Three Films Make A Post: Evil has a new vessel…

Haunting of the Queen Mary (2023): From time to time, Gary Shore’s and Rebecca Harris’s tourist attraction based horror film gets up to a scene or two of effective, surrealist horror. More often then not, alas, this is one of those movies that confuses “surrealist” with “random”, so there are interminable scenes of the filmmakers just throwing random stuff at characters and audience.

Little of that stuff sticks or lands anywhere interesting, while the film drags through an interminable two hours of non-plot. Good actors like Alice Eve and Joel Fry stand around, do things with little relevance or connection, some dude who doesn’t look like him and isn’t too great of a dancer plays Fred Astaire (did I mention this thing is random?), and little of any actual consequence, impact or meaning happens.

The Red Monks aka I frati rossi (1988): Not really less confused but decidedly more concise is this Italian TV movie (“Presented by Lucio Fulci”) directed by Gianni Martucci. Its tale of sordidness and a bit of murder plays out before an early 40s background it can’t afford to actually portray (again comparable to Queen Mary) but really doesn’t seem to care about anyway. What the film does care about is to put a kind of cheapskate greatest hits of Italian Gothic horror and giallo tropes on screen, mix them up with the help of a surprisingly clever protagonist shift in the final act, and let its audience wallow nostalgically in the TV sleaze.

This will only work for viewers who are really into the beautiful ages of Italian genre cinema and its byways, but for those like us, it is a surprisingly fun little movie.

The Spiral Staircase (1975): This version of the Ethel Lina White thriller drags the somewhat venerable book into the age of the 70s British potboiler thriller. It isn’t exactly art, but Peter Collinson was pretty great at this sort of thing, rushing its protagonist (Jacqueline Bisset) through her private gauntlet of betrayal and mad men with verve and the joyful nastiness of the British thriller of that era.

From time to time, the film teeters on the brink of actual feminism, but whenever it does, Collinson appears to get distracted by needing to do something cheap and schlocky instead. I’m neither damning nor complaining here, for as much as I would have liked the whole affair to just be a little bit more clever than it ends up being, I never could – and certainly still won’t – resist a bit of good schlock. Plus, say what you will about the director, Collinson was pretty great at improbably, schlocky suspense sequences.

In short: Asher (2018)

Asher (Ron Perlman) is a professional killer. You know the kind – aging, tired, sad, lonely apart from a handful of professional contacts, and not without regrets for his life decisions. His life just might take the kind of surprising upturn few people of his age get, when he killer-meet-cutes Sophie (Famke Janssen), a woman with some baggage herself and a mother (Jacqueline Bisset) suffering from dementia.

But as these films go, a strategic mistake in his professional life sets Asher on a collision course with one of his former friends and associates (Richard Dreyfuss), and some too ambitious plans the killer doesn’t know about get most of the rest of said associates killed, so his newfound hope for an actual human life just might come too late and be rather deadly for Sophie.

On paper, Michael Caton-Jones’s Asher is nothing special. We’ve seen its plot and variations thereof a hundred times before and its central characters are just as well-worn (though kudos for Sophie not being blind). However, in practice, there’s something pretty special about the whole affair. In part, the film’s considerable amount of actual human pathos is won by a cast and director whose careers have reached a trajectory quite parallel to Asher’s, a late middle to final phase that doesn’t fit comfortably with anyone, and the least with consummate professionals in a business that favours youth over talent and experience any day, as much as you try to mutilate yourself with botox and whatever other nonsense’s the flavour of the day.

It’s not all self-pity and doom and gloom here, though. Instead there’s a relaxed quality to quite a bit of the film, a willingness to stay with characters and care for them when other films would make haste to the next plot point. But then, we know the plot very well indeed, so fixating on it would be quite beside the point, especially when caring for what’s going on with the characters is a lot more rewarding.

Part of Asher’s special quality in this regard is how clearly it applies actual lived experience to the genre tropes it uses, providing the film with palpable humanity where it could get away with going through the motions. The actors clearly share in the film’s approach here, and they all, especially Perlman, Janssen and Bisset, seem to put a lot of themselves into what we are seeing.


There are also some fine, homage-heavy scenes of professional killer business, a dry yet warm sense of humour and low-key eccentricity as a way to give standard plot beats more life to enjoy here, turning this into quite a different film from the would-be post-Tarantino thing I expected Asher to be going in.

In short: St. Ives (1976)

Former crime reporter, now hapless professional writer who doesn’t get his book done and recreational gambler who can’t win, Raymond St. Ives (Charles Bronson) is hired by the eccentric rich Abner Procane (John Houseman) to work as his middle man in re-acquiring Procane’s stolen journals. Rather curiously, the thieves asked for St. Ives by name, but Procane doesn’t seem all that distrustful about it, and St. Ives acts as if this sort of thing happened to him every day. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much his reaction to everything.

Unflappability is a useful trait to have for St. Ives, too, for the handover of the money the thieves demand for Procane’s precious diaries goes very wrong indeed, and dead bodies start to pop up around our hero with a certain disturbing regularity. Instead of getting dissuaded by this minor piling up of bodies, the intense interest of dumb cops Deal (Harry Guardino) and Oller (Harris Yulin), and the friendly persuasions of his old cop friend Blunt (Dana Elcar), or by various attempts on his own life, St. Ives allows himself to be drawn into the situation further and further, teaming up with Procane, his live-in assistant Janet (Jacqueline Bisset), and his pet psychiatrist Dr. Constable (Maximilian Schell) for some rather dubious plans.

Frequent Bronson director J. Lee Thompson does his best to help the actor transition into a somewhat different persona than his usual kind, the kind of charming rogue with morals you’d find Roger Moore overplay and have turn out as an insufferable smart-ass. Bronson is certainly willing (who wouldn’t be, in his case) but I don’t think he’s actually convincing in a role that demands more smiling and a very particular kind of swagger instead of dead-eyed glaring and quite a different kind of swagger. That could have been quite a problem in a more involved film but this Ross Thomas adaptation does hold deeper human emotions at arms length for most of the time and can therefore live with the central performance that is more trying to be convincing than it is actually convincing.

In fact, part of the film’s semi-comedic charm lies in the sense of old-fashioned stylization with a big nod to Old Hollywood Thompson tries to maintain, and often manages rather successfully to build, turning the film into one giant homage to film’s of an earlier time. And, while Bronson isn’t looking too convincing with his new persona, he still is fun to watch, enough so that I think it’s a bit of shame he only got to let loose this way very seldom during the rest of his career; I wouldn’t be surprised if a few more films of pseudo-Saint shenanigans had turned Bronson into as much of a pro in this kind of role as he seems have to been in doing his usual shtick.

Be that as it may, the film at hand is a sometimes charming, sometimes very 70s, piece of old-fashioned entertainment, the sort of thing I’d call “diverting” if that did not sound quite as damning with faint praise when what it actually means is that St. Ives fulfils its function as an escapist piece of entertainment excellently, and there’s never any shame at all in that.

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