Past Misdeeds: SAGA: Curse of the Shadow (2013)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Welcome to the extremely generic secondary fantasy world of SAGA that is – I’m not kidding – the background for a bunch of – possibly popular – fantasy miniatures!

There’s trouble afoot in whatever the damn land this takes place in is called. A shadowy cult of undead and cursed known as the Shadow Cabal (or sometimes just the Shadow) is planning a ritual to bring the Elder God of Death back from wherever he is, with hopefully resulting undead armies and other fun stuff for the junior fantasy conqueror who can’t get any dragons. One of the younger gods of good (though her interpretation of the concept of “good” will leave quite a bit to be desired during the course of the film), known as the Prophetess, gets wind of the problem and sends out her cleric (though he seems to be more of a paladin, D&D class-wise) Keltus the Wanderer (Richard McWilliams) to solve the situation, because clearly, this is the kind of problem that you wouldn’t throw a few people more at.

Anyway, Keltus will have to team up with anger management impaired elven bounty hunter Nemyt (Danielle Chuchran), cursed with the sign of the shadow and therefore eventual evilness by an orc shaman she has killed, and former orc chieftain Kullimon the Black (Paul D. Hunt), whose tribe has been taken over by the Shadow against his will, to resolve the situation.

Apart from the whole evil cult thing, other problems arise: Keltus’s plan to fight his enemy is really the sort of thing that could all too easily end up actually helping the Shadow and damn Nemyt’s soul; Nemyt hates all orcs with a passion, and Kullimon isn’t too keen on elves or human clerics himself; and Keltus’s goddess really seems to be more Lawful Evil than any other alignment.

Fortunately, these particular elves, orcs and men might just be able to get over the things that divide them, might just have quite a bit of heroic back bone when they need it, and the Prophetess just might not be the only goddess interested in Keltus (for reasons I don’t even want to speculate about).

Don’t tell anyone, but I’m convinced in these post Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit times, we live in something of a golden age of low to extremely low budget sword and sorcery and fantasy cinema. Sure, many of the resulting films look like their elves, orcs, and monsters were created with resources left over from various LARPing sessions, and their plots are generally made with secondary world fantasy cookie cutters, but that’s the kind of minor stuff that is not going to keep me from enjoying a film about people and creatures with pointy ears going at each other with swords.

Curse (or whichever of its many titles you choose) certainly has its problems in the plot department, with the basic quest being pretty bland, and its not very interesting attempts at turning the whole affair into a redemption story for Keltus and Nemyt falling flat by virtue of at least Keltus never doing anything much worthy of redemption. Instead, Keltus eventually gets killed and then revived by a goddess with a love of hopeless causes, without having to actually do anything for it, and Nemyt’s redemptive act only carries the most tenuous connections with the things she needs to redeem herself for. On the other hand, the characters are generally likeable, particularly Hunt’s Kullimon, who seems rather more worldly than his two future friends, and certainly gets all the best lines. It helps that the film’s core trio of actors is decent enough, with Hunt and Chuchran even charismatic enough it’s not too difficult to ignore all the grunting and snarling they have to do.

The rest of the script is basically competent, with decent pacing, and a clear idea of the fact that this sort of film really needs a fight against a different creature or enemy every fifteen minutes or so much more than it needs anything else.

These fights are quite well done, too, with Chuchran (who gets to have an acrobatic fighting style not too far off from that of a wuxia film character) and Hunt making for attractive screen fighters even in those moments where there’s clearly no stunt person substitution going on, and some very fun choreography that makes much of the film’s limited resources. Director John Lyde for his part provides ample space for the fights and fighters to shine in, using little obfuscation of what is going on on screen. McWilliams, on the other hand, often looks as if he’s just stumbling after his sword in these scenes, but two out of three ain’t bad.

The make-up and effects are all over the place in quality with Kullimon’s orc make-up one of Curse’s high points, the sort of make-up job that might not look real but keeps the actor’s face expressive enough for him to still act. Among the rest of the effects, there’s some ridiculous stuff (the final enemy, for example who looks like nothing so much like a mid-level boss from a video game made in 2006 or so), some neat, some mediocre, and a dwarf who looks to so weirdly artificial he actually hits the same sort of freakishness as your run of the mill evil clown.

All this adds up to something better than I’d ask of a tiny low budget sword and sorcery movie. The film does perhaps take its plot a bit too seriously for some tastes, but if the film itself didn’t why should the audience? If you’re not willing to just accept the D&D module style of the whole affair, this is not a film actually meant for you anyway, I very much suspect. I have no problems with that, and so feel myself in a good position to enjoy how much Lyde et al just go for it, and how fun the resulting film turns out to be.

And even though much of the dialogue is a bit too heavy and portentous for its own good, there’s actually a nice series of witty lines too, not so self-conscious as to rip you out of the world the film tries so hard – if cheaply - to create but enough of it to add to the sense of fun I got from the film.

All in all, Curse of the Shadow is a positive surprise, at least if you like the things D&D level fantasy or Italian sword and sorcery films have to offer, or just enjoy watching very competent people fighting on screen.

Past Misdeeds: The Machine (2013)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

In a near future dominated by a new Cold War between the West and China with a new arms race taking place on the field of cybernetics. Scientist Ava (Caity Lotz) has brought the AI she is developing as close to getting through the touring test as any AI has ever managed. Despite misgivings, she hires on to a secret UK military project lead by the brilliant Vincent (Toby Stephens).

Vincent has been working on brain implants that will give soldiers back those brain functions they lost in various unpleasant ways, and he has been so successful some of these soldiers are actually working as guards on the underground base where his – and now Ava’s – experiments take place. On the negative side, some months after they get their implants, the soldiers lose their ability to speak and tend to become rather, well, inhuman in their behaviour. Curiously enough, nobody involved in the project seems to think anything of the behavioural changes beyond the muteness, and somehow also everybody seems to miss that the cybered-up soldiers actually can talk to each other in some kind of machine language.

