Three Films Make A Post: Ghoulish Delights

Halloweenville (2011): Gary P. Cohen, of Video Violence fame, and one Paul Kaye, document the intense Halloween shenanigans in Lambertville, New Jersey, which turns into a giant, tacky and lovely piece of Halloween kitsch for a week a year. Embedded in cheesy commentary and the cheapest default editing tricks the directors’ editing suite can provide, are interviews with various local Halloween enthusiasts and many a verité (or awkwardly framed, if you prefer) scene of the place’s insane Halloween festivities. It’s enough to make any ghoul cry tears of joy.

While this is certainly not done artfully, there’s so much genuine enthusiasm here, presented fully in the cheesy version of the spirit of the season, it’s impossible not to love this.

The Raven (1963): This adaptation of Poe’s poem as a comedy has never been a particular favourite of mine among the films of Corman’s Poe cycle. On this recent rewatch, I actually fell in love with the film. Price, Lorre and Karloff mugging it up in this tale of duelling wizards, Hazel Court doing a femme fatale bit, and young Jack Nicholson looking confused in front of Daniel Haller’s gorgeous gothic sets, filmed by Corman with the élan they deserve – what’s not to love?

Particularly when I’ve actually grown old enough to find the general silliness rather diverting, find myself actually laughing at jokes I’ve shrugged at a decade ago, and enjoy how much Corman and company make fun of a style they themselves put a lot of effort into creating.

Plus, the climactic sorcerous duel is one of the prime moments of pure, silly, imagination in cinema.

The House of Usher (1989): Speaking of Poe adaptations that don’t exactly keep to the text, Alan Birkinshaw’s bit of late 80s cheese is pretty fun if you accept it as what it is and what it isn’t – there’s certainly joy to be had in Donald Pleasence running around with a drill hand pretending not to be mad, Oliver Reed being dastardly while chewing scenery, some tasteful mutilation and decapitation, a rat eating a guy’s penis, and come curiously fine set design that goes for some sort of modernist gothic. All of this doesn’t make terribly much sense, but certainly looks pretty great.

In short: The Sell Out (1976)

Former US intelligence operative Sam Lucas (Richard Widmark) has retired to Jerusalem where he lives with another former spy, Deborah (Gayle Hunnicutt). Alas Sam’s peaceful life is going to end soon, for he’ll have to cope with the results of a rather peculiar partnership. Apparently, high level US spy Harry Sickles (Sam Wanamaker) and high level KGB boss General Kasyan (Peter Frye) have made a pact to get rid of troublesome and unloved members of their respective agencies by teaming up for absurdly public assassinations. And if that means blowing up Israeli children in a botched attempt to kill US traitor Gabriel Lee (Oliver Reed), so be it.

However, before he changed sides, Gabriel was Sam’s favourite spy pupil. Or even a bit more – Gabriel likes to call the older man “Papa”, so when he comes to Sam for help, the surprisingly honourable (for a spy) man has a hard time not trying to help, even knowing that it will probably cost him everything. Complicating things is the fact that Deborah was Gabriel’s girlfriend before he defected, and Sickles is clearly an old enemy. Add to this the Israeli security Major Benjamin (Ori Levy), who is really unhappy about the whole dead kid business, and you have quite the clusterfuck.

Which is also the proper word to describe the script (by Murray Smith and Jud Kinberg) of Peter Collinson’s spy action drama The Sell Out. When the basic set-up to your spy movie is less plausible than Blofeld’s latest attempt to shoot 007 into space, but you still seem to want to make a gritty, semi-realistic spy movie with actual human psychology in your characters, you are in trouble. The whole basic plan in which Sickles and Kasyan conspire to murder some of their own agents very loudly and in public makes little sense. Since when have spy agencies have had trouble to get rid of their own people quietly, and with less opportunity to create a major international incident or three? Why assassinate people in the least effective manner possible? Why push dangerous people into a position where they are bound to lash out at you just for basic self defence?

Character psychology doesn’t work much better either. It is clear the film is trying, and it certainly has a fine cast to do it, but no character relation here ever feels plausible or convincing. Everything is either plain stupid, or screeching, overwritten melodrama (particularly Hunnicutt has to go through literal contortions), or just plain pointless. Most acting choices are as inexplicable as the writing, but then what’s an actor to do when given material this incoherent?

Collinson attempts to muddle through whatever it is the script is trying to do, but there’s a lifeless quality to the melodramatic parts of the film, and little flair to the more general spy business. The Sell Out only ever truly comes alive during the action sequences. But a couple of good car chases and shoot-outs can’t save anything here.

In short: Gor (1987)

Wimpy college lecturer Tarl Cabot (Urbano Barberini) finds his weird ideas about the existence of a “counter-Earth” you can visit with the help of a ring he inherited from his father proven very right indeed when he is sucked into the sword and sorcery without sorcery world of Gor.

Freshly arrived, he just barely escapes the clutches of the men henching for evil priest king Sarm (Oliver Reed) and runs into the local good guys. Sarm is on a bit of a rampage through various villages, slaughtering and enslaving their populations and stealing their “home stones”. Sarm’s rural enemies have hoped for a dimension traveller to arrive, apparently, but Tarl isn’t manly enough to pass muster, so has to go through a training montage.

