5 Against the House (1955)

Al (Guy Madison) and Brick (Brian Keith) have been friends at least ever since Brick saved Al’s life during the Korean War, getting wounded himself in the process. Both men are studying law now, going to college on the GI Bill, hanging around with two non-vets, the painfully annoying “funny” Roy (Alvy Moore), and self-styled rich kid brainiac Ronnie (Kerwin Mathews). Brick is suffering from a hefty helping of PTSD, swivelling between good humour bordering on mania, depression and violent outbursts – all things Al has made the habit of trying to counter as best as he can.

When the four men visit a casino in Reno, Nevada, together and witness a botched robbery, Ronnie decides he can do better and develops a plan how to rob the place and actually get away with it and the money, getting Roy and Brick in on the thing. Brick becomes rather obsessed with the whole plan, but it’s not as if Ronnie and Roy don’t want to go through with it. They do realize that square-jawed Al’s not simply going to help them, so they decide it’s best to surprise him into becoming an armed robber (seriously) by pretending to go on a simple trip to Reno with him and his fiancée Kay (Kim Novak) and hoping to talk him into it once they get there. When Al realizes what’s going on half-way to the place, where he was indeed planning to marry Kay, and shows himself to be less than pleased, Brick starts threatening Kay’s life.

So a robbery it is.

5 Against the House is never going to be one of my favourite films by the typically great Phil Karlson. There are a lot of elements in here that I find interesting and worthwhile, and the performances by Keith and Madison are fine, but the script has terrible pacing problems and has to go through awkward contortions to avoid problems with the still not unimportant Production Code where crime isn’t allowed to pay, if it wants to get to the ending where characters are allowed to live it clearly wants to have. Which alas leaves us with a film about a casino robbery where manoeuvring Al into a position where he can take part in the robbery without being morally culpable feels more important to the film than the heist itself. The musical number and some horrible, supposedly funny, business about our protagonists hazing a freshman do not improve the pacing, either; the latter also not my mood.

The film certainly often has its heart in the right place, allowing Brick to survive and potentially get better (not that the state of psychiatry in ‘55 gives one much hope for that), portraying his violence as well as his pain with as much honesty as it can get away with, and his mental illness as something he’s not responsible for and has little control over – which is pretty great for a film of its time, and also provides Brian Keith the opportunity for an equally great performance. Karlson does of course often excel in portraying the fragile parts of men living under the thumb of societally approved machismo, not exactly criticising the structures causing their pain and pushing them into causing pain to others but certainly not blind to these things.


Also pretty great is the robbery itself, once it finally gets going, the gang dressed up in cleverly ironic cowboy costumes (it makes sense, really) going through what turns out not to be the perfect robbery Ronnie envisioned. How we get there is what lets 5 Against the House down.

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.

Three Films Make A Post: The Super-Beast Battle of the Century

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958): If there’s any better way to delight one’s inner child than this classic Ray Harryhausen effects spectacular directed by dependable Nathan Juran, I don’t know it. There’s little not to enjoy about this lovely piece of Hollywood Arabian Nights fluff. Harryhausen’s effects are a joy (and would only get better in the future), while also showing the typical variety of his work; from here on out Harryhausen would seldom use one stop motion monster in more than two sequences when he could create another one, and my imagination thanks him for it. Apart from the effects (which are the star, obviously), this is an excellently paced, cracking 50s fantasy adventure with some choice scenery chewing by Torin Thatcher’s most excellent villain with a decent enough hero in Kerwin Mathews, and photography only a fool wouldn’t want to call colourful. Why, even Kathryn Grant’s Princess Parisa does things in the film, not something you’ll encounter often in this time and genre.

