Three Films Make A Post: Zeppelins. Bombs. Bordellos. Burials. You name it. We have it.

Trinity is Still My Name aka Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità (1971): I didn’t enjoy Enzo Barboni’s quickly shot seque to the first Trinity movie as much as its predecessor but it still is a fun little movie, if already suffering from the ever increasing childishness of the Terence Hill/Bud Spencer comedy pairings. This one’s still having a lot of fun with Spaghetti Western conventions but it’s also working pretty hard at repeating the favourite beats of the first film without just repeating itself – mostly with success, even. The sequel’s problem really isn’t so much that it isn’t a funny, well-made movie, it sure is funny and well-made movie, as that it’s just not quite as funny and well-made as the one it follows up on. It’s a bit of a luxury problem to have for a film, but there you have it.

Willow Creek (2013): Even though I am not quite as enamoured with Bobcat Goldthwait’s unexpected turn towards the bigfoot POV movie as some of my peers are, this is still a fine little film. I particularly love how Goldthwait doesn’t overdo the amateurishness of the footage, the carefully thought through shorthand he uses for the characterisation, and the film’s use of humour.

Willow Creek does take quite some time to get going, though, but once it does, it culminates in two of the most effective examples of “people frightened in their tent” and “people panicking in the dark woods” scenes I’ve seen in a POV horror film. Particularly the former, basically consisting of a single, fifteen minute shot of lead actors Alexie Gilmore and Bryce Johnson looking frightened while creepy noises play, is quite an achievement because it takes a set-up that should be a guarantee for boredom and actually makes it work.

Sledztwo aka The Investigation (1974): I always find myself rather surprised by the comparatively high number of Stanislaw Lem adaptations. While often intellectually quite delightful, the comparative disinterest in plot and character displayed in Lem’s body of work doesn’t exactly lend itself to screen adaptations. Despite that, most Lem adaptations not only exist but are also also tend to be rather good.

Case in point is this TV movie directed by Marek Piestrak with a directness that still leaves room for visual mood-building as well as a degree of playfulness, all the while following Lem’s philosophical ideas. It’s quite wonderful to behold in its way.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,american movies,polish movies,in short,comedy,spaghetti western,horror,sf,enzo barboni,terence hill,bud spencer,bobcat goldthwait,alexie gilmore,marek piestrak

They Call Me Trinity (1970)

aka My Name is Trinity

Original title: Lo chiamavano Trinità...

Hygienically challenged professional drifter (with a horse), and probably fastest gun alive, Trinity (Terence Hill), by chance comes upon the town where his half brother Bambino (Bud Spencer) is working as a sheriff. Or rather, where Bambino has gone under cover as sheriff, for in truth he’s only a mildly successful horse thief with a grumpy disposition, and has taken the place of the town’s actual new sheriff whom he - half accidentally - shot.

Mostly, Bambino is trying to lay low, and the town’s nice and quiet enough for that, or it was before a group of pacifist Mormons (yeah, I know) lead by Tobias (Dan Sturkie) arrived, settling as farmers in a place horse magnate and practical owner of the town, Major Harriman (Farley Granger), wants for his horses. Up until now, the Major’s men haven’t done much beyond punching out a Mormon now and then, but the situation won’t stay this way forever.

Particularly not once Trinity takes a look at two pretty Mormonesses and decides he really should be helping their people out against the Major and his men, dragging the unwilling Bambino in with him.

It’s always dangerous visiting childhood favourites, particularly when you’ve already made the experience that Terence Hill and Bud Spencer movies don’t hold up when you’re not a kid anymore, even when you’re as childish a grown-up as I am doing my best to be at all times, so realizing Enzo Barboni’s They Call Me Trinity was actually a rather nice Spaghetti Western comedy turned out to be a very pleasant surprise for me. Which might have a lot to do with the fact this was actually the first comedic outing by Hill and Spencer after the success of the comedy dub of a much more serious earlier film – Boot Hill - featuring the two in Germany and elsewhere in Europe proved surprisingly successful, and this was the film that set the basics of the formula of the pair’s films instead of just repeating it ad nauseam.