To motivate him into helping out against Sarm, his new buddies – big-haired and big-breasted love interest Talena (Rebecca Ferratti) and characters I dub old guy and grumpy young guy – explain that their home stone is Tarl’s only way to get back home. Why everyone else is so fixated on some red plastic stones, the film never gets around to tell. So off our heroes go through deserts and more desert, visit a barbarian camp and wander through some caves in what appears to be the local equivalent of a quest, just without the adventure.

This is Fritz Kiersch’s Cannon version of the first of John Norman’s Counter-Earth novels. The books start as basically readable Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches but becomes increasingly misogynistic and unpleasant, espousing some pretty notorious nonsense about women’s supposed wish to be dominated, enslaved and violated; the film on its part doesn’t care about any of that stuff, and really just wants to be an Italian Conan rip-off. Alas, it doesn’t manage to achieve this modest goal.

Even the worst Italian sword and sorcery (or in this case sword and planet/scientific romance) movies try to keep their audience awake by throwing regular action scenes and cardboard and latex monsters at their audience. Gor’s action is as unambitious as it is infrequent, with the usual barely dressed guys and gals slowly going through motions Kiersch is either unwilling or unable to make look interesting. Apart from Tarl’s dimension hopping, there’s no fantastic or science fictional element here at all, missing out on quite a bit of what makes Sword and Sorcery or the best stuff by Burroughs (I can’t speak for Norman’s books, for I don’t have the stomach to delve deeper than the first two books there, and my reading of those has been a couple of decades ago) so fun – creatures, magic, and weird science as the base for fun and games.

It would be one thing if Gor had anything else to show its audience, but there’s really little happening here of any interest. Kiersch’s disinterested and unergetic direction doesn’t improve anything.

The most interesting thing about the film is how it manages to get such a bored villain performance out of Oliver Reed. For some reason, Reed mostly mumbles and angrily whispers his lines, with pauses that suggest he has to drag every single line slowly out of the script; from time to time, he laughs pointlessly. Oh, well.

Past Misdeeds: The Scarlet Blade (1964)

aka The Crimson Blade

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


The English Civil War is in its last throes. The remaining Royalists, the Cavaliers - who are pure as angels I'll have you know - are fighting a guerrilla war trying to enable the former king Charles to escape from the - satanically evil wouldn't you know - Roundheads.

Despite the Royalists' best efforts the men of Colonel Judd (Lionel Jeffries) - officially a traitor to the royal cause himself - manage to capture the king. Now it's only a matter of holding on to the arsehis former royal majesty until he can be transported to the tower, which is supposed to happen in a few weeks time.

Fortunately or un, a group of especially potent Royalist guerrillas (among them an especially scenery-hungry Michael Ripper in embarrassing brownface as "the gypsy Pablo") led by Edward Beverley (Jack Hedley), calling himself "the Scarlet Blade" is operating in the area. These guerrillas are of course doing everything in their power to decimate the enemy troops in the area, and find a way to rescue the ex-king.

What Judd doesn't know is that his daughter Claire (June Thorburn) has been helping Royalist refugees for quite some time, even though she isn't exactly subtle about her loyalties; from there, it's only a small step to involve herself in the conspiracy meant to save the king. Ironically, Judd's right hand man, the deeply cynical Captain Sylvester (Oliver Reed) sees quite a bit more clearly what Claire is up to, but instead of denouncing her, blackmails himself into the Royalist conspiracy too. For Sylvester has fallen in love with Claire and has decided that the best way into a woman's heart is threatening her with exposure and then helping her out with the things she's afraid of being exposed for. He is a smooth ladies man, Sylvester is.

Alas for poor Sylvester, once Claire lays eyes on the prime middle-aged woodenness of Beverley, her heart is forever lost to him. Of course, being played be Oliver Reed in a very sneering mood, Beverley is not the kind of guy who takes these things on the chin, and again the cause of saving one mass-murdering asshole who is being replaced by another mass-murdering asshole is threatened by the vagaries of love.

The deeper I dive into the pool of non-horror movies Hammer Studios made parallel to their horror output, the more impressed I am by the non-horror movies' general quality.

John Gilling's The Scarlet Blade may not be the second coming of the historical adventure movie, seeing as it uses a period not often seen in this sort of film in a bit too shallow a manner, doing a bit more violence to actual history than seems necessary for the kind of film it is. It's one thing to decide on one side of the English Civil War to be the moustache-twirling bad guys, but it's quite another one to basically have the angels sing on the soundtrack whenever fucking Charles I., who deserves the word "tyrant" the film uses for Cromwell quite well too, appears on screen.

However, whenever the film decides to explore the more complex loyalties and motivations of its characters, and relegates actual history to the attractive background like most modern swashbucklers do for a reason (we're a long way from Weyman, for better or worse), it becomes less annoying, and more believably human. In fact, the strained loyalties all of the film's major characters except for its nominal hero Beverley have give the handful of scenes of actual physical violence much more poignancy than they otherwise would carry, and give the film's melodramatic scenes quite a bit of power. Beverley, on the other hand, is and stays the sort of boring, wooden romantic lead you've come to expect from this sort of film (the times of Errol Flynn alas being over, too), a man whose moral certainty is not based on an ability to work through his doubts and fears, but on a lack of imagination and personality, which makes him pretty difficult to cheer for, even when he puts love before duty.

