On Her Majesty's Secret Service

In my last post on a James Bond film, You Only Live Twice, I admitted that the James Bond project was moving along somewhat slowly.  Inwardly, I promised myself that I'd speed it up a bit, crack through a few more films and get on with it.  But then I looked at the next film on the list: On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Oh dear.

OHMSS is a film I'd only seen once. It has a reputation as a low-point of the Bond series: people can argue forever about who their favourite Bond is but none of them ever say George Lazenby. Ever.   More than that, it's one of the very few Bond films that, after watching it, I never felt the need to return to again. But that was years ago. Surely my memory was deceiving me? Surely it wasn't that bad?

It was.

Well... maybe not entirely as bad as I remembered. Just mostly as bad.  There are a few decent moments and sequences in it but, for the most part, this is a pretty dull film. First off, it's slow. Bond films usually move along at a fairly brisk pace - conversation, fight, conversation, fight, etc. etc - but OHMSS just crawls along. Although the plot itself is no better or worse than most other Bond films - Blofeld + world domination + mind control - it just takes forever to actually get exciting.  When it does pick up, the film's actually not bad. The final, say, 20 minutes are pretty pacey. We have a bobsled-run chase/fight, some decent explosions and good gunfights. It's just such a shame it took so long to get there!

There's basically two ways of looking at OHMSS: if you treat it as a Bond film, it's a disappointment. The tone's all wrong, Lazenby isn't a great Bond and Telly Savalas is a rubbish Blofeld. On the other hand, if treated as a generic spy/action flick it's pretty decent. The [spoilers!] grim ending is so very out of place amongst Bond films: usually marooned in the sea/jungle/desert cosying up to a beautiful woman, Lazenby's Bond is left biting back tears, sat next to his dead wife. It's not a bad ending - but it's not Bond.

Still, OHMSS was slightly-less-bad than I had expected, which is pretty much all I was hoping for. Hello and goodbye Mr Lazenby. Next time it's back to Connery...

[REC]3 Génesis

I arrived at this film with high hopes. The first [REC] is a film I absolutely love. Studying Spanish and being mad-keen on zombie films, it seemed almost too good to be true that one of the twenty-first century's best zombie films was filmed by two Spanish directors in an appartment block in Barcelona. It's a powerful, scary zombie film (that staircase death!) that managed to breath new life into both the zombie and the found-footage genres. Impressive stuff.

The second in the series was by no means as good but it was still streets ahead of most of the competition. Balaguero and Plaza played around with the restrictions of the found-footage film, spiced up the zombies with a bit more religion (not to everyone's taste) and spent their obviously increased budget on quantities of guns and gore. More impressive stuff.

Coming to the third instalment, then, my hopes were high. Almost worryingly high.  I'm pretty sure that at some point Balaguero and Plaza had said they intended to stop after the second but, given its commercial success, rights-holders Filmmax said they'd continue with other directors in that case (I might have imagined this. But I think it happened). Whatever the details of the scenario, B+P did sign up to do more [REC] films but planned two more, of which they would direct one each, rather than co-directing as before. [REC]3 is Plaza's segment. It takes place, as far as I can tell, at roughly the same time as the first film. What seemed like an isolated outbreak clearly wasn't...

It opens in the now-familiar shaky-camera style. We're at the wedding of Koldo and Clara. As the family and friends move on to the reception, however, it emerges that the Uncle's dog-bite may be infected. Badly. Coughing blood and staggering, there are no prizes for guessing what happens next. It is, essentially, all fairly predictable. We're ushered into a secure location (country house), introduced to the characters/victims (wedding guests) and then a zombie is thrown into the mix and all hell breaks loose.

That said, [REC]3 handles it all pretty well. The country house makes a refreshing change from the apartment block of before, the characters are (mostly) intelligent and likeable and, most crucially of all, the gore is good. Some cruel, splattery deaths are dealt to zombies and humans alike, characters are killed off, heads and limbs are hacked at. It's gleeful, bloody stuff (which is exactly what we want, right?)

It's certainly not as innovative or as well-crafted as the first film, I'll accept that, but I'd say that it gave [REC]2 a pretty close run. [REC]3 is a well-made, straight-faced, zombie-movie. And I enjoyed it a lot.