While all this still sounds rather humanitarian, if badly organized, the experimental subjects are basically held as prisoners, and the experiments at large are not exactly in tune with any rules on human experiments. And of course, Vincent’s ridiculously evil boss Thomson (Denis Lawson) dreams about mind-controlled cyborg super soldiers and killer/spy androids, and little of helping people cope with brain damage. Vincent for his part is only involved in the whole project because he wants to find a way to cure his brain-damaged little daughter.

Soon after she arrives on base, Ava has quite the breakthrough with her AI, getting her to evolve what rather looks like actual consciousness; unfortunately, she also digs into the project’s secrets without hiding her trails very well, which gets her killed by a fake Chinese assassin.

Vincent, who was really rather fond of her, builds an android body made in Ava’s image to house her AI (also Caity Lotz, obviously). While he is trying to nurture the strange new artificial kind of life he has helped give birth to, and understand what it is Ava and he actually created, Thomson does of course go the killer android route faster than you can say “Terminator”, with a rather more thoughtful and complicated version of the expected results.

Caradog W. James’s The Machine is the curious case of a film that has some major and very obvious flaws yet that I’d still highly recommend to anyone with even a mild interest in clever low budget science fiction. As my – still quite abridged for a film that doesn’t even reach the ninety minute mark – plot synopsis probably shows, the major problem of the film – beyond some dubious lines of dialogue - is that it tries to squeeze too many elements into too short a running time and too low a budget to do everything included in it justice. This leads to a state of affairs where something like the eventual replacement of the human race through artificial life – reminding me of a Terminator prequel that sympathizes with the machines - which would usually be quite enough to base a film on is just one among a huge number of things The Machine is about in one way or the other.

There’s also some pop philosophical thought about the nature of humanity and love, the transhumanist element as represented by the cybernetically enhanced soldiers, the question of moral responsibility in research, the evilness of evil governments (of evil), father daughter relationships, the problems with selling one’s soul, and various assorted ideas. Come to think of it, it’s a bit of a surprise the film actually finds time to think about any of this at all while still keeping its plot together. Not that it’s a very complicated plot, or a very surprising one, but, if you ignore some plot holes that might actually be explained by shoddy “results before security” thinking by the project’s boss Thomson (as if his evil evilness of evil weren’t enough), and behaviour by Vincent that smells more of wilful blindness than plot hole to me, it’s coherent, makes sense, and hangs together well with the film’s various thematic interests – all one hundred of them.

Even more surprising is how deeply engaging the film stays even though it can’t do its cornucopia of ideas as much justice as I would have wished for, how much it still manages to do with some of these ideas, and how it builds fascinating stuff like the suggested implant soldier culture out of a few scenes and a handful of suggestions of meaning. Really, the reason for my disappointment with The Machine not getting too deeply into any single one of its elements lies in how interesting the surface here is, and how much further this wee low budget movie mostly shot in one of those warehouse-looking sets goes in thinking about transhumanism and AI rebellion (of a sort) than any contemporary mainstream production that could actually afford to do much much more but just won’t. There really aren’t – for example – many movies that suggest the replacement of the old (aka humans) by the new (aka AIs) might be a natural thing in a cosmic sense, while at the same time keeping enough sympathy for humanity, as the dramatically ironic ending demonstrates. Perhaps Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning would be comparable, if you stretch the word “mainstream” a bit far, though Hyams does of course talk a very different filmic language from James, even though both visibly appreciate the stranger edges of their given genres.

The Machine is also full of nods in the direction of the films about AIs, cyborgs and androids that came before it. It’s mostly films from the 80s of course, because that was pretty much the high water mark of films thinking about the nature of humanity via AIs etc, beyond the Pinocchio riffs. It will hardly be a coincidence how much the Ava/Machine looks like it came out of Blade Runner and even the handful of echoes of Universal Soldier included seem quite consciously positioned. It would be rather silly to pretend not to be influenced by the films that came before thinking about the same things one thinks about, after all.

A final reason for the impressive effect The Machine had on me despite its obvious flaws is Caity Lotz’s performance as the Machine, with a body language that suggests the alienness of something that never had a body before, as well as the fragility of a child, but also demonstrates an ability to switch to the appropriate body language for the more violent stuff. Her performance also makes it that much easier to get over some of the more problematic moments of the film’s dialogue like my personal favourite “I didn’t know man and clown were the same”.

The Machine really is much better than you’d expect of it, a film that perhaps attempts too much than it could reasonably achieve yet still offers a lot, if you’re inclined to look at it from the right angle.

Past Misdeeds: Violet & Daisy (2011)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Violet (Alexis Bledel) and Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) are silly teenagers (or in Violet's case a young woman using a not quite age-appropriate teenage persona to protect herself from things she and the film can't speak about directly) and best friends. Or really rather "only friends", for they are both too weird for the general populace. Together, they don't fight crime but work as professional killers. They're the sort of professional killers whose thoughts after the rent are pop stars and dresses, though.

Their latest hit develops a curious dynamic. It isn't, after all, every day that a hit person's victim reacts to finding two armed girls asleep on his couch by putting a blanket over them, nor are offers of cookies day-to-day experiences in the killing business. Of course, their victim (James Gandolfini) is rather atypical in that he actually wants to die and has therefor done his best to piss the leaders of two independent criminal organizations off to get his death wish fulfilled. Our heroines are not quite prepared for this kind of situation, and soon a peculiar sort of friendship develops between them - in particular the more classically sane Daisy, who really only ever became a killer to be with Violet - and their prospective victim, with unexpected and expected expressions of humanity.

