now, I shall just point you in the direction of Paula Haifley's website. Paula was, amongst her fellow students,"the only student to make a thesis film featuring a disembowling", which is - quite frankly - easily reason enough to check out her website and her rather awesome short 'Movie Monster Insurance'

More info on this page!

Poster Hunt #7 -James Bond and The Matrix - Ghana style

2010-02-04T14:03:00.000Z

This month Poster Hunt comes in the form of TWO gorgeously ridiculous hand-painted posters from Ghana. Many of these paintings were made by (incredibly creative) artists who had not seen the film

And if you like these, you should definitely check out Ephemera Assemblyman

Blood and Donuts

2010-02-03T22:08:00.003Z

For a first real Women in Horror Recognition Month post, I chose to watch Holly Dale's Blood and Donuts. I'll be honest; I only chose the film because it has a female director and female-directed feature-length horror is all too rare. I must admit that, going on only the title, I really wasn't expecting much.

How wrong could I be?

Though I won't pretend that this is absolutely essential viewing, this is a clever, fun, sensitive vampire film; sharing much more with thoughtful films like Interview With The Vampire and Let the Right One In than with Hammer's neck-biting romps. At the heart of this film we have the indefinitely old vampire, Boya - a "humanist vampire" as we discover. Much like Brad Pitt/Louis in Interview With The Vampire, this leaves Goya to lead a less than glamorous life, munching on rats and pidgeons as privately as he can and trying not to court too much attention.

If we're completely honest, the plot doesn't exactly go anywhere and there're a handful of unsatisfyingly loose ends (bad scripting or unfortunate editing, who knows?) but the bulk of this film is about the relationships between Goya, Molly the waitress at the coffee and donut shop and Earl, a cab-driver leaned on by some shady gangster types. Though, as I said, the story doesn't really take these characters very far, the actors are surprisingly good for such an obviously low-budget affair. Gordon Currie, as Goya, is superb and creates a suffering vampire who we really do care for, whislt Helene Clarkson and Justin Louis are also both convincing in their roles - although perhaps a little too quick to accept Goya as a vampire.

It's by no means flawless - a handfull of (really) dodgy special effects are decidedly disappointing, the title is excruciatingly awful (I know that's not a major point, but still....) and, after creating such an interesting vampire, it's a shame we learn so little about Goya's life (or rather, existence. Life's probably the wrong word). For all that, it is a well-paced, interesting vampire flick which manages to both follow a good deal of vampiric folklore (excepty stakes to the heart apparently) and bring something fresh to what can, at times, be a fairly tired, predictable and plodding genre.

As if to further reward you, David Cronenburg's extended cameo does add some more fun to the bill; he and his mobster subordinates are mostly an excuse for some vampire action - the characters are never really fleshed out at all - and both help to create some tension in the film but also to undermine the plot somewhat. Their inclusion is never really explained satisfactorily - it is as if someone forgot to include a little chunk of plot that might have bound it all together a lot more tightly.

Minor gripes aside, this is definitely a film worth watching and came as a wonderful surprise.

Women In Horror Recognition Month

2010-02-01T16:22:00.003Z

So, whether you knew it or not, February is Women in Horror Recognition Month. Yes if you're in America it clashes with Black History month, but if you're in/from the UK, you'll know that Black History month is in October, right?

Anyway, Chopping Mall's participation is going to be somewhat laid back, but shall definitely be participating. We'll have posts about the fantastic Emily Booth coming soon, as well as a couple of reviews of Female-directed Horror films (a disturbingly rare occurrence).

For now though, let me point you in the direction of the main site and a handfull of female horror-bloggers whom you should definitely be reading.

Women In Horror month - Co-ordinating site setup by Hannah Neurotica

Facebook page for WiHm - Updated more regularly

Day Of The Woman - Any blog that has a banner taken from I Spit On Your Grave is likely to be good, right? Keep reading and it just get's better.

Musings Across A Continuum - Quite apart from being one of the very few blogs with a double-u (not a w) in the title, this is a rather excellent little blog that I stumbled upon recently and have been enjoying reading.

The Horror Digest - This is probably one of my favourite film blogs around. I really don't need to say more; go and read it now, yeah?

Little Miss Zombie - I must confess, I've only just found this one (from the WiHm facebook page, natch) so can't say a lot about it. Needless to say, the title (and header banner) were enough to convince me and, as it's been going since Oct 2008 it looks like there's a bit of back reading to be done. Covers books as well as films.