Suspiria in a Swimming Pool

The Russian synchronised swimmers just did their routine to Goblin's creepy and wonderful score to Dario Argento's Suspiria!



Amazing.
(video via AVClub)

You Only Live Twice

The James Bond project is going slowly. When I decided, back in October, to watch every Bond film in order I didn't expect it to be a marathon of back-to-back viewings (not like Argento week!) but if I'd been asked I'd probably have predicted to be beyond Film #5 after 9 months! As it is, You Only Live Twice marks a milestone of sorts: it's the last film with Sean Connery. Ok, well... it's not. Because he came back after Lazenby. But it's the last film where only one actor had played Bond.

And it's a good one. You Only Live Twice has long been a favourite of mine. It's hard to explain really but, in many ways, it feel like one of the most Bond-like of Bond films.  It just ticks so many of the boxes. James Bond has, in my opinion, never really recovered from the end of the Cold War (Media barons just don't have the same level of villainy...) and YOLT is a good demonstration of Cold War threat: even if it's not actually the Russians who are the bad guys, the danger of M.A.D. looms over the space-race backdrop and spurs Bond into action. Because when the Yanks and the Ruskies are at loggerheads, it obviously falls the Britain to save the day!

In the process, we get some prime Bond action. Q turns up with a tiny fold-up plane in a box (one of the more perfect Bond gadgets that gently mocks his hyper-masculine reputation), the Japanese secret service supply NINJAS (with throwing stars!) and, Bond punches and fights his way through a series of Japanese paper walls. They even manage to create a clever, highly-trained and sympathetic female character and (even more surprisingly) resist giving her a name like 'Pussy Galore'. As Bond in the 60s goes, that's about as close to progressive or feminist as you're going to get!

The plot is reassuringly bonkers: a Spectre spaceship keeps swallowing the US/Russian spaceships and vanishing before anyone can find it. Tasked with stopping it, Bond has to fight a handful of subservient Spectre drones, find the lair and put a stop to Blofeld's sinister spaceship-swallowing plans.  The lair in question, nestled in a Japanese volcano with a metal fake-lake hiding it from view is pretty spectacular and one of the more memorable of Bond Villain lairs (I've always considered the submerged satellite in GoldenEye to be in imitation/homage to this one, really). Add to that a handful of really memorable scenes (poison on a string!) and you have a pretty neat Bond film.

As might be expected, there are a few clumsy moments - the less said about Bond's Asian disguise and the Japanese security-chief's harem of subservient women, the better... - but all in all this is a Bond film that takes some beating. Great stuff.

And it's On Her Majesty's Secret Service next. Now there's something to look forward to...

Melancholia

I've never been a Lars von Trier completist but I've always enjoyed his films - particularly Dogville, The Idiots and Antichrist (Ok, enjoyed might not be the right word), so I'd been looking forward to Melancholia since Cannes last year. My excitement was only further stoked by Peter Bradshaw's astonishingly negative review in the Guardian...

Bradshaw has never made a secret of how much he hates everything von Trier has done, is doing or will do (to the extent that it's pretty much pointless him writing reviews) but this one clearly had him riled!

Once again, Von Trier has written and directed an entire film in his trademark smirk mode: a giggling aria of pretend pain and faux rapture. The script is clunking, and poor Dunst joins Nicole Kidman and Bryce Dallas Howard in the list of Hollywood females who have sleepwalked trustingly through a Von Trier production. Even the spectacle is thin and supercilious.

Quite apart from the utterly nonsensical description of 'spectacle' as being 'supercilious', Dunst even won best actress for her "sleepwalked" performance! Luckily, Philip French was on hand to provide a second-opinion, half sneering and half simple plot retelling, that - as one commenter pointed out - got several of the significant details entirely wrong.  Thankfully, other reviewers less-desperate to smugly condemn von Trier's Cannes-Nazi-gaffe provided more ...uh... balanced reviews.

Either way, I was keen to see it. Now that I have, I have no idea what to think. I'm pretty sure it's one of the best films I've seen in a very long time but I've still no real idea what it was about. The failure of human relationships? Bipolar disorders? The futility of making plans for the future given that life is essentially fragile? Who knows?