It doesn't help our theoretical hero's case that Jack Hedley's performance is so neutral it sometimes becomes difficult to remember he's there, nor that his main rivals for screen time are Lionel Jeffries and Oliver Reed, both doing their best to outdo each other in intensity, nor does it improve matters that the script doesn't bother to give him much of interest to do.
June Thorburn's character is quite interesting for an adventure movie of this period (and especially one from Hammer, who weren't exactly front runners when it comes to active female leads) in that her character is actually allowed to have some agency as well as a backbone. In fact, Claire seems a much more heroic character than Beverley to me, because she actually understands the implications of what she is doing, and decides doing it despite of these implications because she thinks she is doing right. I just wish Thorburn were a little better at projecting the force of personality the script suggests her character to have; while she isn't as lacking in screen presence as Hedley is, she's never quite convincing enough, which is a bit of a shame.


Other reviews of The Scarlet Blade on the 'net tend to come down hard on the action scenes. However, I don't think that's particularly fair. It's true nothing Gilling presents here is truly spectacular, but the film's emphasis lies more on its character-based melodrama of loyalties, with the action only meant to provide the story with enough spice to keep it moving. This, I think, the action does quite well.

Past Misdeeds: The Pirates of Blood River (1962)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


At the end of the 17th century, a group of Huguenots fled France and settled on the tropical, piranha-infested Isle of Devon somewhere in the tropics. Now, two generations later, what once was supposed to be a colony providing freedom from persecution has become the tyranny of a handful of older men with impressive facial hair under the leadership of Jason Standing (Andrew Keir, as intense as always, even though the script doesn't provide him with much to work with here). The bible-wielding elders sentence people to death or life in their own little penal colony for breaking that obscure set of religious laws known as "the ten commandments" (or something of that sort). The less bearded classes aren't too happy with the political state of affairs, yet they're still too respectful of their elders and their elders' leather-vested henchmen to openly rebel.

Standing's own son Jonathon (Kerwin Mathews, one of the better romantic leads for this sort of film) is especially dissatisfied with life on the island, thinking his father lets himself be manipulated into a cruelty that is quite against his nature by his colleagues. Rather lacking in holiness himself, Jonathon's also in love with a married woman who is mistreated by her husband, and plans on fleeing the place together with her. Alas, before the couple can realize their plans, the elders are catching them in the act of rubbing their cheeks together, provoking the poor woman into running into a river full of piranhas.

Graciously, the elders don't sentence Jonathon to death for his unbiblical behaviour, but rather to spend some time in the colony's penal colony, which, as it turns out, is just as much of a death sentence, just a slower one.

Things at the colony are rough, and Jonathon's background makes him not exactly well-liked by the warden, but eventually, the young man escapes. Only to run right into the arms of the pirate band of Captain LaRoche (Christopher "I'm French, no, really" Lee) which counts among its members some beloved Hammer mainstays like young Oliver Reed and Michael Ripper. For a pirate, the Captain seems civilized enough, and claims to be willing to help Jonathon out with peacefully getting rid of the rule of the elders if the younger man only agrees to let the pirates stay in the Huguenot village for rest and recuperation whenever they need it.

In a turn of events that only surprises Jonathon, the pirates are really in it for the raping and the pillaging. LaRoche is convinced that the founders of the colony have hidden away a treasure of gold somewhere (he might even be right), and he's willing to do absolutely anything to get it. Of course, hoping for gold and actually finding it are two things, especially when some of the Huguenots turn out to be quite competent guerrilla fighters.

John Gilling's The Pirates of Blood River is the least among Hammer Film's handful of seafaring averse pirate movies, slightly hampered by a script that sets up conflicts for its first thirty minutes it will then not bother to resolve later on by anything else but hand-waving.

The whole religious oppression angle is very much side-lined - except for two or three wavering dialogue scenes - once the pirates arrive at the colony, and is only ever resolved by the fact that LaRoche kills off the elders one by one, which sure is a solution, but not one that's thematically satisfying. On the positive side, pirates.

Said pirates are a bit sillier than in the other Hammer pirate movies, too, for some genius (Gilling? Anthony Keys? Jimmy Sangster?) decided it would be a bright idea not just to camp up their appearance, but also to let them all - except for Michael Ripper, whose dialogue instead tests out how often a man can use the pirate-appropriate word "matey" without giggling - speak with painfully fake accents. Reed - in an unfortunately minor role - and Lee - doing his evil glowering shtick with some enthusiasm and thanks to that to very good effect - seem to be trying to outdo each other in the badness of their "French" accents. Though this aspect of the movie clearly has camp value (too bad for me I abhor the concept), it's standing in stark opposition to the film's earnest dramatic tone and makes it quite a bit more difficult to take certain scenes seriously.