To complicate matters, there are also the number one killer of Violet's and Daisy's organization (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the killing troupe of the other gang, and the kind of lies you tell people because you love them to cope with.

At first, Geoffrey Fletcher's Violet & Daisy seems to be another movie in the never ending line of would-be Tarantino gangster movies, the kind of film Tarantino hasn't been making for a long time, or ever, and the kind of film his imitators generally painfully not succeed at making anyhow. The longer the film goes on, though, the clearer it becomes that Fletcher isn't really making one of those films at all but something much more interesting and individual.

Violet & Daisy does share some of the surface aspects of the semi-Tarantino genre but the film's emotional core and the direction of its intelligence are both completely different from that horrible non-genre. And not just because of its protagonists' prolonged teenage-hood, but because Fletcher's main interest seems to lie in examining the way in which people, young women like Violet and Daisy as well as older men like Gandolfini's Michael, can grow sideways and crooked, yet still deserve some basic human compassion. The film doesn't believe that compassion then magically fixes everything but it does believe in it making things better, even if an act of compassion is as twisted as the one Michael provides for Daisy in the end.

I was at first rather uncomfortable with the way the film's portrayal of its female main characters, with horrible clichés about teenage girls hanging in the air, but here, too, things became more clear and more interesting the longer the film went on. Fletcher is neither out to reduce the two to the clichés they at first seem to be, nor does he look down on them. Turns out a girl can be a professional killer for dresses and still be a complex character; it's as if Fletcher had actually met teenage girls.

One of the film's tricks to achieve its obvious goal of complexity and ambiguity is by playing with audience expectations. The best example for this is the casting the 30-year-old Bledel not as we'd (ironically) expect - and some typically dense IMDB reviews even complain about - out of painful movie experience as an actual teenager, but as a woman who acts like a teenager to keep things in her past at bay the film can only ever hint at or show in a metaphorical dream sequence, because the character just can't articulate them. And yes, this is the sort of film willing to be ambiguous enough to just tell (or not tell, depending on your perspective) its audience something important about one of its main characters via a metaphorical dream sequence.

It being a rather black comedy, Violet & Daisy very often happens to be not just surprisingly profound and emotionally complicated but also to be very funny. The interplay between Gandolfini, Ronan and Bledel really sells practically every joke in the movie, with no moment played too broadly. The trio is just as good in the film's more serious moments (though this is the kind of film where the humour is part of the serious business too, and vice versa, so it's rather difficult to keep them apart), playing off each other beautifully in ways that feel natural in a film little interested in realism but very much in feeling emotionally and philosophically real. They're so great together it's rather unfair to single one of them out, but I have to say, if Saoirse Ronan is this great at selling complexity in a role a lesser actress could have turned into a mere caricature when she isn't even twenty yet, what kind of performances will she be able to give in ten years? [Future me feels decidedly vindicated here.]

So, if you're in the market for a non-naturalistic film about growing up, compassion, and bloody violent murder, Violet & Daisy will be for you. I'd even recommend it if you're not.

Past Misdeeds: Jaal (1986)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

With his mother developing a consumption-like illness that makes it impossible for her to keep continuing the cooking work that paid for the family's food and education, and since his father has been dead for quite a few years, it now falls to kind-hearted part-time badass Shankar (Mithun Chakraborty) to earn the money that pays the rent.

His first attempts are - of course without his fault - without much success. His luck changes when a mysterious woman calling herself Sundari (Rekha) makes Shankar an offer he can't refuse. She's going to pay him quite a lot of money if he'll do whatever she asks of him for two years. Once Shankar has reluctantly agreed, Sundari tells him what his first mission for her is going to be: he is to go to a small village and somehow slime himself into the trust of the local evil Thakur, a man named Bhanu Pratap Singh (Amrit Pal).

Obviously (well, for everyone except for Shankar), Sundari has chosen Shankar for a reason. Soon enough our hero will learn the truth about the death of his father (Vinod Mehra) and a sticky and complicated past, find his true love (Mandakini), lead a minor revolution, and kick people in various parts of their anatomy with all the power his Mithun fu provides him with. And if you think I just left out about a dozen minor plot lines, detours, and flash backs, you're absolutely right.

It's been quite some time since I've last watched a Bollywood movie, and as always when I let this happen, I'm asking myself afterwards: why the heck did I take so much time to look towards India again? Thanks to the watchalong efforts of my delightful friend Beth, I'm back in the groove again, and we couldn't have chosen a better film than the delectable Jaal (which means "Trap", and is not to be confused with other Hindi movies name Jaal). Apart from being pretty damn fun to watch, Jaal also again made clear some things one really should keep in mind when watching masala of the 70s and 80s, lest one’s false expectations turn an incredible experience into something dreary and annoying.

Jaal's mixture of melodrama, a complicated backstory to be revealed sooner or later, overheated action, sudden bursts of psychedelia, musical numbers (written by Anu Malik) in at times frightening and always imaginative choreography, unfunny humour (responsible here: Jagdeep, one of the true horrors of the ages) and plain weirdness for weirdness' sake looks typical of masala movies even to a Bollywood dabbler like me; the only things missing to the formula are a death scene for Mithun's Ma and long-lost siblings at odds with each other. Of course, and that's the main thing I need to remind myself of whenever I dabble in Bollywood movies of this style, one shouldn't go into most of these films in search of originality or a sensible, linearly presented plot but to enjoy them scene for scene in a game of "whatever will they come up with next". These films were after all meant to include something for every potential member of their Indian audiences, which is not something that makes coherence as Hollywood praises it (and often doesn't achieve for completely different reasons) an easy or even useful element of what the films were supposed to be and do. The masala approach does lend itself to produce joy, though.