I know that I'm going to be musing over it for some time though. A thoroughly thought-provoking film.

Mould

OK, so just few days ago I was wowed by the poster for Mould* and decided that I'd almost certainly have to watch it. I must admit I wasn't actually expecting very much: once you've seen a number of 21st century B-movies you tend towards pessimism. Most recent films that aim for the schlocky, low-grade style of classic 70s and 80s films do so in such a self-conscious, post-Planet-Terror, we're-so-very-hip-and-grindhouse way that they're ultimately pretty disappointing. To my surprise, Mould* resisted all that and played it straight-faced and gorey and, as a result, was a whole lot of fun.

[Yes, the film is actually called 'Mold' but the word looks silly without a 'u' in the middle. Sorry America. You might be right about 'color' but oyu're wrong about 'mold']

The plot is about as complex as you'd expect from a low-budget film about mould. A group of basically good but apparently conscience-free scientists (oh scientists, why are you always evil?) have been funded to create a new form of super-evil life-destroying hyper-contagious mould. Y'know, so America can remain a superpower or something. And kill people. It's pretty vague, but let's be honest, who cares? The important point is that this mould is in their lab and it is very, very bad for you.

And it's demonstration day. So as well as 4 scientists (Old scientist, lady scientist, two young scientists who both fancy the pants off lady scientist) we have a coke-snorting congressman, his effeminate aide, a cigar-toting army general and his dumb, macho soldier aide. So now we have cowards, scientists, bullies and a woman. All locked in together in a building with some mould. AND GUESS WHAT!? Despite all the precautions taken, the mould contaminates one of them and, from that point on, the worry of containment and contamination takes over the film.

Budget-wise, of course, this is very efficient. Most of the action takes place in one room, with a few shots set in the neighbouring corridors. This, thankfully, means they were able to save all the rest of their cash to spend on splattering green goo and blood across... well... everything. Mould is one of those that you can imagine was an awful lot of fun to make and the enthusiasm carries across onto the screen. I don't want to spoil the surprise(s) but we have splattering heads, exploding internal organs, facial bleeding. And then later, some guns.

There really isn't very much more to tell: Mould is an awful lot of fun. It does perhaps start a little slowly but the slow-moving first half hour is definitely worth it for the oozing, gooey, mouldy pay-off that follows. This is modern low budget trash made with old-fashioned enthusiasm. Highly recommended.

Available right now at www.moldthemovie.com 

Poster Hunt #12 - Mold

It's been an absolute age since the last Poster Hunt blogpost - there hasn't been one since July 2010! But today I stumbled upon a picture that was just too good not to revive the long-forgotten series. A pedant might well point out that this appears to a cover rather than an actual poster but... pfft! Who listens to pedants anyway?

So here is the beautiful artwork for MOLD! It looks a pretty fabulous film, so I might have to give a watch some time soon.

 

See previous Poster Hunt's here!

Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity

Oh they don't make 'em like this anymore. Armed with an invincible title like that, a budget the size of a shoebox and ambitions the size of an alien planet, how could you go wrong? SGFBI is a masterclass in campy sci-fi film that could teach modern snoozefests a thing or two...

Firstly, it's not nearly as sexual as its title would suggest. Nowadays, a film with the words "Slave Girls" in the title would almost certainly be pretty unpleasant. Instead, this fast-paced little flick just throws a couple of prison-escapees into a foreign jungle planet and follows their adventures. There's hardly anything by way of gratuitously sleazy scenes and it's all the better for it. The two women, Daria and Tisa, on a bid for galactic freedom, crash land on a strange and (at first) apparently deserted jungle planet.

Soon enough, they meet the outrageously camp 'Zed', who is master of this private planet and lives in a stone fortress with his two robotic henchmen (I'm not making a word of this up...).  Invited to slip into something more comfortable and join him for dinner (which includes a bizarre son-et-lumiere theremin interlude...) Daria and Tisa meet two other crash-victims who are stuck on Zed's planet. Before long, they realise that the sinister hunting-enthusiast Zed has been taking his unwilling 'guests' out and hunting them in his jungle gardens.

