Three Films Make A Post: Taking Them One Mishap at a Time.

Accident Man (2018): House favourite Scott Adkins stars in the adaptation of a Pat Mills/Stu Small comic I haven’t read, directed by frequent Adkins collaborator Jesse V. Johnson. Adkins plays a professional killer specialized in murders that look like accidents or suicide. Things go a bit out of control when he learns that his ex-girlfriend (who happens to be pregnant by him, too) is murdered by some colleagues. A whole lot of hand to hand fighting and murdering ensues. The film, typical for the Johnson/Adkins combo, goes for the pop-coloured and cynically humorous, with a load of pretty eccentric characters (played by beloved action movie character actors like Ray Stevenson, Ray Park and Michael Jai White) fighting it out in not always completely serious ways, in between scenes of often genuinely funny one-liners and dialogue that at least sounds of a piece with some of Mills’s writing.

That the action sequences are budget conscious yet also excellently choreographed and genuinely fun is rather par for the course for projects from this particular circle.

Meurtre à Montmartre aka Reproduction interdite (1957): Self-important whiny art dealer Marc Kelber (Paul Frankeur), falls in with a pair of art forgers to pay for stuff like his step son’s (whom he clearly despises) piano lessons. Because everybody is incredibly high-strung, and really bad at planning, things quickly go wrong.

There are moments when Gilles Grangier’s crime movie is visually effective and captivating, but it self-sabotages with a melodramatic streak as wide as the ocean, where everybody’s emotions are always at eleven, and no single character has ever seemed to have learned even the tiniest bit of self-control. Worse, the film clearly wants the viewer to sympathize with Kelber’s plight, but neither makes any effort to provide reasons for empathy, nor makes him interesting.

Run a Crooked Mile (1969): This TV movie by Gene Levitt aims for a twisty take of weird conspiracy (like The Prisoner minus the depth, the surrealism and the look) that’s mostly aimed at a viewer’s suspense glands. This works well for the first half or so, but once our hero (played by the seldom interesting Louis Jourdan) gets conked over the head and wakes up two years later in Switzerland as a polo playing playboy married to the yawn-inducing Elizabeth (Mary Tyler Moore), things become bogged down in exactly the things I’m least interested in: the marriage problems of two painfully flat actors, a conspiracy that seems to be run by complete idiots, and suspense plotting that misses out on the whole “suspense” thing.

Three Films Make A Post: Boy Meets Dog

Love and Monsters aka Monster Problems (2020): If you’re patient enough to get through the film’s atrocious first twenty minutes that combine lots of exposition, crappy jokes and an intensely annoying main character, you, as was I, might be surprised by how entertaining Michael Matthews’s science fiction comedy adventure with medium sized monsters then becomes. It’s still a movie with not a single original bone its body, mind you, insists on a very traditional way for a guy to turn into a hero™, and ends trying to sell us people inspired by a speech of our protagonist going out for what amounts to mass suicide as a hopeful ending, but at least, it puts its borrowed bits and pieces into a pleasant series of adventures. More often than not, it’s really quite charming in its undemanding way, and if you survive the first act, you’ll probably be entertained on rainy Sunday morning.

Maigret voit rouge aka Maigret Sees Red (1963): This is the second time Jean Gabin steps into the shoes of Simenon’s police inspector hero of oh so very many novels and adaptations. Directed by Gilles Grangier, this outing finds Maigret hunting a trio of actual American gangsters using their particularly violent methods (US crime is to this film as Russian crime to today’s US crime cinema) on his home turf. It’s clearly a matter of national honour, with a low-level nationalist vibe running through affairs that would be much more annoying if Grangier’s nice eye for interesting side characters, Gabin’s always lovely (and often pretty funny if he wants it to be) low-key acting style, and the film’s absurd ideas about the way US gangsters of its time worked, weren’t so damn distracting and charming. It’s certainly as pulpy in mood as Maigret gets.

El esqueleto de la señora Morales aka Skeleton of Mrs. Morales (1960): This macabre thriller/comedy by Rogelio A. González is generally seen as a gem of Mexican cinema, its heavy-handed satire of Mexican bourgeois mores clearly the thing to delight the people compiling “The Most Important Mexican Films of All Time” lists and such. The film’s gender politics have aged rather badly, though, as has its critique on the bourgeoisie. Chabrol, this ain't.

If you’re like me coming at it from a more genre savvy perspective, the satire, the black comedy and the thriller elements here don’t always fit together all that well or effectively, and while González repeatedly shoots very beautiful scenes, there’s little here to see rather more disreputable kinds of Mexican cinema haven’t done quite a bit better. On a curious note, this is also one of the few adaptations of a work by Arthur Machen, though not adapting anything of the part of Machen’s body of work I’d actually like to see adapted.