In Jaal's case, what the filmmakers came up with to produce that joy are delights like Mithun hitting someone with his crotch (to my disappointment only once, or I could have used the phrase "crotch fu" to describe his fighting style), Rekha's vengeance plans including awesome details like provoking one of the bad guys into a heart attack via an aerobic themed (well, nominally breakdance themed) musical number that for some reason also features mimes. Which, now that I think about it years later, is more than enough to give anyone a heart attack. There are also needle-dropped Madonna songs, the misadventures of the easiest marks for a confidence trick ever, Rekha doing her patented (and inspired/awesome) glowering, moral confusion, women getting very very wet during a musical number, magical jumping boots that appear for one scene only to forever disappear from the film afterwards, girls with guns, some deeply problematic ideas about prostitution that collide with some rather more humane and progressive ideas about prostitution and never get directly resolved into what I'd call a position, and a baseball match that ends with Moon Moon Sen being board-cified in a sexually suggestive position I'd really rather would have expected - and raised an eyebrow at - in a Japanese film.

As is so often the case with masala movies, it's difficult to talk about Jaal as the sum of its parts, because, as explained above, a lot of masala films (there are of course humungous amounts of exceptions to this rule) don't seem all that interested in being the sort of thematically coherent whole that is best looked at as the sum of its parts. Consequently, it makes little sense to judge the merits of a film like Jaal that way, or to get cranky at it for not following the rules of filmmaking made to construct and understand something with very different goals. Why, it would be like looking at a Hollywood blockbuster the same way as you would look at an arthouse movie. So instead, I like to look at these films and praise (or not) them for the amount of joy their succession of single scenes provided me with while watching.

Seen from this angle, Jaal looks pretty darn great to me, seeing as it contains not a single boring minute, and is never afraid to just throw in anything director Umesh Mehra found cool on that particular morning.

Past Misdeeds: Werewolf Of London (1935)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Botanist Dr. Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull) is on an expedition into Tibet, looking for a mythical plant that only blooms by moonlight said to grow there.

In a valley guarded by strange powers, Glendon finds the plant he seeks, but before he can grab it and return to his native London, the scientist is attacked by a creature part wolf and part man. Glendon manages to fight his attacker off, but is wounded in the process.

The botanist returns to London with his find and begins to work ceaselessly in his laboratory on finding a way to influence the plant through artificial moonlight; he also seems to have invented a monitor and security camera combo you wouldn't expect from a botanist, but no matter. Glendon's increasing obsession with his work begins to put a strain on his marriage to his wife Lisa (Valerie Hobson). This is rather unfortunate in a marriage that never seems to have been based on a very deep understanding of each other's wishes or character.

Even more unfortunate is the fact that Lisa's old beau Paul Ames (Lester Matthews) is beginning to sniff around her again, clearly smelling emotional turmoil he can use to get what he wants, reminding me of nothing so much as of a dog with a receding hairline and no ethical backbone that goes beyond very basic ideas of propriety - in other words, he is the typical romantic lead in a 1930s movie.

Glendon is displeased, but too distracted to do much about Ames, while Lisa is all too happy to have someone close-by who treats her as a person instead of a piece of furniture, even if he’s an ass.

Soon, Glendon is visited by the mysterious Dr. Yogami (Warner Oland). Yogami knows all about Glendon's Tibetan adventures and warns him that the creature who bit the botanist was a werewolf - a creature combining the worst aspects of man and wolf in the language of the film - and that the creature has infected him with its curse, the same curse Yogami does suffer from. Only the blossoms of Glendon's plant will be able to counteract the transformation into a ravening beast out to destroy what it loves the most (something Glendon would seem to be perfectly able to do through negligence instead of violence without being a werewolf). Yogami begs Glendon for one of the blossoms for himself, but Glendon declines in disbelief of the story, and because simple kindness is clearly beyond him.

After his first transformation, the scientist will be much more believing in it as well as in the power of the plant, but at this point, someone will already have stolen all the blossoms he so desperately needs now. From then on, Glendon tries to keep away from his wife as much as possible, driving her even further away but living out his murderous urges on random women (of obviously “loose morals” - one might meet the film's subtext here).

Universal's Werewolf of London is often erroneously called the first werewolf movie. In fact, there have been four to six other films (excluding Jekyll & Hyde versions, which are of course closely related to the werewolf myth as the movies see it) containing werewolves made before it, but - as far as I can tell - all of them seem to have been lost to us.

In any case, Werewolf of London is Universal Studio's first attempt at making a werewolf movie, six years before their much more successful and much better loved The Wolf Man with Lon Chaney Jr.

At times, Werewolf of London feels like a dry run for the later film, but it would be quite unfair to only see it as such. While the basics of the two films - parts of the werewolf mythology, the werewolf as a victim of his own (aggressive and sexual) urges, a creature killing what it loves the most - are identical, Werewolf puts quite a different emphasis on things.

Where Chaney is nearly as much of an innocent victim of his own urges as the people he kills, Hull's Glendon seems to be much more conscious of what he is doing when he is not completely himself anymore. There's a distinct undertone of Glendon living out his true wishes when he is in his wolf form. Being a werewolf in this case seems to be less the case of Glendon being a victim than him becoming what he truly is.

This doesn't mean that the film treats its main protagonist as a pure monster - he is trying to stay away from people after he realizes what is happening to him, he is doing what he can at least not to kill his wife - it does however treat him as someone fighting himself rather than an outside influence. This impression is even deepened by the fact that Glendon-wolf seems to keep his intelligence and even tends to change into different clothes before going on a rampage. In this respect, Werewolf is closer to the Jekyll & Hyde school of werewolfery than the Chaney version.