This isn't to suggest there's nothing enjoyable at all about the movie if you're not into pointing at especially silly pirates; this is, after all a Hammer production made in the early 60s, a time when the high professional standards of the studio and the people working for it made it quite impossible for them to produce a bad movie. Gilling - who directed two of my favourites among the studio's non-series horror movies with The Reptile and Revolt of the Zombies - may have his problems with the film's pacing in the early scenes, but once the final half hour arrives, he milks a lot of excitement out of the guerrilla warfare between the Huguenots and the pirates trying to get away with their ill gotten gains. At that point, there's little left of the silliness of the film's earlier scenes. High camp is replaced by a certain grimness that makes up for a lot of what came before.


My true disappointment isn't so much with the film's problems at the beginning anyway but rather with the idea how fantastic the film could have been if it had been quite as good as those last scenes right from the start. As it stands, the sympathetic viewer needs a bit of patience and the ability to ignore a problematic set-up to enjoy The Pirates of Blood River, but with that patience, the film is still very much worth seeing.

Ten Little Indians (1974)

aka And Then There Were None

Under various pretexts, the mysterious U.N. Owen invites a group of people (Oliver Reed, Elke Sommer, Adolfo Celi, Herbert Lom, Gert Fröbe, Maria Rohm, Charles Aznavour, Stéphane Audran, Alberto de Mendoza and Richard Attenborough) into an unused hotel smack dab in the Iranian desert next to some picturesque ruins.

On their first evening, a tape message by the voice of God, or Orson Welles, accuses everyone in the house of being responsible for the death of at least one other person. Usually, that would be quite enough to stop every party, but this one takes until Charles Aznavour sings a song with an invisible band to get antsy; or the sudden nervousness might be on account of his death by poisoning shortly afterwards.

Now, our protagonists find themselves trapped in the Hotel, for the desert seem rather unconquerable, and there are neither cars nor telephones around. Soon, more people die based on a free very interpretation of the “Ten Little Indians” nursery rhyme, and people become increasingly paranoid, convinced the killer must be one amongst their ten.

Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians seems to be a book that brings out the best in the people adapting it, perhaps because it lacks a single annoying detective and replaces her or him with a perfect opportunity for a bunch of actors to emote, chew scenery, or something of that kind.

Dubious yet sometimes lucky British producer Harry Alan Towers loved the material so much, he made three adaptations of it, about one every fifteen years. Okay, I suspect he needed to keep making them to keep a license alive, but given that two out of these three films are actually rather good, that’s not the worst that could have happened. As far as I understand, this second Towers version uses much of the dialogue from his first version, but it still retains a character very much of its own thanks to its acting ensemble, its locations, and Peter Collinson’s direction.

Collinson, a man with mediocre as well as quite great films on his CV, clearly saw the opportunities the locations Towers acquired gave him to build a rather macabre mood. His camera finds the inherent threat in the hotel’s interiors where spacious oriental kitsch meets occidental colour-blindness, he uses spectacular staircases for playing games of the audience watching someone watching someone else while he himself is being watched without needing more camera involvement than decidedly clever placement, etc, and so forth.

The film’s visual style seems highly influenced by the giallo, the camera generally being positioned in the more peculiar and telling ways available with no conversation – and this is a very conversation heavy peace – not enhanced by direction that seeks to express the mood inside a room via its own movement and positioning even before the actors do anything at all. Like many a giallo director, Collinson succeeds in leapfrogging an audience’s scepticism towards a faintly – or very – ridiculous plot by creating a mood that suggests dreamscapes and the workings of the subconscious, making it very easy to read the resulting films in a manner where what a film’s plot has to say becomes secondary to what its mood tells us about its characters and the meaning of the world surrounding them.

I am – obviously – very fond of that approach to filmmaking, perhaps even to a fault, but I think this particular Christie novel just calls for it. This is, after all, a film about members of the upperclass and the bourgeoisie having to show and confront the truths behind their masks and the lies they tell themselves to get to sleep at night. Why, two of the more working class characters might even be called innocent, which would probably be more telling in a class-political sense if the other two weren’t just as murderous the bourgeois.

These characters are brought to life in various ways between subtlety, thespian grandstanding, and good old scenery-chewing with most of the involved well able and willing to use all three approaches, depending on what any given scene calls for. It’s all rather lovely to watch, particularly in scenes like the surreal confrontation between Lom and Attenborough with two packs of matches and a billiard table as a prop.

This all adds up to a very fine movie, even if the ending eschews to embrace the darkness of the novel and goes for a rather more normal happy end that only fits the tone of what came before vaguely. Despite the problem of the ending, Ten Little Indians is another exception to my usual “Ugh, Agatha Christie” rule.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,italian movies,french movies,spanish movies,german movies,reviews,mystery,peter collinson,oliver reed,elke sommer,herbert lom,gert fröbe,richard attenborough,alberto de mendoza,stéphane audran,adolfo celi,maria rohm,charles aznavour

The Assassination Bureau (1969)

1914. Suffragette and all-purpose feminist Sonya Winter (Diana Rigg) attempts to break into that vestige of the patriarchy we know as journalism. To reach her goal, she finds out how to contact the elusive international group of assassin’s known as The Assassination Bureau, and proposes to make contact with them and write about it to Lord Bostwick (Telly “Most British Man Alive” Savalas), owner of quite a popular London newspaper. Even a bit to Miss Winter’s surprise, Bostwick agrees.