Hey! Look Behind You! - This is a blog I discovered only a few days ago but already rate highly. Especially good for Nicki's "I Love Shorts" posts, as Horror Shorts are a too often neglected art.

Anyway, as I say, this is just by way of introduction to Women in Horror Recognition Month; films to come soon. Check out some of these other blogs, celebrate the important women in horror and lament that Horror (and other cinema in general) is still such a male-dominated world.

Hello February.

[To any, undoubtedly awesome, female bloggers not included: this isn't through a lack of interest but a lack of knowledge. Got an awesome blog? Send me a link!]

Blowing our own trumpet...

2010-01-31T17:43:00.005Z

It's been a nice few days for Chopping Mall.

Firstly we were kindly given the One Lovely Blog award by William Weird from over at the excellent Beard Weirdo Reviews blog. Many thanks for that!

And then Dan Goodswen at Total Film listed Chopping Mall (alongside 599 others) in his list of the 600 Movie Blogs You Might Have Missed.

It's good to see a whole lot of other LAMB blogs in the list too!

So yeah, not a very content filled post, but hey, I'm pleased.

Big Screen Big Tune #1

2010-01-25T18:48:00.002Z

Having recently written a bit about the film OST, I tohught I might as well start a series of posts dedicated to the best soundtracks and theme-tunes around. So here is the rather fabulous Green Slime.

The youtube video was put up by the Uranium Café, which is a very good blog if you're interested in these kinds of things...

Open the door you'll find the secret
To find the answer is to keep it
You'll believe it when you find
Something screaming 'cross your mind
Green slime

What can it be, what is the reason
Is this the end of all that breathes, and
Is it something in your head?
Will you believe it when you're dead?
Green slime, green slime, green slime

Hammer Horror - Dracula and Brides of Dracula

2010-01-22T18:06:00.004Z

Part of the aim of writing this blog and of taking more notice of what I watch, is to improve my general film knowledge and to encourage me to fill in some of the gaps - whole genres and famous names that I know little or nothing about.

Sometime of course, fishing about in new genres just isn't appealing and I'll settle back into the safety of the Spaghetti Western or a predictably nonsense 'horror' film - like Attack of the Killer Shrews. Recent viewing however has seen me beginning to get to grips with classic American Film Noir (about which I'm sure I'll write something soon) and, for this post, the wonderful world of Hammer Horror.

I'm not quite sure how on earth I'd gone for so long with very little awareness of Hammer's output. As a firm fan of both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, with a fondness for slighly camp British horror of the last few decades, how had I never really become a Hammer fan?

Thankfully, I am now very much a Hammer fan. I bought A New Heritage of Horror by David Pirie (I.B.Tauris, £15) which, however much he tries to deny it in his introduction, is basically a history of Hammer's film output. And none the worse for it. Much as my love of Zombie films was gently lead and guided by Jamie Russell's Book of the Dead (Fab Press, £11), I found myself flicking through this book with a growing list of scribbled down "must-see" titles.

I started with X: The Unknown (radioactive slime crawls out from the centre of the planet and munches its way through some tasty radioactive things), Hound of the Baskevilles (Good fun adaptation) and The Devil Rides Out - which I enjoyed a lot and might have to re-watch and review)

My now fairly strong feeling that I was onto something rather wonderful was confirmed when I moved onto the Dracula series. So let's start at the begining shall we?

Hammer's 1958 version of Dracula is brilliant. THere are flaws a plenty but I think it'd be hard not to enjoy the film. It's well-paced, ever-so British and it has Christopher Lee draining the blood from those around him. What's not to like?

It was one of Hammer's first widescreen and colour production and really does look beautiful - although the colour of the blood is decidedly more akin to strawberry than it perhaps should be. Though obviously not being produced on a massive budget, the sets are wonderful, Dracula's Transylvanian castle is as real as you could hope for and the whole film carries its gothic mood wonderfully.

Budget constraints did force them to savage the plot somewhat (Johnathon Harker's family now live er... right near the castle) and many elelments are missing but this doesn't particularly hurt the film in itself. Whilst it might suffer in comparison to the novel, the story that remains is strong enough and moves along at a decent pace, aided no doubt by some brilliant acting. Christopher Lee is a perfect Dracula; just the right balance of menace, charm and pointy-teeth, whilst Cushing is brilliant in the somewhat more understated part of Van Helsing.