SGFBI clocks in at a tiny 75 mins. In that time we get space travel, intrigue (!), horror (!), theremins (!), robots and jungle. A good third of the film is taken up by Zed's attempt to hunt the three girls through the jungle. The other guest in Zed's personal playground is sadly not so lucky and is crossbowed (is that a verb?) early on.

I need to say a quick word about the robot guards who, apart from being fabulously designed, are apparently also tempted by curvaceous ladies and have a pretty hilarious argument. Read the following in Dalek voices:
Robot 1: The Maaaaaster will not be pleased with your aaabscence!
Robot 2: You displease MEEEE! Aaaand I ignorrrre YOOOOUUU!
R1: I'm going to inform the maaaaaasteeeerrrrr!
R2: Tattle-taaaaaaaaaaalle!

They're awesome, this is awesome, the sets look like they're made of sponge and carboard and Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity is more fun than it surely has any right to be! 

More from Bradford

Juan of the Dead, the first film I saw at the Bradford Film Festival this year, was by far and away the most 'Chopping Mall' themed film of the bunch.  The others were a curious bag of experimental and inventive footage that are certainly worth a mention though.  I seriously doubt any of them are in line for a DVD release any time soon, so they might be a little harder to track down, but they're all worth a watch - and as distribution moves more and more towards digital methods, they may well be available at some point.


First up: Vikingland!

Vikingland's story is a bizarre one (and possibly even more interesting than the film itself!). The blurb is worth pasting from the official website:

Xurxo Chirro has a passion for record keeping and works in the Archives Department of the local television company. During research, he came upon four video tapes that amounted to 16 hours of rushes and were titled ‘Vikingland’. Luis – an expatriate seaman and a migrant like so many of his fellow Galician countrymen – is the hero of this quite peculiar video saga. This is, indeed, no epic tale but a combination of anecdotes and Luis’ persistence. Between learning how to handle the video camera he has just acquired and the long hours working on the ferry-boat which sails from Denmark to Sylt Island in Germany, where he has been hired as a warehouseman, Luis recorded himself without respite for a whole winter. 

So... yes. This is amateur footage shot by a sailor, re-cut by a Galician archive-keeper into something that (supposedly) imitates Moby Dick (Melville is even credited at the end as a writer...). It's long and it's slow but also interesting and occasionally amusing.  Some of the scenes are almost painfully empty of any action (Luis sets the camera up to watch him moving boxes. We watch him moving boxes. That's it) but other moments are more compelling.

The extended Galician-sailors' Christmas dinner is a great scene. The wine-guzzling sailors introduce each dish to the camera and discuss how keen they are to show people what their lives are really like. In this sense it's a pretty fascinating  documentary about the minutae of behind-the-scenes life for the workers in the ship. It is too long, but apart from that it's got a lot to recommend it. Whether we believe Xurxo Chirro's story or not, his project is refreshingly real and democratic. There's no real attempt to make Luis a hero, to explain his history or future, but we're invited into his little cabin and get to see life as he does.

Next up: Moscow Diary.

Here, we're invited to follow Walter Benjamin's footsteps around Moscow, which he visited for six weeks in the 1920s.  It's shot entirely on a mobile phone and, as we wander the streets, parts of Benjamin's diary are read out to accompany the film.  Although he was partly there to have a look at communism in action, the main purpose for his trip was to pursue actress Asja Lacis with who he was apparently madly in love. Given that I only know Benjamin from his writings on aesthetics and technology and his academic reputation, being shown the fragile and human side to him was quite a surprise. His sad reflections on having waited up all evening in the hope that Asja would swing by are sometimes unsettlingly pathetic: it's hard to reconcile the philosopher with the lovesick boy.

Visually, the film's a bit uneven. The mobile-camera works well for the most part - it's held steady and the image is decent, if not great - but that makes Adam Kossoff's choice to occasionally use zoomed in shots puzzling because the low-resolution makes it look a right mess.  I'm pretty sure by now it's not a nostalgia-based illusion: low quality digital footage looks a lot worse than low quality film.

Moscow Diary  was paired with another mid-length film about Walter Benjamin (you wait ages for a film about Benjamin and then two come along at once...) : Les Anges de Port-Bou (The Angels of Portbou)

In this one, Parisian (?) Benjamin-obsessive Séraphin comes out by train to the border with Spain to recreate Benjamin's last journey, fleeing France for what he hoped would be safety in Spain, before eventually killing himself in the Spanish town of Portbou.