Against All Odds (1984): In theory, Taylor Hackford’s neo noir is a remake of Jacques Tourneur’s brilliant Out of the Past, but you wouldn’t really know watching it. Which is all for the better (the older film does still exist after all), for Hackford certainly is not Tourneur. While there’s nothing wrong with his direction – he’s actually perfectly decent in suspense sequences - he does have a tendency for fluffing things up into TV advertising style prettiness that never does anything as interesting as actually contrasting with the supposedly dark script. But then, the script does tend to make little sense - particular Rachel Ward’s Jessie (who never gets around to being an actual femme fatale) seems to act exclusively in service of going where the film wants her to be instead of where she has any kind of (even messed up) reason to be. There’s a superficial quality to the whole production that suggests a film going through certain surface motions of the noir but completely uninterested in the genre’s philosophy. Jeff Bridges and James Woods are fine, as far as the lack of substance lets them, but then, when aren’t they?


Band Aid (2017): Zoe Lister-Jones’s comedy about a permanently squabbling and arguing couple (Lister-Jones herself and Adam Pally) that decide to turn their fights into songs is a very nice surprise. While there are a handful of moments that seem to come directly out of the quirky indie comedy handbook, much of the film delights by being genuinely sweet, thoughtful and funny, only to in the final act turn to a more serious tone. That switch works out as well as it does because Lister-Jones first took her time to create characters and a world a viewer can care for and believe in, and only after that really aims for more obvious depths without ever betraying what was so enjoyable about the film before. Thanks to this careful approach, the film also manages to go from the specificity of the characters’ lives to the more abstract things the writer/director has to say about being a woman in contemporary US society, the life of couples and the emotional strain following a miscarriage. Which is pretty fantastic for a quirky indie comedy.

The Boy Who Cried Werewolf (1973)

Warning: there will be spoilers for this more than forty years old movie

Child of divorce Richie (Scott Sealey) is spending a nice weekend with his Dad Robert (Kerwin Mathews) somewhere in a cabin in the country. Under the light of the full moon, they are attacked by a classically styled wolfman (also known as the “dog-faced boy” type). Robert manages to fight the monster off and kill it so that it turns into a dead human but he is bitten in the process. Robert convinces himself they have been attacked by a maniac. It’s a variation of the sort of interesting delusion all characters in the film will share, for everyone here laying eyes on a werewolf in form of a human with a dog’s head walking on two legs and wearing clothes will say they have seen an animal. Which is rather peculiar, unless the wildlife of the USA have seen some rather interesting developments nobody told the rest of the world about.

Well, all characters will talk that sort of nonsense except for Richie, who will always insist on werewolves being werewolves, a fact that won’t bring much happiness to him and his family once Robert starts turning into one too. Not a great development to happen just at the point in Robert’s life where plying his ex-wife Sandy (Elaine Devry) with chauvinist nagging and alcohol seems to start having an effect on her. Not the one consisting of applying boot to ex-husband genital you might wish for, alas, so perhaps lycanthropy actually is for the better.

Sometimes, a film just stumbles upon a way to talk about a lot of the anxieties of its time and space without seeming to actually notice. The Boy Who Cried Werewolf most certainly is such a film, and while it’s not terribly effective as a horror movie, it is such a capsule of early 70s white US middle class anxieties it is worth watching if only to point and gawk at how unfiltered a lot of this stuff here is.

There’s the whole D.I.V.O.R.C.E. angle, Robert’s honestly confused and slightly bitter reaction to his ex-wife having a career that’s just as important to her as his own is to him and being able to handle that and being a good mother too (the film pleasantly never playing the card of making Sandy crap at raising spawn). That’s just the beginning of the sheer 70s insanity. Little Richie, for example, apparently has his own psychiatrist despite seemingly coping well with the divorce and not showing any other signs of mental illness; a psychiatrist, I might add, who believes in werewolves and talks about the occult a lot. Then there’s a sub-plot about the shenanigans of a band of Jesus hippies (“Freaked out on Jesus!”) being threatening, ridiculous and dishonest in turns, random psycho babble and other bits and bobs that must have looked like a good idea at the time.

All these bubbles of random anxiety somewhat overshadow how bleak of a film this would be if it only were emotionally involving. This is after all a movie where a little boy’s father turns into a raving monster that’ll even try to kill his ex-wife, and ends up killed by a torch-less mob in the end - but not before he can bite the little boy. The bleakness as well as the obvious metaphorical reading of the main plot don’t come as much to the surface as one might hope, though. I can’t help but think veteran director Nathan Juran – not exactly a child of the 70s – didn’t terribly care for that sort of thing.