The Chaney version also isn't a film about a marriage going down the shitter. Werewolf very much is. At times, this part of the subtext becomes so strong the transformation of a man into a raging creature full of hatred for his wife can hardly be called a metaphor for the emotional turmoil inside of a very insecure and violent man at the end of a marriage anymore.

Visually, the film isn't as interesting as it is on its metaphorical level. Director Stuart Walker surely wasn't one of Universal's more interesting worker drones, and much of the rest of the team behind the camera - with the exception of special makeup artist Jack Pierce, of course - wasn't among Universal's best either. The film's set design and cinematography are far from the expressionist backlot Europe heights the studio's best films reached. Mostly, the film is looking professionally bland, but this blandness is from time to time broken up by single moody shots or short moments of inspired shadow play. After all, this was produced in a year when Universal's minor creatives were still more than competent in what they were doing, and more importantly, when they - and the studio itself - were still treating their films and their audience with respect and seriousness - it's 1935, and not 1944.

Pierce's werewolf make-up is of quite a different calibre than competence, though. Less doglike and hairy than the later wolf face for Chaney, the mask enables Hull to bring more of his facial expressions to bear. In fact, he seems to be a much better actor when baring his fangs than he is when talking.

Hull's performance out of his mask is unfortunately often quite weak. He tends to go for the overtly dramatic where subtlety would be better and for the bland where one would hope for something more charismatic. I'd go as far as to say that it is in large parts Hull's fault that the later Chaney film has become Universal's iconic werewolf film instead of this one.

Still, there's much of interest to be found here for anyone even a little interested in the horror movies of the 30s and 40s.

Pirates Of The XXth Century (1979)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Original title: Piraty XX veka 

Little does the crew of a Soviet freighter transporting medicine for the Motherland expect the true nature of their cargo - opium. However, what the sailors don't know, a bunch of evil pirates does. A shipwrecked sailor (Talgat Nigmatulin) the freighter takes on board on the open sea is in truth the pirates' man on the inside, bound to destroy the ship’s radio when the time for attack comes. Soon enough half of the Soviets are dead, their freight is stolen, and their ship is sinking.

The survivors, led by their Captain Iwan Iljitsch (Pyotr Velyaminov) and engineer and part-time hero Sergej Sergejitsch (Nikolai Yeryomenko) manage to escape on a life boat without their enemies realizing it, but without supplies and far-off from help, their situation looks none too pleasant. That is, until they come upon an island. As luck will have it, the crew's troubles aren't over yet, though, for it is this very same island the pirates are using as an HQ after having enslaved a village of peaceful pearl-divers. Or rather the female population of it - for the men, the pirates just couldn't find any use.

Fortunately, the Soviet sailors are nearly to a man - there is of course the obligatory "coward" (aka a person who reacts rather more realistically to the whole plot) and the crew's two women are only there to get kidnapped and tortured a bit because why should a Soviet Russian movie be any better about this stuff - improbably competent at the manly arts of sneaking, fighting, and being badass while disco funk plays, so they even have a chance to survive the ensuing cat and mouse game against the much better armed and more numerous pirates. In the end, though, all will depend on Sergej Sergejitsch's ability to do the lone hero bit.

Boris Durov's Pirates Of The XXth Century was the highest grossing movie in the existence of the USSR, which again goes to show that people are the same wherever you go. So if there's a film full of fun violence, an audience will choose it over anything generally considered more worthy every time, no matter where it comes from or what specifically is considered to be more worthy at that given place and time. I say this and make it sound as if it were a bad thing, but obviously, Pirates and films of its type are my bread and butter when it comes to movies, and I'll watch and enjoy a film with shoot-outs and explosions over a treatise about some rich people's marital troubles (or in this case the purity of the working classes) every time.

As an action film - a genre Soviet directors only had limited experience with - Pirates often is a bit awkward, with everyone striking the same poses you'd find in a Hollywood production or something produced in the Philippines, but doing so in a manner that can feel slightly off, as if the actors and the director weren't totally fluent in the filmic language they were speaking. This does only strengthen the film's charms for me by providing it with a feeling of a certain playground innocence, not unlike that found in Turkish pop cinema, although Pirates' creators, not surprisingly, show quite a bit more technical proficiency. Like many action films this is a variation of kids playing cowboys and Indians, just with a greater budget for playing make-believe.

Other elements of the film are completely in keeping with the international language of action movies. There's awkward-yet-awesome white guy martial arts (still better than Chuck Norris because these white guys at least lack the ick factor), the need for people to at least nearly fall off a cliff if a cliff is provided, the naturalness with which everyone who isn't a woman not only knows how to use an assault rifle but is good at it too - all these pleasant clichés and more are there and always pretty fun to watch.

Pirates also offers some choice noises for our ears thanks to a wonderfully late 70s disco funk score by Yevgeniy Gevorgyan that is clearly a brother in spirit to what I like to call Toei Funk and assorted genres of film music, with some added moments of random synth-warbling during the diving sequences (which are pleasantly short and to the point instead of the traditional boring and long-winded).

Pirates is great fun if you don't have to take your action movies dead seriously, but can enjoy silliness for the sake of silliness like a proper cult movie fan should. No worries, though, while the film is as silly as one could ask for, it never goes the frightening and wrong route of conscious camp that has destroyed many a movie over the years. This film's silliness is not a result of cynicism.

It also should be noted that the film's script (by Durov and Desyat Negrityat's Stanislav Govorukhin) eschews the bane of many a Soviet movie, the propagandist speeches about the superiority of the Soviet people, awesomeness of the working classes, communism, and so on, and so forth that have sucked the joy out of many a film (which I suspect to not have been the favourite parts of movies for their native Soviet movie audiences either). There are of course certain assumptions about the way people and the world work that are slightly different from what one is used to from western films (for one, there's a larger emphasis on team play than is typical for action movies of the time without the number seven in their title), but these are the result of people coming from a culturally slightly different place, and will only annoy those who can't cope with others having vaguely different values or ideas about the world than themselves.