Instead of his friend, who's supposed to be walking with him, he's met by his friend's sister, Gabrielle, who Séraphin reluctantly allows to accompany him across the hills.  Their walk ambles between topics, taking in Benjamin's history, the lives of people in the region and the appeal of mystery amongst other things. It's a gently told story with plenty left open to interpretation but it's neatly done, looks beautiful and just flies by. I'd definitely be keen to see more by the director Vladimir Léon.

Juan of the Dead

A few months ago, towards the end of last year, the Leeds International Film Festival announced a rather exciting looking UK premiere in the shape of the world's first Cuban zombie film Juan of the Dead. Sadly, given that I was volunteering at the time (and watching as many films as I could cope with...) I missed it. Given that foreign cult films are sometimes ridiculously slow to appear on DVD here in the UK, I thought I'd missed it altogether. So it was a pretty nice surprise to see the fabulous Bradford Film Festival schedule it as part of their After Dark strand of horror films this year.

As a lover of many things Spanish/LatinAmerican and all things Zombie, perhaps I was somewhat determined to enjoy this. Even so, sometimes that hyped excitement is the surest way to guarantee disappointment. After all, when you're looking forward to a film that much it's going to be hard for it to meet expectations (this is also a worry of mine about Iron Sky, the much-hyped Nazis-on-the-moon adventure...). Thankfully, JotD offered no such disappointment. It was great fun from start to finish.

Juan is a tongue-in-cheek zombie killing rampage with plenty of laughs, some fun gore and not a lot in the way of horror. It's decidedly more in the Dead Snow and Shaun of the Dead lines than Dawn of the Dead or other more (ahem) 'serious' zombie films - this was probably a sensible choice: straight-faced zombie horror can be pretty hard to pull off, especially with a comparatively inexperienced cast (French suburban zombie masterpiece La Horde shows how well it can be done though!). Anyway, Juan sensibly balances laughs and splatter, with the obligatory bit of soul-searching and character improvement.

The basic premise is left beautifully stark. Havana is overrun with zombies. Juan and friends are trying to survive. That's about all there is to it. Like many of the classics they don't waste much time on life-before-zombies and they certainly don't bother explaining where the zombies come from - although the TV reporter blames American imperialists, a neat joke on both Cuban news/propaganda and the (modern) zombie's links to American consumerism. For the most part it just throws us into the middle of the fray as the Juan, his estranged daughter, his best friend and a couple of others start bashing, slashing, smashing and splattering zombies.

It's not perfect. But who really expects perfection from a zombie flick? The plot is essentially pretty episodic: Juan and friends go to one place, kill zombies. Another place, kill zombies. Go home. Go out. Kill Zombies. Etc. etc. Luckily it's all carried out with such obvious enthusiasm that it never really gets boring. It's slightly spoiled by some astonishingly crappy CGI though. Before computer graphics, designers had to find a convincing way to show something or just not show it. If only this were still true. Shots like a helicopter smashing into Cuban government buildings were obviously prohibitively expensive to shoot properly so would have been better left out entirely. Instead the computer generated helicopter just looks cheap.

The gore's good though! Some nice splatters, severed limbs and oozing wounds show just what fun you can have with real physical special effects. And, even if it is episodic, some of the episodes are so damn good that you can forgive them entirely: one scene sees the heroes naked, unarmed and handcuffed to a zombie in the back of a van... There are lots of wry jokes at the Cuban regime and it's claims - the zombies are referred to as dissidents throughout - and one of the characters carries both a Cuban and a US flag to wave depending on who wins. It's also suitably cavalier with its characters: several central characters meet gruesome ends and, at the beginning at least, the gang seem to accidentally kill as many humans as they do zombies (accidentally shooting an old lady with a harpoon...).

Overall, it's the enthusiasm that holds this film together. It's made by people clearly enjoying the chance to make the first Cuban zombie film and their enthusiasm is infectious. Juan is somewhat uneven but so are most zombie films. It's generally a lot of fun.

(The Bradford Film Festival is screening it again on Sunday 22nd and the film will get a DVD release on 4th June. Hurrah!)