Soon, Miss Winter finds herself in front of the boss of The Assassination Bureau (Limited), charming crazy man Ivan Dragomiloff (Oliver Reed). Because she’s a public minded person with a sarcastic streak, Miss Winter declares she wishes to hire the Assassination Bureau to kill one Ivan Dragomiloff. Dragomiloff agrees to take on the job, because he thinks his organization has fallen far from its former ideal of just killings for money to just killing for money, and having a kind of mass duel between himself and the regional leaders of the organization – as played by people like Curd Jürgens and Philippe Noiret – would be a good way to clean up their act.

What Miss Winter doesn’t know is that Lord Bostwick is actually the vice chairman of the Bureau and this is his – rather idiotic – plan to get himself on the chairman’s seat. From here on out, it’s all Miss Winter following and romancing Ivan around the world (he’s no fool though, and soon just takes her with him, because she’s Diana Rigg in 1969), Ivan donning ridiculous costumes to kill people in ridiculous ways, and Telly Savalas and Curd Jürgens chewing scenery in the most enthusiastic manner.

The Assassination Bureau isn’t one of director Basil Dearden’s best works, but it is quite an entertaining black comedy that generally is at its best when it lets house favourites Oliver Reed and Diana Rigg – here quite at the heights of their powers - do their respective things while various European character actors around them gloat, die, and explode (not necessarily in this order) in more or less effective ways.

All this takes place in fine, stylized and colourful sets and locations,  with Dearden milking everything he gets his camera on for purposefully ridiculous and clichéd local and temporal colour, clearly basing the film’s world not on the actual 1910s but on the pop cultural idea of them, leaving us with a film that contains an awesome (in the old sense of the word) bordello that defies description in – of course – Paris, a pretty gondolier who sings a pre-recorded piece of schmaltz after dropping off the bodies his lover (frequent giallo actress Annabella Incontrera) has poisoned, and a finale that sees a European peace conference threatened by a bomb carrying zeppelin. It’s quite impossible for me to argue with these things, particularly when they are presented with as much ironic delight and verve as Dearden shows here.

In fact, Dearden is so convincing a director I found it easy to ignore two of the film’s three main flaws. Firstly, the fact that the film’s idea of humour can be more broad and slapstick-y than I generally prefer, with rather a lot of these “comical chases” I usually only read about; though most of them end with dead people, so that’s still quite alright.

Secondly, it’s a bit of a shame how little the film really does with its historical background. Even when it (rather tastelessly) integrates the actual starting occasion of World War I in slightly fictionalized form (with added blood sausage), there’s never the impression it actually has something to say about the historical era it is taking place in. Again, it seems to be more interested in the era as pop cultural colour than as anything deeper.

Thirdly, and quite impossible to overlook, is the sad fact that the film gives all the swashbuckling action scenes (and, despite the wrong historical era, this is very much a swashbuckling comedy in its nature) to Reed, with Rigg fortunately not cast as a helpless girlie yet also generally side-lined when it comes to the action. Which is a bit (or a mountain) of a shame, really.

Still, The Assassination Bureau is a highly enjoyable bit of British humour that doesn’t contain one boring second, and that certainly counts for a lot in my book, flaws or no flaws.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,comedy,adventure,basil dearden,oliver reed,diana rigg,telly savalas,curd jürgens,philippe noiret,annabella incontrera

In short: The Three Musketeers (1973) & The Four Musketeers (1974)

(I treat both films as one because there's really no good reason not to, seeing as they were filmed back to back and absolutely belong together).

It is always a dangerous proposition to visit one's childhood favourites again, particularly when those favourites are comedies like Richard Lester's version of Dumas's Three Musketeers. Once, most of us found farts inherently funny, and now - hopefully - we no longer do.

So it is a particular delight when one can watch movies like the ones at hand and come out with the feeling that one was a particularly clever gal or guy when one liked it, already of impeccable taste and with an eye for strangeness.

For strange Lester's film surely is: turning the romantic splendour of the previous versions of the story into a mixture of the comedic, the veracious, and the absurd with the help of "Flashman" writer George MacDonald Fraser does not sound the most - or even fourth-most - obvious way to go about another adaptation of Dumas's novels, but Lester and Fraser really pull it of. A large part of the films' charm is based on the way the often very broad humour and the greater than usual in a swashbuckler authenticity collide, showing off much of what is splendour in other versions of the tale as just as silly as the fashions and mores of our times will look a few hundred years on. The past, the films make clear, was another, quite muddy and rainy (even in undramatic moments), country where people lived and loved and dressed and acted like fools, and where France was overrun with people with - or at least pretending to have - various British accents who were totally unable to agree on a pronounciation of D'Artagnan.

The Three Musketeers could easily have drifted into the realm of deeply cynical deconstruction with this approach, but the film looks at its strange people and times with a look that is as much one of wide-eyed wonder and compassion as it is one of mockery, as if Lester and Fraser had begun with cool distance to their material but soon enough fallen in love with all its inner ironies, its unconscious naiveties, and its sense of adventure that transcends morals.

Add to this a cast of actors like Oliver Reed, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Faye Dunaway, Geraldine Chaplin, Christopher Lee, Michael York, Frank Finlay, Raquel Welch and Richard Chamberlain in a very good mood (well, Welch is absolutely dreadful and has zero comical timing, but that was to be expected), and Lester's hand for heroically ridiculous (or is it ridiculously heroic?) swashbuckling action, and you have a film I'm inordinately proud to already have loved as a little boy.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,british movies,american movies,adventure,richard lester,oliver reed,raquel welch,richard chamberlain,michael york,frank finlay,christopher lee,faye dunaway

Sitting Target (1972)

Despite having landed in prison thanks to a mysterious snitch, hardened professional criminal Harry Lomart (Oliver Reed) seems willing enough - though not happy to, mind you - to peacefully wait out the next fifteen years or so in prison. After all, his wife Pat (Jill St. John in a surprise non-awful performance) is going to be waiting for him when he gets out, so there's something to look forward to, right? Harry's disposition changes when Pat visits him to give him a particularly fine Dear John speech. Not only does she want to get divorced, but she's also pregnant by another man. Harry's not the kind of guy to take news of this sort in stride, and unsuccessfully attempts to strangle Pat at once.

A bit later, Harry and his partner and eternal best friend in crime Birdy Williams (Ian McShane) - in fact, they seem so good friends it is sometimes curious why Harry is so hung up on his wife seeing as he is also married to Birdy - break out of jail. Birdy would prefer to just flee the country, but Harry still has his murderous plans for Pat (and her elusive new man) in his heart, and Birdy's not the kind of friend who leaves his buddy just because of a minor murder plan. Or because Harry does the unthinkable for a British criminal (even of his rather brutal persuasion) and acquires a gun and starts using it quite like the bad guy in a crime movie. This sort of behaviour doesn't just increase the enthusiasm of Inspector Milton (Edward Woodward), the man in charge of protecting Pat, for his work, but also strains Harry's relations in the underworld to a breaking point. It's really just the question of how much carnage he will be able to cause before somebody gets him and Birdy. Perhaps he'll also find an answer to the question of who exactly did initially snitch on him. Harry probably won't like the answer.

Douglas Hickox' Sitting Targets belongs to the fine group of deeply pessimistic crime films (one could argue they are even more pessimistic than the classic noir movies) made in the UK during the 70s whose most famous example is of course Mike Hodges' Get Carter, and rightly so. Sitting Target is a fine example of the form too, filtering a gritty sense of reality (rather than "realism") through the lens of the sort of artificiality that is meant to heighten intensities rather than break them. There's - apart from the dramatic one - no irony in Hickox' direction. No curious camera angle, no peculiar framing of a scene is meant to point out its own artistry; everything is in the service of characters and plot.

Still, from time to time Hickox lays his obvious visual metaphors and clever camera angles on a bit too thick, not like somebody who wants to point out his own awesomeness, but as if he were afraid the audience wouldn't get what he's trying to do unless he hammers it home and then hammers it home again. A man for subtlety and ambiguity the director ain't.

Fortunately, the film only suffers from that sort of over-emphasis (which always reminds me of Eisenstein when I encounter it) in a few scenes, and isn't at all ruined by it. Hickox also shows himself adept at increasingly intense, often just slightly bizarre and highly creative action scenes. My personal favourite is a sequence where Reed has a peculiar kind of duel with two motorcycle cops in an immense mass of hanged laundry. It's the sort of scene that should be ridiculous taken at face-value but is set-up and filmed with so much cleverness and intensity it's impossible not to take it absolutely seriously.

That scene - and many others - wouldn't play quite as well if not for some rather great acting, with Reed playing the kind of violent, intense and too frequently unthinking man (critics often like to use the word "animalistic" here, but that's a cop out word to describe physical emotionality as primitive if ever I heard one) he got often typecast as with all of his immense powers of glowering and slurring his lines (an approach whose general lack of subtlety fits the film it occurs in perfectly). As is often the case in his movies, Reed's performance is the obvious main attraction in the cast (in Sitting Target's case quite logically so for plot reasons), but McShane and the other actors do more than create good foils for his various outbreaks and sudden mood shifts. The way they play it, there's more going on than the violence and the shouting, just not necessarily things Harry as a character very much caught up in his own emotions is able to realize, turning him into another crime movie protagonist caught up in things very much beyond his control and understanding.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,douglas hickox,oliver reed,jill st. john,ian mcshane,edward woodward,crime

On WTF: The Scarlet Blade (1964)

aka The Crimson Blade

As you know, Jim, there aren't many adventure movies set during the English Civil War, but fortunately, the glorious people of Hammer did at least provide us with John Gilling's The Scarlet Blade, a film that features a comparatively active female lead, Oliver Reed and others glowering with all their might, and an incredibly boring hero.

If that adds up to something good or something rather bad I'll tell you in this week's column on WTF-Film.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,adventure,john gilling,lionel jeffries,oliver reed,jack hedley,june thorburn,michael ripper,other places

On WTF: The Pirates of Blood River (1962)

Ah, Hammer Film and their landlubber pirates. The Pirates of Blood River may not be the best movie coming from that particular sub genre, but it does recommend itself with the usual awesome cast (including Christopher Lee, Oliver Reed, Andrew Keir, Michael Ripper and Kerwin Mathews) and some Huguenot guerrilla fighting.