So, all in all, Soviet Russia can be proud of having this as its highest-grossing movie.

Past Misdeeds: The Casebook of Eddie Brewer (2012)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Warning: there are one or two rather mild spoilers ahead

Eddie Brewer (Ian Brooker, an actor whose screen credits only seem to consist of a few bit parts, which looks preposterously unfair in context of his performance here) is a rather old-fashioned kind of paranormal investigator. He works alone, mistrusts the whole EXTREME Ghost Hunters approach as much as he does the professional sceptics, and clearly abhors mediums; in fact, even though he has encountered strange phenomena quite often, he doesn’t necessarily even believe in spirits as such.

Despite his friendly curmudgeonly nature (with an edge of sadness connected to the burning death of his wife decades ago), Eddie has agreed to be accompanied by the documentary crew of a culture TV channel for a bit. The investigator clearly thinks they are doing some friendly puff piece, so it will come as a bit of surprise to him when he’ll learn that their plans also involve a group of modern style ghost hunters and capital-s sceptic Susan Kovac (Louise Paris) with whom he has clashed before.

Mainly, Eddie is concerned with two cases right now. One involves some poltergeist type occurrences surrounding a young girl named Lucy Blakewell (Erin Connolly), phenomena which started out harmlessly enough but that by the time Eddie appears at the scene have become quite disturbing to Lucy’s mother (Bella Hamblin). And after all, how unthreatening can a phenomenon be that is connected to Lucy’s imaginary friend, when said friend calls itself after the clown Grimaldi?

Eddie’s second case concerns some odd happenings in Rookery House, a historical yet run-down building owned by the local council that’s being - rather haphazardly it seems - renovated. Particularly the building’s cellar appears to be a veritable hotbed of weird occurrences. In fact, Eddie will have encounters there that will be closer than any he’d ever expected.

During the course of the cases, Eddie will also learn that there just might be a connection between them, that if you look into an abyss, the abyss just might look back at you, and that you really don’t want to waltz into certain cellars with a horde of people in tow.

Expectations are a wonderful thing, particularly if you go into a film like Andrew Spencer’s The Casebook of Eddie Brewer expecting another paranormal investigation POV horror film (I still can’t believe this is now an actual horror sub-sub-genre with more films in it than the Nazi zombie film) as I did, only to be delighted by what the film then turns out to be.

Formally, The Casebook isn’t a pure POV/found footage film at all. Most of the film does consist of the material the fictional TV crew is shooting but whenever things happen when and where having a camera around would be improbable, or when the paranormal activity is playing around with the camera while Eddie experiences something horrifying - which just happen to be scenes much more effectively staged without the POV camera style – it changes to a more traditional filmmaking language, with many a well-composed (and moodily-lit) shot. Trained against acknowledging the improbabilities of the POV conceit as I - and probably other viewers of the type who haven’t grown to loathe it - now am, I would have expected to find this changing approach jarring, but Spencer uses it so effectively, naturally, and logically, the shifts in viewpoint seem to be organic parts of the film that wouldn’t make any sense done differently.

That’s not the only highly impressive aspect of a film clearly made on the tightest of budgets, the kind of production where half of the people involved take on three or four roles behind the camera. The sound design is particularly worth mentioning, with various creepy noises taking the place of visible special effects, though the latter do come into play when appropriate, generally to good effect, unless you just need to see something explode, or want very explicit gore. In that case, however, this won’t be a film to make you happy anyway.

It’s not as if The Casebook were coy about the supernatural, though. There’s no dragging of feet in the script, and an absolute willingness to show the audience creepy and disturbing things, unless – and I love it when a film has the brains to know the difference – it is more creepy not to show something, and instead to suggest it. The film also does right by some other pretty difficult elements of horror, namely the so often tedious and annoying battle between believers and sceptics. The film is always clear that its sympathies (at least in the context of the plot) lie with Eddie’s approach to the supernatural, but it anchors these sympathies in Eddie’s characterisation instead of trying to convert the audience or preach at it, or even worse annoy with the bizarre holier than thou attitude of something like The Conjuring (a film as inferior to this one, by the way, as its budget is higher). In fact, professional sceptic Kovac doesn’t seem to be looked down upon because she doesn’t believe but because she’s an asshole about it, which goes for the Extreme Ghost Hunters! from the other side as well.

What impresses me most about Spencer’s film aren’t any of these fine and indeed impressive elements, though, but rather how well it builds up a feeling of dread, beginning in a wry, friendly and even comedic tone that slowly shifts as the more disturbing parts of the plot unfold. At first, the hints of things to come only break the film’s seemingly laid back flow a little, but like Eddie’s nerves, the tone becomes increasingly brittle until even what starts out as a scene making fun of a broadly acted medium can turn frightening at a moment’s notice. Brooker, as the actor who is in most of the film’s scenes, sells this change of mood and his character very well. In his performance, there’s a certain edge to Eddie’s character from the beginning, yet the edge is counteracted by a feeling of basic, no-nonsense (in the polite British way, not the American one) decency. Until, that is, one of the film’s central horrors occurs, and the wonder and calm that are part of Eddie’s character shift into fear and utter horror. It’s quite the thing to watch.

Not coincidentally, as the whole of The Casebook of Eddie Brewer is.

Past Misdeeds: The Crone (2013)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Original title: Kosoku baba

The two less popular members of the idol group Jersey Girls, Nanami and Mayuko, hate their group’s very own star (if you want to use that word in the kind of bottom-feeder entertainment world these girls are working in) Ayane with a degree of passion - at the very least enough to let out their hatred in the kind of physical "pranks" that can't be described as friendly anymore.