The film was one of Hammer's biggest successes and sold well the world over....

....So they made some more.

Needless to say, Hammer quickly realised that having Dracula destroyed at the end of the first film wasn't really the smartest move - they needed more vampire and they needed it now! Similarly awkward was Christopher Lee's absence; David Pirie writes that it's unknown whether he flat-out refused or asked for more money than Hammer could spend. Either way, he wasn't coming back. So neither was Dracula.

Infact, the follow-up to Dracula, 1960's The Brides of Dracula is pretty surprising as a Dracula film for er.... not having Dracula in it.

It's still pretty good fun; Cushing returns as Van Helsing who really does just happen to be in the right place at the right time all over again and is on hand to help stop the rise of the Baron Meinster who has escaped from his perpetual confinement and has gone on a bit of a rampage, sinking his teeth into the necks of the women he meets.

It's another good fun film, although there's decidedly less tension to it - despite the fact that I didn't already know the story, this Baron was so much less charismatic, so much less calm and cool, that I really did struggle to imagine him winning. Needless to say, he doesn't.

What it loses in tension and atmosphere -especially in the second half - however, it does mostly make up for by being generally a lot of fun. And we like fun films, right?

Of course we do.

Super Bad, Super Cool and the Rise and Fall of the OST

2010-01-17T21:49:00.003Z

I've just finished listening to a really rather wonderful BBC Radio 2 programme called Super Bad, Supe Cool about the phenomenon of the Blaxploitation film.

The hour long show was narrated by Pam Grier (star of Coffy, Foxy Brown and many a great film, described by Tarantino as being probably the first female action star). It delved into several aspects of the genre - from the controversial and much disputed title 'blaxploitation', it's impact and significance for black actors and cinema-goers of 70s USA and the importance of the soundtrack in these films. Calling on a whole host of film and music luminaries from Isaac (RIP) Hayes (if you're young, you probably know him best as South Park's Chef) to Samuel L Jackson to Tarantino, Pam Griers examined the massive impact of cult-classic Shaft and it's lasting influence on cinema.

I can't add much to the show in terms of genre studies; you'd be much better seeking it out yourself. Sadly the 7 day listen-again feature on bbc iplayer has expired but it's floating around the internet for anyone tech-savvy enough to find it.

Perhaps the most interesting element of the show in general cinema terms was the aspect of the soundtrack; Shaft is credited as having changed the way in which music and film were considered as complementary cultural works; many of the blaxploitation films were sold on little more than the fabulous soundtracks that accompanied them. Whilst the film score was an established form - see Mr Morricone for more details... - this was the first real example of the stand-alone pop song being created especially for cinema.

The soundtracks to these films were pop albums in their own right; someone interviewed on the show recalls the 12" records of the soundtrack being given away as promotional tools for the films and then later outstripping film sales.

Nowadays this is something of a lost art; in the digital age songs are made to be recognisable, to be sold as singles, and you are far more likely to find a film soundtrack cd that comprises of a series of hit singles by pop and rock bands, lifted from albums for the film, rather than recorded specifically for the film.

The film score still exists, by all means: just look at John Murphy's excellent 28 Weeks Later score (and yes, though 28 days is the better film, it's 28 weeks that has the more thorough soundtrack), but it would seem that the pop/rock one-artist Original Sound Track has been largely forgotten.

So let's go repay a visit to the Shaft tune and remember better, funkier times:

Poster Hunt #6 - Count Yorga, Vampire

2010-01-17T19:46:00.003Z

After completely missing out December, Poster Hunt makes a glamorous 2010 return with this rather lovely poster for Count Yorga, Vampire.

They just don't make them like that any more...

IMDb here

Trailer here:

Damnation Alley

2010-01-11T21:39:00.005Z

Looking back over some of my other reviews, it becomes quite clear what sort of things I appreciate in a film; before even troubling myself with something as trivial as the plot, I've enthused about Christopher Lee, Ennio Morricone, killer shrews, alien monsters, robots, the undead etc, etc. So, if you were to pitch a film as being a post-apocalyptic adventure with giant scorpions and flesh eating cockroaches, do you really think I could turn it down?

Of course not.

I think I must be one of the few people who likes this kind of thing that hadn't seen this film before. It has a great following of lovers (and haters) all over the internet - despite having never been released on DVD. Though Anchor Bay did try a few years back, Fox are sitting tight on the rights for the moment.

Whilst in previous posts, I've praised some low budget flicks - Murder Party for instance - for knowing their limits and keeping their ambition firmly within the realms of possibility (both financial and artistic), Damnation Alley is decidedly at the opposite end of the scale. Let's be totally clear about this: Damnation Alley had a relatively enormous budget, set it's ambitions massively high and er... failed on an epic level.

Nowadays, with CGI (of variable quality) and all sorts of clever trickery, I'm sure the task of creating giant 8ft-long scorpions would not be so difficult but the 70s were a very different world. Wikipedia claims that this was originally attempted using full size remote-control scorpions but then abandoned due to poor results. I would love to own an 8ft long remote controlled scorpion! If anyone out there knows where one can be found, please do let me know.

Eventually they created some kind of savage montage attempt, putting really close up scorpions in the same screen as some further away action. Although it is thoroughly unconvincing, it's so thoroughly bonkers that you really do have to admire it.

Similarly unconvincingly threatening are the flesh eating cockroaches. Though they do have an awful lot of them, they are not really any bigger or scarier than normal cockroaches which, although a little frightening, tend not to be life-threatening. These ones, however, can strip flesh clean to the bone. And do.

Also of note, whilst we're looking at the special effects are the brilliant skies. This film was released in the same year as Star Wars, with Fox originally seeing Star Wars as the underdog to this, their major Sci-fi film for the year. Years later when we compare the two, the effects in Star Wars - though decidedly ropey in places - make the er... green and red skies of Damnation Alley seem laughable, but somehow charming.

Is there anything I missed? Oh yeah, plot. And one other vitally important feature but we'll come to that last.

The plot is decidedly so-so. It's based on a book by Roger Zelazny. I haven't read his book so can't really say how true the plot is to the novel but, from the well-documented fact that he hated the film, I imagine it was somewhat dumbed down. It's fairly standard post-apocalyptic fare: World gets nuked, loads of people die, earth turns on axis, USA becomes a desert, select band of survivors set out together and are confronted by aforementioned special-effects. The characters are two dimensional and uninteresting but... there're flesh eating cockroaches dammit! Who needs a plot?

Finally we arrive at the one massively ambitious creation that was a total success; so much so that it has inspired its very own cult following. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, The Landmaster.

I'm sure that it would stand out entirely on it's own merit, but the dodgy effects elsewhere in the film make this purpose-built, fully-functional armoured personnel carrier seem truly phenomenal. To be quite honest, if they'd edited out all the dialouge and just shown non-stop footage of the bendy-middled, heavily armed twelve-wheeled behemoth I'd probably have enjoyed the film even more than I did. It's utterly fantastic and the fact it was designed and built for the film (at a cost equivalent today to $1,200,000) only makes me love it more.

This film will not challenge your brain. But if it doesn't at least make you smile, I'd be very surprised indeed.

[Pictures are obviously low quality without it having ever been released on DVD. I also couldn't find a trailer, but I do believe that the whole thing is on YouTube ]

Episode V: Chopping Mall Strikes Back

2010-01-08T22:50:00.004Z

We're back.

It's been a long, long absence but - like many a zombie - the fact that Chopping Mall looked dead didn't mean that it was dead. Not at all.

Instead, Chopping Mall returns refreshed, renewed and reinvigorated for a new year, nay, a new decade of exciting, gorey, thrilling films. I plan to broaden the scope of the blog a little; wheras previously it was almost all reviews, with the occasional special news piece, the new year should welcome in a little more film criticism, cinema news and history and all sorts of exciting fun.

For now though, I'll review in 10 words or less the films I watched (or re-watched) over the Christmas period. Here we go....

1. G-force
Surprisingly good fun with animated guinea-pigs. Unexpected treat.

2. Paranormal Activity
Not half as scary as everyone said. Dull.

3. Murder Party
One of the best independent films of recent times.

4. Where Eagles Dare
Brits, Yanks, Nazis. Guns. 'Splosions. Cable-cars. Awesome.

5. The Commander
Lee Van Cleef. Donald Pleasence. Otherwise rubbish.

6. Cemetery Without Crosses
Spaghetti western fun of the highest order.

7. Muppet Christmas Carol
Possibly Michael Caine's career highpoint?

8. Meteorites!
Absolute crap.

9. Run, Man, Run (Corri, Uomo, Corri)
Sequel to the Big Gundown. Not half as good.

10. Shanghai Noon
Not enough Jackie Chan. Too much Owen Wilson.

11. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Your Wu-Dan is a whorehose.

12. Inglorious Bastards
That damned armoured train.

13. The Mercenary
One of the best Westerns ever.

14. Boa Vs. Python
Snakes. Snakes. Snakes. Guns. Snakes. Boring.

15. Doghouse
Awesome Brit-Zombie flick. Might be worth a re-watch.

16. Avatar
Paper thin plot in staggeringly beautiful 3D.

17. Die Screaming, Marianne
Started well, middled bad, ended worse. Avoid.

18. Muppet Treasure Island
Best film ever?

19. Ipcress Files
Michael Caine with no muppets. Still pretty good.

20. Black Dynamite
One of 2009's best. DYNAMITE, DYNAMITE!

21. Inglourious Basterds
Best film of the year? I think so.

Bring on the new year!

RIP Paul Naschy

2009-12-01T14:54:00.004Z

Sad, sad news today that Spanish horror writer, director and star Paul Naschy has died from cancer at the age of 75.

Over the years he's starred in loads of films, most famously a series of werewolf films (The Mark of the Werewolf imdb) as well as countless other horror films and a handfull of satires and dramas set in Spain, which only became possible as the years of Franco-era Spanish censorship faded away.

El País has a Spanish language article here.

Sad day.

Scream and Scream Again

2009-11-26T00:18:00.004Z

Scream and Scream Again? Sigh. With a name so dull can we really expect anything much from this 1970 UK horror flick? I mean, Scream and Scream again? How prosaic.

What could it possibly offer us to whet our appetites? Oh, Vincent Price is in it, you say? [One eyebrow raises...] Now there's something, Mr Price has a bit of a reputation as horror supremo of the 60s/70s... perhaps you could tell me more?

Peter Cushing? Well I'll be damned; not one, but two of the best horror actors to hit the screen. [Second eyebrow raises] This almost sounds worth watching: to hell with the plot, it's got Price and Cushing in it. So... a little more info?

Christopher Lee? [Damn, no more eyebrows to raise] Christopher Lee as well? What a trio! Now I really don't care what the plot's about. Who could? It hardly matters at all! But, you know, since we're here, tell me something about the actual story...

Mad scientists? CraZed killers? Genetically created Frankenstein-a-like super-beings? Shady (Soviet-in-all-but-name) foreign powers? Vats of acid?

The ingredients of this film are so good as to be almost untrue. In fact, if I'm brutally honest, the ingredients are too good; the film simply can't live up to its summary. Though (a lot of) fun, Scream And Scream Again is sadly less than the sum of its parts. It's as if we have several films here at once; the foreign spy adventure is treading on the heels of the police-detective thriller which in turn keeps bumping into the mad-scientist sci-fi body horror. There's just too many films happening at once here.

Perhaps if it were made nowadays it would've hit the two hour mark and made the story a bit more clear with an extra 30 mins. Or, then again, perhaps there was no clear story. The disappointing thing is that this film really does feel like it should make sense; we have several characters fleshed out in detail, we have wonderful ideas and we have a really fast paced story but... it's just too fast for its own good. Whether it was always intended to be this way or was cut down for running-time's sake I may never know; it certainly seems as if it's just a little too savagely edited.

All this sounds like I didn't enjoy it. I did enjoy it. I enjoyed it immensely. From start to finish there wasn't a single dull moment (which puts it above nearly every other film on this blog...) and I loved it. I just didn't necessarily understand it all very well..

Price, Lee and Cushing are all as reliably smashing as you could hope for, which it makes it all the more remarkable that Alfred Marks, as Superintendant Bellaver, completely steals the show. Grumpy, rude and oh-so-British, this is a fantastic performance and one that the film would be poorer without.

If you come to watch Scream and Scream Again with expectations as high as its ambitions you will be sorely disappointed; it's ambitions are just far too high. If you come to watch it expecting middle of the the road 70s Brit horror you'll be pleasantly surprised. Highly recommended and good fun; just make sure you pay attention or you'll be far too confused.

Oh, and the whacky science towards the end is just great...

Poster Hunt #5 - The Erotic Adventures of Zorro

2009-11-17T22:49:00.003Z

What with November being quite busy and the poster for The Killer Shrews being quite so fab, Poster Hunt got left somewhat by the wayside this month.

Still, just over half-way through, the showcase of fabulous and/or strange posters returns with the Erotic Adventures of Zorro. How classy.

The Killer Shrews

2009-11-11T17:11:00.003Z

If I asked you to think of a fictional movie-title that would be undoubtedly awful, entirely silly and should probably never be made, do you think you could come up with better than The Killer Shrews?

Sometimes I really do wonder how on earth these things get pitched before creation. THis is low budget, but no so low that it didn't have some funding. The conversation must have gone something along the lines of:

Mr Money: So, what is this film you were asking for funding for?

Jay Simms (screenplay): Ah, well. It's going to be an exploration of the dangers of science. We're talking themes of genetic mutation, we're talking science going bad, human achievement getting so far ahead of itself that it puts humanity in danger. We want people to think about science, about whether it's a good thing, about where the limits of 'playing God' lie.

Mr Money: (yawning) yeah, yeah. Ok, same old, same old. Isn't that what every science fiction book and film has tried to do? So what makes you the new HG Wells? What's the actual premise?

JS: Well, let me buy another round first. Whiskey as well? Yep? Good.

[goes to bar]

JS: Where were we?

Mr Money: You're explaining the premise of your story? Where's it set?

JS: Well, we're opting for an island. You know, our heroes are trapped on an island with these beasts. We're going to set it up so that they can't leave: I'm thinking hurricane or tropical storm, that conveniently imprisons these people on the island at exactly the worst moment, when these monsters are at their most dangerous.

Mr Money: You mean like full moon or something? Are we talking werewolf?

JS: Erm.. not exactly. No. We're talking animals that have been made larger and more vicious through scientific experiments. They've escaped from the lab and are roaming the island. So our heroes arrive just as they're running out of food and turning on their creators. More drinks?
Barman! Two pints, two whiskies ... make them doubles!

Mr Money: Go on...

JS: Well we'll obviously go for the trapped-survivor tensions. We've got it mapped out perfectly, pair of scientists - one completely work-obsessed - pretty blonde girl with nasty coward boyfriend and one handsome rogueish seaman. Oh and we'll throw in a black guy and a Mexican as well

Mr Money: They're the expendable characters?

JS: Oh yes, we'll kill them off with little or no time wasted on characters or emotions.

Mr Money: Well, I must say, that all sounds rather good. What did you say the monsters were again? Was it savage dogs? Spiders?

JS: Not exactly...

Mr Money: Well come on, tell me, I want to know...

JS: Ah... shrews.

[Long silence]

Mr Money: Shrews?

JS: Shrews. Savage, dog sized shrews with massive pointy teeth.

Mr Money: Shrews? I think I'm going to need another drink before I sign that cheque....

And, after that next drink he signed over his cash and so The Killer Shrews was made. Replete with dogs-in-furry-costumes playing the shrews, this is one of the most ridiculous films I've seen. It's not even that bad: well paced and you're guarranteed to be laughing throughout...

Lady Terminator

2009-10-30T00:17:00.005Z

Oh me, oh my. Where to begin?

Sometimes, someone recommends you a film and it's pretty good. You note down the recommendation, you go off and watch it and you are pleased. This friend of yours made a good recommendation.

Sometimes however, the recommended film is so mind-bendingly brilliant/bizarre that you are left in shock; you are almost angry that no-one has recommended this film before. Lady Terminator was made 1983. That means it has existed for all 21 years of my life. With this firmly in mind, how is it possible that I haven't seen it before? The world has been hiding a gem from me!

I'll try and sell it to you: it's an 80s Indonesian exploitation action-movie, that robs heavily from Cameron's Terminator and can't quite work out whether it's set in New York or Indonesia. If that doesn't sell it to you, I don't know what will. I guess if that summary isn't appealing then it probably just isn't your kind of film; you're missing out.

In a tour-de-force of sublime bonkers-ness, Lady Terminator mixes bizarre Asian folklore with unstoppable killing machines. The (entirely unecessary) back-story presents us with an angry goddess-lady who, defeated by some guy, swears revenge on his grand-daughter (yes... so far so odd). She achieves this by er.... throwing her soul into a bit of the sea and hoping that something will happen.

Something does indeed happen: young anthropology student, Tania, goes diving in the area and is posessed by the soul of this rogue goddess, returning to surface as a murderous beast on a killing rampage. Oh yeah, she's also pretty much totally invincible. Cue long gunfights, a ridiculously brilliant body-count and blood splatters all over the place.