OSS 117 se dechaine (1963)

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 without any re-writes or 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 American spy Roos (Jacques Harden) is killed while on a diving expedition set to find the place where the Russians are hiding their swanky new experimental atom submarine detector. This gadget would make US atom subs nearly useless, leading to dire danger for world peace because the Americans could incinerate the world's population only ten times over instead of twenty or something.

Renotte (Henry-Jacques Huet), the diving instructor Roos was working with (no, I don't know why he used random civilians in his work), convinces the French police that his charge's death was an accident, but the OSS is of a different opinion in the matter and sends its best man to finish the job Roos couldn't.

Said best man has been cursed with the dubious name of Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath (Kerwin Mathews), and quickly gets to work, mostly by making himself a pest to Renotte and trying to talk himself into Renotte's girlfriend's Brigitta's (Nadia Sanders) panties.

Fortunately for the viewer, a handful of Russian agents are making it their mission to complicate matters for everyone involved. It might even be possible that Brigitta is one of them too, without even the shady Renotte's knowledge.

Of course, what kind of secret movie agent would Hubert be if he wasn't able to kiss a Russian spy over to his side.

This, some helpful French spies, and a handily placed self-destruct button should be enough to make the world a safe place by keeping the potential number of victims in a war as high as possible.

Before Ian Fleming created his much loved super spy James Bond, French writer Jean Bruce had already penned an astonishing amount of spy thrillers about OSS 117, an American agent from New Orleans whose French roots were probably helpful when trying to sell him as a hero in France. As far as I (ignorant of French as I am) understand it, they must have been quite pulpy. There had already been a single attempt to adapt the series for the cinema in the 50s, but its lack of sequels doesn't exactly speak to its success.

Of course, in 1962 everything changed for the spy film with the appearance of the first Bond movie, showing everyone with an interest in money a new, unexplored genre to exploit.

It didn't take us Europeans long to jump on the spy bandwagon, and what better way to keep away from pesky law suits about intellectual property was there than to try and start another series of OSS 117 films?
OSS 117 Se Dechaine is the first of these new, improved OSS 117 outings. As these things go, the film is more a proto Eurospy effort with a heavy thriller influence than already a full grown example of the Eurospy genre. It has some of the hallmarks of later films, like the theoretically smart yet rather bland hero who doesn't really do much besides womanizing and punching people gallantly in the face, rampant sexism that should be much too ridiculous to offend anyone, and a happy disregard for the realities of violence and death I always find charming.

What the movie misses is the full-grown insanity of later efforts in the sub-genre - there are no evil lairs of note (I don't think a normal mansion and a boring cave count), the villains are just relatively normal people, and their plans make a certain amount of sense, at least as long as you are able to run with the sort of logic the Cold War thrived on. Don't get me wrong, the plot is still silly enough to drive any arbiter of good taste to fits and the last half hour of the film or so even takes some good steps on the road to complete loss of reality, it's just that the film still seems to have illusions about being a film about dramatized espionage instead of a conglomerate of crazy ideas and scantily clad women.

Another expected element the film is lacking completely is the exoticism many a later Eurospy film used to cover up its lack of a budget and provide the film team with a nice vacation, as well as the viewer with some attractive filler material. Here, there's only black and white Corsica and Nice to look at, and not too many of the touristy parts of them for that matter.

It all feels a little low-key for what I have learned to expect from the genre. However, director Andre Hunebelle (who'd helm two further OSS 117 adventures and had before made quite a few swashbuckling adventure movies) is an obvious professional and makes the most out of what he has to work with. The action sequences aren't exactly spectacular or realized on the level of someone like Enzo Castellari, but are entertaining enough, the acting is fairly solid, and the soundtrack nicely swinging, very French jazz.

The whole film is also well photographed and should have enough of interest in it to keep people watching who have no historical interest in early Eurospy films.

Barquero (1970)

Outlaw Jake Remy (Warren Oates), his very French Lieutenant Marquette (Kerwin “Frenchman” Mathews) and his merry band of crazy murdering bastards have just destroyed a town somewhere in the Old West, killing the whole populace, stealing three hundred Winchester rifles from the US cavalry, and taking everything else that took their fancy. To make a decent escape before the cavalry realizes what has happened to their rifle transport and the town it went through, the band of arseholes needs to cross a river on the only barge for a good hundred miles.

That’s where Remy’s problems start, for the barge is owned by Travis (Lee Van Cleef), an ill-tempered frontiersman who has grudgingly turned ferryman to a bunch of settlers slowly coagulating into a town around his barge whom he sees as squatters. We’re never sure what Travis thought what his building a barge would otherwise result in; nor does the man himself seem to know.

Travis, now, isn’t the man to do any barging at gunpoint, and once his ire is raised, he’s certainly not helping Remy even a bit. Instead, the barquero, his rather mad mountain hermit friend Mountain Phil (Forrest Tucker), and the not exactly happy settlers are holing up on the side of the river Remy would so very much get to. A cat and mouse game between the two men and their respective cohorts develops that sees Travis getting rather protective of his squatters, and Remy slowly losing control of his men as well as of his sanity, becoming so obsessed with his enemy/mirror image on the other side any thought of crossing the river somewhere else becomes tantamount to treason for him.

Quite a few American directors with a past in more traditional US Western movies had more than a little trouble when it came to adapting their styles to the pseudo-Spaghetti Western ideal the companies who hired them rather wanted them to make when the Spaghettis hit it big, often resulting in films that are boring, or ill-advised, or both at the same time.

At least going by Barquero, Gordon Douglas didn’t have that sort of problem. While his direction style here is a bit less experimental and dynamic than typical of the higher tier Italian and Spanish films of the genre, he hits the combination of off-beat humour, off-handed brutality and plain weirdness the Spaghetti Western so often revelled in without a hitch, and even seems to enjoy the plain weirdness the script by George Schenck and William Marks is filled with, instead of looking down on it.

To my eyes, it’s not always clear if the film is joking with any given idea it shows, or if it just believes existing at a frontier (one of the many parallels between its two central antagonists) must turn everyone involved crazy in a manner that makes it all too easy to fluctuate between ridiculousness and physical threat. Definitely, there’s a vibe of deep mental un-health surrounding everyone involved, not just on the side of the outlaws, but on that of their enemies too, a madness that seems to be catching the longer anyone is involved with Remy or Travis. Because this is still an American Western, the men’s madness is understood as belonging to the kind of man you need to widen your frontiers but whom you’ll want to get rid of as soon as possible once things become peaceful enough for civilization to hold sway, which is one of the basic arguments of US Westerns since at least the 50s.

In Douglas’s film, though, this typical, and typically unsolved problem is framed in a way that makes the question itself look as pathological as the people asking it (or shooting it out violently). The whole film is shot through with violence so sudden and bizarre it becomes surreal, and so much off-handed strangeness – everything Mountain Phil does or says, for example, be it discussions of ant life or the polite little chats he likes to hold with men before he shoots them – it at times feels as if were just getting its breath for a parody of this old question of Western filmmaking, one the Italian films Barquero is oriented towards very often (outside the works of Leone, at least) do not care about or for at all. However, the film never quite arrives at parody, not even when it shows a weed-smoking Remy having a vision of his violent past. Instead it floats between the poles of parody and a just very strange interpretation of the real thing.

The performances fit the film’s peculiar tone quite nicely, with Van Cleef making shifty eyes and looking pissed off in a manner even more exaggerated than usual, Mathews faking his horrible French accent like a champ while still maintaining is role as the straight man to an Oates performance so broad, one could believe he could have crossed the damn river on it without Van Cleef’s barge. What would be destructive in other films fits Barquero’s approach perfectly.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,western,gordon douglas,lee van cleef,warren oates,kerwin mathews,forrest tucker

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