So click on through to my column on WTF-Film for some raping and pillaging.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,adventure,reviews,john gilling,kerwin mathews,christopher lee,oliver reed,andrew keir,michael ripper

Spasms (1983)

Seven years ago, millionaire Jason Kincaid (Oliver Reed) and his brother mounted an expedition into the wilds (or something) of Micronesia to try and get behind the truth of a local legend about the door to hell opening there every seven years to let out a giant snake. The expedition cost the brother his life and left Kincaid with a telepathic connection to and an obsession with a possibly demonic, loud yet stealthy snake of quite variable size.

Now, seven years later, Kincaid has hired some poor idiots to catch his arch enemy and transport it to his mansion in the USA. Kincaid hopes having the thing in close proximity will somehow make it easier to sever the telepathic bond between him and the hellish animal (though the film also insinuates that this particularly dubious idea might actually be caused by the snake's malevolent telepathic influence). To help sever the unpleasant bond, Kincaid hires psychiatrist and ESP researcher Dr. Tom Brasilian (Peter Fonda, who is all relaxed, man).

Alas, evil never sleeps. A snake worshipping cult of satanists thinks Kincaid's snake is the devil himself, and has therefore hired the shady Crowley (Al Waxman) to steal it before it can even get into the millionaire's and Brasilian's hands. This being the sort of film that it is, it will come as no surprise to anyone that Crowley's attempt to steal Plissken the snake (combined with an attempt of Kincaid's niece to kill it that is only in the movie to make things superficially more complicated) only sets the animal/demon/whatever free so that it can finally begin its murder spree.

Will Kincaid and Brasilian be able to stop it before it eats itself through the whole population of a university town?

If this rather confused sounding plot synopsis (and believe me, I left out much that is superfluous and obviously only in the movie to bring it to feature length) has left you in any doubt, let me just state the obvious here first: even in the area of the animals running amok film, where my expectations of quality are especially low, Spasms is a horrible film any way you look at it. William Fruet's direction is at once bland and roughly jumpy, reminding me quite a bit of the worst parts of Mexican lucha cinema of the late 70s, where elderly directors working on material they don't care about with no budget to speak of were pushed into service by producers who frankly didn't care much either. The most obvious difference is the absence of masked wrestlers (Peter Fonda being not a very good Santo) and filler.

Instead of horrible night club scenes, Fruet (also at least co-responsible for the script) prefers to add as many ridiculous and cheesy flourishes right out of the 70s (quite an idea for a film made in 1983) as he can find, producing a film that adds the devil to a giant snake to devil worshippers to virally induced telepathy to Peter Fonda's funding difficulties until there's no room to develop any single element in the movie properly and everything turns into an incoherent mishmash of this, that, and Peter Fonda "charming" leading lady Kerrie Keane.

What I can't say about Spasms however is that it's boring. There's always way too much ridiculous nonsense going on for that problem ever to manifest. The horrible special effects alone, featuring a snake that very much looks like a toy somebody has painted over to look more threatening, should be enough to keep the easily entertained (like me) happy.

While every single element of the film is badly executed, the sheer mass of crap (which, Peter Fonda explains "charmingly", is an unladylike thing to say - in this movie's world, that's the sort of thing you say to a woman to get kissed, by the way) the film throws monkey-like at its audience is nearly automatically entertaining. After all, if you don't like blue snake-o-vision, you'll probably like the very polite satanist ritual, or Al Waxman nearly exploding from snake poison, or the totally subtle gratuitous (as if it ever were) nudity.

Plus, Oliver Reed does some perfectly, inappropriately intense scenery-chewing of the type only the truly great actors know to produce. If that's not enough for you, though, you'd best keep away from Spasms.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,reviews,horror,peter fonda,oliver reed,kerrie keane,al waxman

In short: Captain Clegg (1962)

aka Night Creatures

1792. The impressively rude Navy Captain Collier (Patrick Allen) and a small boatful of his men enter the small British village of Dymchurch following information that has lead Collier to suspect the village of harbouring a rather effective smuggling operation.

Collier is quite right in his assumption too. Many of the village's upstanding citizens, including the jolly coffin maker (Michael Ripper confusingly not playing an innkeeper), the shady innkeeper (Martin Benson) and even the son of the local squire (Oliver Reed), are part of the smuggling operation, and given the way the representatives of royal authorities are presented throughout film, it's difficult not to sympathize with them. To top it all off, the local parson, a certain Dr Blyss (Peter Cushing) is the smuggler's ringleader.

A large part of the smugglers' success is certainly thanks to Blyss's organisational talents. Blyss uses people dressed as scarecrows and children as lookouts, and also lets the local legend about skeleton riders roaming the marshes come alive as a means of protection.

At first, Collier seems quite helpless against the wily villagers, but eventually, his combination of brutality, stubbornness and sheer good luck does pay off, especially once the innkeeper Rash, who is a rather nasty character, slowly starts to unravel. Things for Blyss are certainly not made easier by the strange fixation on killing him the navy men's nameless mascot and slave (Milton Reid), a mulatto (alas, here comes the racism fairy) who belonged to Captain Clegg's crew until he caused the death of the Captain's wife and lost his tongue and nearly his life for it, shows.