I really did enjoy this film so much that it pains me to say anything bad about it. Yes, the vast majority of the special effects are crappy, yes, the acting is basically atrocious, yes, the dubbing leaves much to be desired.... but all these complaints are missing the point. What we have here is a brilliant mix of crazy fantasy and Terminator imitation that is enormously fun for all of its 80 minute run-time.

I can't recommend it highly enough.

Quest for the Lost City aka The Final Sactrifice

2009-10-20T23:58:00.007+01:00

The version I watched said 'Quest for the Lost City' on the titles, but this was the best cover art for it.

OK, OK, let's get the good bits out of the way first, that shouldn't take long. The cinematography here is pretty good: for a decidedly low budget flick, they never try to do anything beyond their means and it's preet well shot.

It's just a shame that the screenplay, plot, acting, etc. just wasn't anywhere near as good. At the time of writing, this film was the 14th worst rated on IMDb, which should give you some idea what we're dealing with. In truth, this is nowhere near as bad as that makes it sound; this film was given the MST3K treatment and as such got far more exposure than it otherwise would've done. Were it not for this, it'd surely merely be wallowing amongst the 'rubbish' rather than the 'shockingly awful'.

Hero Troy, look pensive

I'll have to break this into two halves; as my opinion changed quite dramatically halfway through. At first, and for a good 30 minutes of its 78 minutes, I really couldn't understand why this was made. Budget films tend to aim towards a niche; you have cheap gore films - made by fans of gory films for fans of gory films -, exploitation flicks - more often than not with added nudity to attract an otherwise uninterested audience, etc. etc. What I'm getting at is that you can usually tell roughly who a low budget film is made for.

Bad guys! With weapons!

Here, however, I was completely puzzled. A boy (I really have no idea how old he was supposed to be...) called Troy discovers his dead father's archaeology file and finds a map to a Lost City, no sooner has he done so, than mysterious baddies turn up at his house with the intention of retrieving it. So far, so sub-Indiana-Jones-good. But who watches sub-Indiana Jones adventures? It was clear that it had never been anywhere near a cinema and you could hardly imagine (at this stage) anyone, child or adult, getting terribly excited about it on vhs...

Bad Guys! With weapons! In car! Oh, the trauma!

Some while after Troy has teamed up with the ageing, moustachioed Zap Rowsdower (!) however, things take a turn for the more bonkers as it emerges that they are battling a weird cult (who killed Troy's dad, no less) who are descendants of a pre-American Indian hyper-intelligent civilization who er... mysteriously died. Taking their fabulous, 'better-than-anything-in-Egypt' city with them. These rifle and chainsaw wielding descendants, lead by the impossibly deep-voiced 'Satoris', are trying to sacrifice enough people to the idol, so as to restore their city. Mmmm....right, Ok then.

At this point, yes it is still sub-Indiana Jones (and it will continue to be) but at least it's a bit more fun. We've had balaclava-wearing baddies chasing our heroes through the words, revelations about Zap's past and an implausably easy 'secret' map key (Honestly: you draw a big cross on the map. Where the lines make an 'x', that's where you want to go...). I am beginning to wonder about this Lost City however (a Lost City surely always deserves capital letters, no?). Perhaps the reason that most films that I've seen use distant and exotic locations is that, as an ignorant Western audience, we know so little about the places that it seems quite possible that someone wandering through a jungle could stumble upon a previously long-lost civilization (hey, that's more or less what happened with Machu Picchu...). It seems that little bit less likely that a mega-city is going to turn up in Canada. So, at this point I begin to wonder: the film is only called Quest for the Lost City. Quest is no guarrantee that it'll turn up... could they really be that cheap as to trick me out of my Lost City? How dare they...

I won't reveal anything about how the ending is acchieved, but I will say this: they come up with the goods on the Lost City and, even more extraordinary, it's pretty good and convincing.

This film is not a masterpiece but neither is it deserving of it's record-breaking disdain. The plot is basically rubbish and the acting is functional at best, but it does carefully avoid overstretching itself, a weakness often found in cheap films. However unconvincing what's actually going on is, visually it is always convincing. You get the sense that with a bit of cash for better cameras and some effects, this would be quite a pretty films.

Of course, you could throw as much money at it as you like, but the plot would still be rubbish...

[Sadly I can't find a trailer. The MST3K version is on youtube, but that's just not the same]