As if this weren't unpleasant enough, the newest episode of their TV show sees the girls visiting an empty, supposedly haunted, nursing home. Alas, the haunting is more than just a supposed one, and soon Ayane, who was the first to enter the building, is plagued by the titular crone, a ghost that doesn't just delight in a lot of fast skittering but also brings with her the dubious pleasures of decay, age, and physical abuse. Even though Ayane is the first to suffer, the curious curse eventually reaches out for all three of the girls, as well as to their handler and the show's director. More ghostly skittering and physical ickiness abound.

Idol-culture based horror has become a bit of a thing in Japanese low budget horror in the last couple of years, and it's easy to see why: a production can hire idols instead of “real” actors, which probably comes quite a bit cheaper, it can latch onto whatever fan base said idols possess, and when in doubt, nobody involved has to do too much acting.

Surprisingly enough, the idol actresses involved in this part of another attempt to re-light the J-horror fire, Honoka Miki, Shiori Kitayama and Kaoru Goto, aren't playing themselves, and are giving perfectly decent performances, not only when it comes to screaming but also in the slightly heightened awkwardness of the idoling (that's the verb, right?) they bring to the movie. That's all you can ask of young women in their late teens with little actual acting experience, and really all The Crone needs; it even gives one hope for a future for these actresses as actresses.

While The Crone is clearly a very cheap production - just look at the Crone make-up to realize how cheap - made in very limited shooting time, director and scriptwriter Eisuke Naito does some interesting things with what he has to work with. This is a film where all the different, and increasingly freaky, ways the supernatural shows itself are actually connected to plot and theme, with nothing happening that isn't textual or subtextual part of the horrors of the helplessness of the aged, physical abuse and decay. In this context, making the film's protagonists idols, living symbols of an unhealthy obsession with youth and physical perfection if ever there were one, seems particularly clever, not just because the girls are logical figures of hate for the film's specific ghost but also, the film seems to suggest, because the kind of objectification inherent in idol culture is entwined with the hatred for the old and their physical imperfections like a Siamese twin.

Naito's film is really surprisingly resonant in this way, demonstrating a willingness to be a bit deeper than your typical cheap spook-fest usually shows, as well as suggesting a director possessing an ability to actually see his ideas through to the end. There's a good sense for contemporary anxieties underlying the proceedings, perhaps even a bit of absolutely appropriate hysteria, which is more than I can say about much praised films like The Conjuring that never seem interested in anything but the shocks without ever having an idea what the shocks are supposed to be there for.

The Crone's comparative intellectual depth is helpful in other regards, too, for as a mere horror show, the film isn't quite as effective as you'd wish for, or rather, it is professional and often imaginative when it comes to its supernatural affairs, but it is seldom scary, nor does it induce the kind of breathlessness an audience should sometimes feel in an effective horror film. I'm not sure the film is even trying to scare its audience as much as it wants to transport it into a world of increasing strangeness while keeping inside the lines of the themes it has chosen. More often than not, The Crone succeeded with this for me, in part certainly because I expected rather something more in the vein of the last two direct-to-DVD Ju-on movies, or of whatever the last Ring movie was supposed to be. While Naito's film doesn't necessarily succeed in all it sets out to do, there's a lot to say for a film and a director who at the very least seem to care about what they are doing.

I also found the film's moments of body horror quite effective, scenes clearly more in the tradition of the grotesque that runs through a lot of Japanese art than in that of David Cronenberg, and all the stronger for it (sorry, Mr Cronenberg).

Visually, the film is shot in a style closer to Japanese horror of the late 90s and early 2000s with a limited colour scheme that is neither based on blue nor on yellow, and a look that can't quite hide its low budget but which does suggest actual thought has been put into things like composition, blocking, and camera work that isn't plain boring. You could call it retro, or you could call it an attempt to shoot a film not looking like a reality TV show; I'd certainly go for the latter.

Having said all this, I probably need to emphasise that The Crone isn't the kind of film that will resonate with everyone as much as it does with me, for make no mistake, while all the rather delightful subtext is in there, this still is a very basic, very cheap piece of low budget horror in plot and structure. It just smuggles quite a bit of contraband into your brain if you let it.

Past Misdeeds: Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012)

aka Universal Soldier IV

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Even after the positive buzz by people whose opinions I respect, I did expect this new addition to the Universal Soldier franchise to be at best a decent bit of cheap-o US action cinema with one or two hints that director John Hyams has seen Apocalypse Now in it. However, what I actually got was so much more.

This is another movie with themes quite close to the spirit of Philip K. Dick. One should probably wish filmmakers to be inspired by more contemporary SF too, but then I'm already happy when filmmakers read anything at all. It's an amnesiac's (Scott Adkins, stuntman/martial artist turned actually rather good actor) attempt to understand why a certain Luc Devereaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme at his most disquieting) brutally murdered his wife and kid during a home invasion, and his subsequent quest to take vengeance. This rather typical plotline is permanently enhanced and deconstructed by twists, turns, and ideas concerning the nature of our hero, free will, the uses of memory, and the killing of fathers/gods, all told in a visual style that reminded me most of Beyond the Black Rainbow and Driver (films this one does actually see eye to eye with) in the way it suggests wrongness and disturbed subjectivity with every colour and framing choice.

The whole film has the feel of a paranoid's nightmare full of bleak colours, grimy instead of adrenaline-pushing violence, and a feeling of claustrophobia - all not exactly things you'd expect in an US action movie belonging to a mildly successful franchise that generally always avoided to actually delve into the thematic mire of conspiracy theory and identity horror its basic ideas are so ideally suited to. Reckoning, on the other hand, delves in without ever looking back, pulling the part of its audience willing to go into nasty and confusing places with it, and leaving the kind of people who need to have the plot explained to them afterwards behind on the IMDB where they belong.