What makes the film work beyond the often quite funny interplay between Hill and Spencer, with Spencer as always giving the grumpy straight man to Hill’s trickster, is its clear-eyed view of the elements that make up the Spaghetti Western. Unlike Tonino Valerii would later do with Hill in My Name is Nobody, Trinity doesn’t use that knowledge so much for a deconstruction of the genre as for the kind of mild comedy that clearly loves its genre too much to become a true parody yet can’t help but use the more ridiculous elements of it as the base for jokes. Quite a few of these jokes are really just slight exaggerations of the generally exaggerated things happening in Spaghetti Westerns (particularly those having to survive on actors making snake eyes at each other and one or two gimmicks), often used surprisingly subtly and with only the very mildest wink in the direction of the audience.

Despite what one is used to from later Hill and Spencer movies, there really isn’t all that much slapstick going on here, with most of the physical humour working more as a sub-set of sight gags; just with more punching on heads and shot down trousers, as if the film’s high concepts was to take the Spaghetti Western and replace most shoot-outs with light and fun brawls. An approach that certainly, given the general wiliness of Italian genre producers, doesn’t just by chance open up the genre to family audiences.

Consequently, and despite some cynical jokes, the resulting film is a rather good-natured concoction where the big bad is sent off to Nebraska after a big climactic brawl, where shot sheriffs walk around on crutches quite sprightly, and where tricksters can happily escape the threat of grown-up responsibilities while still helping out those in need if they put their mind to it. If this is supposed to be a conscious argument against the Spaghetti Western’s generally more cynical and bitter bent I’m not at all sure, though it’s certainly not impossible.

In any case, They Call Me Trinity proves how a capable director can take some very pessimistic (sometimes even cruel) genre conventions, and give them a believable twist in the direction of the good-natured, the fun, and the (dare I say it?) life-affirming, without having to turn to sappiness – at least in the realm of comedy.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,spaghetti western,enzo barboni,terence hill,bud spencer,farley granger

Three Films Make A Post: Enter a prime-evil world of future shock and alien terror.

The Unholy Four aka Ciakmull - L'uomo della vendetta (1970): Enzo Barboni's Spaghetti Western about four escaped mental patients (Leonard Mann, George Eastman, Woody Strode, Pietro Martellazana) finding out the truth about the amnesiac (Mann) among them, which obviously leads to some vengeance-ing in the end, starts out strong if loosely plotted, but peters out somewhat after half of the film is over and the actual main plot is truly starting. A film that up to that point was dominated by some beautifully photographed scenes taking place in autumnal Europe/America becomes predominantly bound to not very interesting looking sets and wants a type of highly melodramatic acting from the cast that only Evelyn Stewart actually knows how to provide.

It's thanks to Barboni's impressive tight editing rhythms and his always inventive direction that the film stays watchable and recommendable.

Island Claws (1980): This film about a giant crab and his little crab buddies fighting "eccentrics" in Florida is the only movie by director/producer/writer Hernan Cardenas, and watching it, I wasn't much surprised by that. It's not a catastrophically bad monster movie, but if the internet wouldn't tell me differently, I'd have taken it for a rather mediocre TV movie without anything in the writing or direction marking it as something other than just another movie made for no other reason than a pay check, and without much enthusiasm. The film does have one or two moments of pleasant silliness but the rest of it is just so dumb and inoffensive that I think I've already spent enough words on it.

Heavy Metal (1981): As a rule, I don't watch much Western animation, what with the form's peculiar fixation on kids and a family audience, and it's corresponding lack of exploitational values. The portmanteau film Heavy Metal (based on the US version of the French magazine) is an exception to this rule, seeing as it was made with the twelve year old boy in all of us in mind and therefore exists only to provide exploitational values. I find the quality of the animation rather rough when compared to Japanese films of the same era, but it is rough in a way that fits the film's fixation on breasts, blood and freaky humour.

Personally, I could have lived without the segment based on Richard Corben's Den, but then I do think that the Den stories are the absolute nadir of Corben's rather wonderful body of work. However, as we all know, every film like this is bound by law to contain at least one bad segment, and the rest of the segments is entertaining enough to make up for that beautifully.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,american movies,in short,spaghetti western,horror,sf,fantasy,animation,giant monsters,enzo barboni,leonard mann,woody strode,george eastman,evelyn stewart