Three Films Make A Post: IF YOU HAVE THE GUTS, HE WANTS THEM!

Body Count (1995): Despite a promising beginning, this (kinda) action movie about Sonny Chiba and his girlfriend Brigitte Nielsen murdering themselves through a "special" police department with members like Robert Davi, Steven Bauer and Jan-Michael Vincent to find out who of them first hired Sonny to kill a gangster boss and then set him up to be arrested, soon turns into a bit of a slog. It's the kind of action movie where the sporadic action scenes are actually decently done, but in between, there's a bunch of boring and irrelevant dialogue and disinterested acting by people who could do better. The only thing that kept me awake enough to not miss the curious finale in which Chiba steals streetcar as most inappropriate escape vehicle imaginable were the horrors the film's costume department inflicted on him and Nielsen. Is that a glittering baseball cap on your head, Chiba-sensei?

Crawlspace (2012): This Australian low budget movie has nothing to do with the other movies called Crawlspace (in case you're like me and always fear an unnecessary remake). It's about some soldiers with crappy call signs crawling through the mad science base of the Australian/US governments - which incidentally only consists of various sizes of crawlspaces - and having trouble with the mad science experiments running loose. This is one of those SF/horror films that would have only needed a script that's a little sharper, and acting that's a little less clichéd to become actually good. As it stands, the movie is competently done and entertaining enough as long as you don't think too much (or at all) about it, but too often falls needlessly back on clichés and underdeveloped ideas.

Play Dirty (1969): House favourite Andre de Toth directs a war movie following a britizized (it's a real word, I'm sure) Dirty Dozen formula starring Michael Caine and Nigel Davenport. The film contains an astonishing amount of cynicism and bitterness towards war, humanity, and the British class system. Play Dirty features its share of tight action, but below the very slight veneer of "war is an adventure" lies a deep undercurrent of loathing the film likes to express with a sarcastic sneer one can hardly ignore. It's an impressively effective movie at that, and as far from any propaganda bullshit as I can imagine.

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In short: No Blade Of Grass (1970)

Humanity's finally done it. The Earth's natural resources have been wasted and poisoned, and now a new disease is destroying all grass-type plant life like rice and wheat, promising food shortages in apocalyptic dimensions.

While China is gassing its own population centres to reduce its population to a survivable number, the UK hasn't quite been reached by the catastrophe yet, but it's only a question of time until it does.

Architect John Custance (Nigel Davenport) plans to take his wife Ann (Jean Wallace), his teenage daughter Mary (Lynne Frederick), and their youngest child David (Patrick Holt) to his brother's farm far away in the countryside, for he's cultivating plants that aren't (yet) touched by the disease there. Plus, the farm's naturally situated so it can be easily defended once the expected anarchy breaks out.

Warned by Mary's boyfriend Roger (John Hamill), who works in some scientific capacity for the government, that a state of emergency will be declared shortly, the Custance's and Roger begin to make their way towards safer pastures. The situation deteriorates quickly, though, and soon enough, the group kills and steals its way to survival, not so much slowly losing its civilized veneer but throwing it away with great enthusiasm.

Cornel Wilde's No Blade of Grass (based on a novel by John Christopher whom you may know for his - also post-apocalyptic - YA book series The Tripods) is an early, desperately bleak example of the post-apocalypse movie that not only predates most of this particular genre (at least on screen), but is also much grimmer than many of its successors.

Seldom have I seen a film this willing to make no particular moral difference between the way its protagonists try to achieve survival, and those the groups they encounter do. In No Blade of Grass's world, barbarity seems to be humanity's natural state that it only too happily falls back into again once civilization gets into trouble. However, it's clear that Wilde, unlike a representative of the survivalist bend of post-apocalyptic fiction would be, may be deeply pessimist about human nature, but isn't perverse enough to celebrate this state of affairs. So there's an - often blunt, sometimes quiet - sense of desperation running through the film I found particularly moving.

On the directorial side, No Blade Of Grass (at least in its newly restored full-length version) is a bit of a schizophrenic case. Half of its emotional punch is based on laconic, semi-documentarian shots of people wandering through the empty English countryside, polluted nature, and action sequences that are suspenseful yet devoid of action hero behaviour. This mood is regularly broken up by strange stylistic flourishes like flashbacks and flashforwards, negative shots and freeze frames (most of this stylistic excess is completely missing from the film's shorter versions, making that version more easily digestible, and weaker) that can seem awkward and blunt, yet also help emphasise that the film isn't meant as a man's adventure movie. Wilde doesn't want his audience to be excited by the action, so he's undermining the normal build-up of suspense for this sort of movie. It's a rather bizarre way to go about it, but it works.

 

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