It's not only Hyams's ambition to go where Universal Soldier hasn't gone before I admire here, it's that he actually fulfils it, making one of the most off-beat and unexpectedly disturbing action films with a side-line in existential horror I've ever seen.

Past Misdeeds: Diary Of A Madman (1963)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section (like, for example, why I didn't even mention Guy de Maupassant's original story in this one).


France in the 19th Century. A group of mourners attend the burial of magistrate and hobby criminal psychologist Simon Cordier (Vincent Price). Cordier left the group his diary - of course containing the mandatory horrible truth - to explain some strange occurrences surrounding his last few months. Thus endeth the unnecessary framing device and the actual action (or what goes for it here) begins.

Cordier, as one of the men who had sentenced the murderer Louis Girot (Harvey Stephens) to death, is invited by Girot to visit him a few days before his execution. The murderer had always stated that he wasn't to blame for his deeds, but was coerced to them by an invisible, evil force that controlled him. Not surprisingly, Cordier never did believe this story, and isn't getting any less sceptical when Girot now repeats it. Alas, Girot is telling the truth, as his greenish glowing eyes when the ranting session turns violent only too clearly demonstrate.

Cordier manages to survive Girot's attack and knocks the man out. Afterwards, however, the magistrate's life turns strange. He can't stop thinking about what Girot told him; the killer's process files mysteriously appear on Cordier's desk; the locked-up portrait of the magistrate's long dead wife and child reappears at a place in his study where it hasn't hung for more than a decade. Eventually, a mocking voice out of nowhere (Joseph Ruskin) introduces itself to Cordier, and explains that it is an Horla, a creature from another dimension that feels drawn to evil - in Cordier's case his feeling of guilt for having (or only thinking to have, the film's not really clear about that) driven his wife to suicide after the death of their child, for which he held her responsible - and uses mind control to let the evildoers do more evil. Which, frankly, seems a bit unnecessary and a mite illogical, what with them supposedly being evil already. Now, if the film would explain that the Horla feeds on the darker human emotions, this whole thing would make a bit more sense, but Diary's script doesn't believe in doing things the sensible way.

To prove its point, the Horla puts the mind-whammy on Cordier and makes him crush his budgie to death. The very next day, the magistrate does the sort of logical thing people in horror films never do - and that seems quite out of place in a movie typically as thoughtless as this one - and visits a psychiatrist.

The Freud surrogate recommends Cordier to take some time off from his exhausting job, and spend some time sculpting as he had done when he was younger. It's a decent idea, really, or rather would be, if the Horla weren't an actual living being instead of a hallucination.

In his new life as an amateur artist, Cordier soon enough meets and is instantly smitten by artist model Odette Mallotte (Nancy Kovack). She's just trying to sell him a picture she modelled for, but instead  of buying it, he decides to hire her as a model for his first new work. What Cordier doesn't know is that Odette is married to the penniless painter Paul Duclasse (Chris Warfield). That's alright, though, because Odette would be perfectly willing to leave her husband for a richer one, especially one as malleable as Cordier seems to be. Unfortunately, the Horla has rather more unpleasant and violent ideas about what Cordier should do with Odette and Paul.

You'd think that a somewhat larger and somewhat more reputable studio like United Artists would have had no problems emulating the success of AIP's (and Roger Corman's) Poe adaptations, especially when they were willing to hire the star of these films, the greatest actor in horror film, Vincent Price. Alas, the studio heads must have somehow overlooked that the quality of the AIP films had quite a bit to do with Corman's enormous creative powers (and at that point in his career, his willingness to use them) and scripts that were written with actual intelligence and care.

In the place of the visionary Corman, UA set Reginald Le Borg, a director who had begun his career cranking out indifferent films of every genre for Universal, and went on to crank out equally indifferent TV jobs for the thankless grind of 50s TV. One can't help but suspect he worked cheap and fast, without that nasty habit of still trying to make a movie worth watching the Corman bubble had brought to AIP. "Indifferent" is also a fine word to describe Le Borg's work here. There's not exactly anything wrong with the man's direction; there is unfortunately, nothing right with it that exceeds pointing the camera in the right - though never an interesting -direction and having competent lighting, either. In not a single scene does the director seem interested in building a mood - be it a spooky one, an ambiguous one, or a dramatic, an exciting or a just plain entertaining one. The camera points, Le Borg shoots, and that's all. For some reason, he also lets his actors pretend the French currency is called "The Frank" (yep, just like the first name), because there's nothing that makes fake France more believable than not even trying to pronounce it (or any of the character names) right.

Fittingly, Robert E. Kent's script is just as indifferent, and badly structured too boot. Too many scenes are completely superfluous, or tend to run on long after they have expressed what they wanted to express (which never is much, anyhow).

The script's troubles begin with the utterly unnecessary framing device that might as well just not be there, for all that it matters to the proceedings, and continue into that most cardinal of all scripting sins: setting up interesting psychological circumstances for a protagonist and then deciding to just not do anything with them, because one would prefer some stiff operatics about a gold-digging woman, her painter husband and the woman who truly loves him. No, I have no idea why I should care about the painter's best friend/would-be wife either - the film certainly isn't telling me. It's all just a draggy mire of misused opportunities.


And - worst of all - not even acting hero Price seems to be immune to the air of boredom surrounding the film. He's not bad, mind you, he's just neither using his control of thespian nuance, nor his patented thoughtful overacting. The star is mostly just there, going through the motions, getting paid. I won't blame Price much for not giving a good performance here, though. