The Good The Bad and the Odd

I threw this on, expecting a straightforward exploitation movie, and got a BIG surprise. Firstly, it starts off with a prologue explaining, as a documentary, the atrocities and hardships that have affected children, starting with the holocaust (with footage), and leading to Vietnam war footage, and starving children in Africa. It’s was a shock and quite upsetting, mostly because I just wasn’t prepared for that.

Then we launch into the movie, which is partly in Spanish, but mostly in English, involving a married English couple (wife pregnant, and they have two other children back in England) holidaying in Spain, and the man telling his wife of a lovely quiet little island with a village he stayed at as a child.

There’s a festival on at the town they are in, and the noise makes them decide to go stay on the island. But when they get there, it seems deserted, except for playing children.

This is a creepy, but very engaging thriller/horror movie. Children can be utterly creepy in the right context, and this movie uses this to the full. The acting of the two leads is a little off – you can tell they’re good actors, but they seem to be overprojecting a little, almost like it’s a stage play. I think it may be something to do with being directed by a Spanish director maybe, and a different sensibility? Not sure, and I got used to it just fine, as the rest of the movie worked so damn well. The slow build, the quickly escalating (and profoundly shocking) violence, the music, the scene-setting, and the resolution, all worked excellently.

If I had to give a high-concept pitch: Imagine The Children of the Corn made with the same quality and sensibility as the original Wicker Man

thoroughly recommended.

Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly 64/100 One of the oddest movies I’ve seen that keeps a traditional narrative.

It feels like a parent of the BBC comedy League of Gentlemen. An odd family group consisting of a mother, a nanny, a boy and a girl live in an odd old house (I think the one used in the Rocky Horror Picture Show), and the boy and girl go out and entice men back to play ‘games’. The family is in a state of arrested development, with the oldish (17? maybe) children acting like children, and mumsy and nanny treating them as such, but the games descend into violence at the drop of a hat. This movie involves them picking up a “new friend” who decides to play them at their own game.

Shades of The Prisoner, The Beguiled, Sunset Boulevard, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, with a pinch of The Addams Family. It has to be seen to be believed, really.

Zombie Flesh Eaters aka Zombi 2 (1979)

From what I’ve read of it, this one seems somewhat overrated, but it does have its moments. Apparently marketed as some sort of sequel to Dawn of the Dead in some places, these zombies aren’t quite the same as those of Romero’s universe. They’re even slower if anything, and more listless, and their facial and bodily features are not as ‘naturalistic’ as Romero’s walking dead (it’s all relative, of course). In this one, the animation of the dead goes back to older zombie lore, back to voodoo and cursed histories. Even so, it’s not really explained, and we are just left to it.

Most of the action is set on a Caribbean island Mantoul, and here we have some too-ing and fro-ing where some doctor at the end of his limits is trying to figure out what’s going on, whilst failing to take any sort of precautions against frequent cases of the reanimated dead. Throw in two couples investigating the disappearance of one of the girls’ father but being stranded by a damaged boat, and you have the main protagonists.

They are a tired lot, and the film is a little boring in places. The best acting by far comes from some brief work by the doctor’s wife (she ends up with her head skewered on a wooden splinter and gets out early), and there’s a decent enough score. The constant use of drumming when you go to island scenes is a little too close to Chinese water torture for my liking.

Having said all that, there are a number of pretty good scenes throughout – a “deserted” yacht floating into New York harbour; a definite “the one where…” moment when a zombie fights a shark that is quite amazing (how did they do that?); an eye on a stick moment; and a graveyard of ancient corpses rising; final shots where we see the world has gone down the tubes.

Overrated I think, and not in the same league as any in the original Romero trilogy, but definitely worth a watch if you aren’t too averse to unrelenting gore and zombie chomping down on the ever decreasing band of goodies.

Flavia The Heretic (1974)

Either the movie, or I, can’t decide whether it’s art with a political/feminist agenda, or sleazy eurotrash. It has artistic bits (some of the imagery, especially one very distinctive scene of a naked woman climbing inside a cow’s carcass, and definitely the music). Sometiimes is succeeds as art and trash at the same time (the horrible scene of a woman being raped in a pigsty while the pigs excitedly stamp around her – it’s a poorly acted rape, but you have to feel for the actress being naked and on her back while largeish pigs scurry around her – too close), and in its artistic life, it shows us quite well how men rule – they castrate a horse without regard for its suffering, they rape and get away with it whilst the smallest infraction by a woman means they get flogged (if lucky) or tortured to death if not.

It kind of works partly, and the atmosphere veers from rather fine when the odd imagery and music come in, to being undercut by the poor sound design, some poor acting, and the extremeness of the sleaze.

I kind of enjoyed it, when there wasn’t a wince on my face, which was often.

I definitely saw a cut version by the way, because the end of the uncut apparently has an extended flaying – my version cut sharply just as that started. I don’t feel hard-done-by in missing it though.

Les Diaboliques/Diabolique 68/100

Highly regarded French thriller that I think owes its reputation to being in the right time and place. It was, I understand, the first foreign language mainstream hit in America in 1955. Frankly, it seems overwordy and unnecessarily long getting to the third act, though the actors are engaging and fun to watch. I have a very similar problem with Clouzot’s other (superior) movie Wages of Fear, that I can only watch (and really, REALLY enjoy) if I just skip the whole first hour. This movie, though, if you skip, you do miss the slow build of tension that is nice (even if far too slow) and does actually pay off in the last 20 minutes or so. And that last act is rather fine, but I couldn’t help but wonder how the bad guy came up with a plan that meant major discomfort for him for hours on end (and indeed, how he seemed to hold his breath for hours on end, when he was left in the bath).

What happens to the character of one of the actresses at the end spookily happened to her in real life several years later. Ahh, the circle of life/art.

Horror Hotel (aka City of the Dead) (1960)

Rather fine short horror movie, made in the UK with the actors doing American accents. A great beginning with the witchiest-looking witch you ever saw (well, without green makeup at least), atmospheric middle and striking end make this a real pleasure, and whilst it isn’t scary, it is atmospheric, creepy and rich, with some great scene-setting and sudbued, well-written characters and plotting. It also has some amazing parallels with Psycho (which came out just 3 months before), including a similar twist where the audience is misdirected about who the main character is, some fine black-and-white photography, right to a horrific reveal at the end.

It also resembles another great horror movie of 1960, the Italian production Black Sunday, and in fact I think Horror Hotel, despite the grindhouse title, is a better movie than Black Sunday. It also shares plot elements with the later Wicker Man, as noted by Danny Peary in his Guide For The Film Fanatic.

And I didn’t even mention it has Christopher Lee in a central role (doing an American accent too).

Produced by Milton Subotsky, who went on to found Amicus pictures.

Well, worth watching.

Nosferatu The Vampire (1979)

Directed by Werner Herzog, and some of its hazy, dreamy shots and atmosphere reminiscent of other Herzog movies such as Aguirre, this will bore some and entrall others. It enthralled me, but it is glacially slow and mannered. The tenseness in the odd scenes where, for example, Dracula (for that’s what he’s called here) just stands staring at Harker are mesmeric. There’s plenty of what I think is called “Rembrandt Lighting”, and an amazing shot where virtually all is black apart the the Count’s white, revolting face, who looks wistfully with a 1000-yard stare into his own personal abyss. Equally haunting is Isabelle Adjani as the heroine, clearly dressed, made-up and deporting herself like a silent-era scream-queen, and some amazing shots in the rat-infested city, such as troops of black-clad men carrying coffin after coffin.

Some of the characterisations are just weird. Van Helsing (or Von Helsing here – by the way, I watched the German version) seems a tired old guy, as does some town official charged with arresting him at the end, who is an oddly Monty Pythonesque scene starts arguing with the man in charge, because there is no one left to guard prisoners, as everyone died of the plague…

I really enjoyed this movie, it did the three things I need for a film to be great – it entertained, it enthralled, and it enlightened. Really glad I watched it, thoroughly recommended.

Very good episode, involving the crew picking up a teenager that has survived alone on a planet that he shouldnt have been able to, and trying to teach him how to interact with others. During the course of the journey it becomes obvious he has powerful psychic abilities, and is as unstable as any teenager…

Very enjoyable, with the lovesick Charlie mooning about after Yoeman Rand, and then getting more and more frustrated with everyone and doing odd assorted things to people (he turns a girl into an iguana, or makes people’s faces turn into a formless, empty piece of flesh). He doesn’t kill any red shirts though (though he makes a guy in a red judo suit disintegrate into thin air). We also get Uhura singing a song making fun of Spock whilst he plays a harp, and Kirk, topless and wearing red tights in the weirdest gymnasium I’ve ever seen.

This story structure (a powerful being having psychic control over the enterprise, ending with a very, very well-known twist that everyone knows from Star Trek) was used several times in the original series, with Charlie X and The Squire of Gothos being the most well-known examples of this particular story.

Very enjoyable episode. To put it in our list of best first

1. Charlie X
2. The Man Trap

Wiki Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Trap

Reasonable, but not outstanding, episode, chosen by the TV executives as the one to open the series. There’s been debate why they chose this, as it’s not quite as exciting as some of the other early episodes they could have gone with, but it’s serviceable, and has some decent dramatic tension. One thing that is really outstanding and surprising about this and the other early episodes is how much they’re getting right – the whole Kirk/McCoy/Spock dynamic is in place right from the get-go, and this episode shows them off nicely. It also has Uhura doing quite a lot of lines, and setting her character up in an interesting way. She baits Spock about being tired of hearing the word ‘frequency’ and starting to feel like part of the equipment. I liked that little scene.

We also see Yoeman Rand and Sulu off the bridge – Sulu has got some weird plants, I can tell you.

And whilst some crew members die, none of them are wearing red

I’m watching the new remastered version of these series, and they do look quite spectacular – this is a nice restoration.

I’m not going to score these ones, I think I’m just going to start putting each and every episode into my favourite order, highest first, and I’ll ignore the Pike-centric pilot that was never aired. So to start:

1. The Man Trap