By 1962, the Hammer Studios were mostly known for their impressive series of gothic horror movies, but the Studios did still produce films in other genre, even though many of those films were and still are much less seen and talked about. It's a pretty unfair state of affairs when you look at the pure quality of a film like Captain Clegg.

Directed by Peter Graham Scott (who worked as a producer and director on many BBC TV shows we nerds and geeks love), featuring an ensemble of Hammer's stable actors lead by Peter Cushing in a very good mood, and showing off the lush and detailed look typical of Hammer films of this era (as usual, realized on a much lower budget than you'd expect), the film's pretty impossible for me to dislike.

Once you look closely at the movie, you'll realize how peculiar a film this actually is. Not only is Captain Clegg a pirate movie taking place predominantly on land, it also mixes its adventure movie tropes and techniques with elements of the whydunnit mystery and a few tasty moments of Hammer horror as during the night scenes in the marshes and in the character of "the mulatto". What's most surprising about this genre mix is how organically it actually feels when you are watching the film; Anthony Hinds's script makes the integration of disparate elements in a well-paced plot look easy.

The film's other peculiarity is its politics. Now, I'm quite used to the fact that any form of nobility does hide corruption and evil in a Hammer movie, but the sentiments towards the British crown Captain Clegg shows seem to go a step further. One can't help but see the parallels between a village of smugglers robbing a brutal government (the government here is represented by brutal thugs, a fat squire who does not seem to do anything but eat, and a king who doesn't hold to his promises) of tax revenues and a certain revolution in a certain former British colony. Who knew Hammer was that republican?

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,adventure,mystery,peter cushing,peter graham scott,oliver reed,patrick allen,michael ripper

Revolver (1973)

Vito Cipriani (Oliver Reed), an ex-cop, is now working as the vice governor of a prison in Milan.

He has recently married Anna (Agostina Belli) and both are mentally still in their honeymoon period. So it is no surprise that it hits Cipriani hard when his wife is suddenly kidnapped. The kidnappers don't take long to make contact with him. Their proposition is simple, either Cipriani somehow makes the escape of the small time crook Milo Ruiz (Fabio Testi) possible, or Anna dies.

At first, Cipriani does his best to beat the identity of the man's secretive benefactors out of Ruiz, but the criminal is either an extremely good liar under duress (believe me, you do not want to kidnap Oliver Reed's wife) or just doesn't know who would want him freed.

Cipriani doesn't dare to go to the police without any clues to the identity of his wife's kidnappers, and so hasn't any other choice than help Ruiz escape.

The ex-cop is no fool - he hangs on to Ruiz as his only means to get his wife back. Unfortunately the kidnapper's aren't as professional as their boss would like them to be, or Cipriani's involvement in the affair would end here, with the criminal in their hands and Anna back home. Alas, they don't bring her.

Various action set pieces lead Cipriani and a rather relaxed Ruiz to France where both men must agree on a truce if they want to survive the affair they have stumbled into, an affair that turns out to be much more difficult and a lot more political than the men ever could have expected.

 

Revolver begins as a very tight cop movie with less time for self-righteous speeches and more sympathy for the criminals than usual. Just when you think you have it figured out as an extremely slick if not very original variation on typical buddy movie tropes, the film throws you a curveball and goes and turns itself into a pessimistic early 70s conspiracy thriller of the highest caliber. The ending of the film is frightening in its consequence - the best in people is just another angle to be used against them; there is no escape from the system, while even the price it pays you for selling out in the end turns out to be just another kind of lie.

Of course some nice bits of stunt-writing and a pessimistic view on society and human nature don't necessarily make for a good film. Fortunately, Revolver has a lot more to offer, for example a driving soundtrack by Ennio Morricone and very solid English dubbing with Oliver Reed doing his own voice work (and I wouldn't be surprised at all if he had rewritten some of his dialogue - you usually don't hear such sensible use of the word "fuck" in Italian dub-jobs; that Reed, he knew how to curse).

Sergio Sollima's direction is something of a revelation - I knew his qualities from his Spaghetti Westerns, but in my experience most Italian genre directors have two, at best three genres they are really good at (unless we are talking about people like Bianchi - that's more a case of having different degrees of suckitude in different genres), and there was just no guarantee of police movie/conspiracy thriller being one of Sollima's strong ones. I like to be wrong in cases like this.

Sollima does an incredible job of keeping the tempo of the film high, while at the same time moving effortlessly from the action to character moments in a way that should make most of the hacks in the action genre cry.

The main actors are also doing a terrific job. Naturally, Reed does his shouty bits and chews some scenery, but has his acting ticks well under control this time, turning himself into a bundle of spit, intensity, barely controlled violence and plain desperation. This kind of acting often brings the danger of just stomping over the other actors with it. Somehow, Testi holds his ground with a much more laid back portrayal of the rather sympathetic crook who in the end turns out to have a much stronger conviction to truth than Reed's man of the law.

This is as highly recommended as possible.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,action,thriller,conspiracy,oliver reed,fabio testi,sergio sollima,reviews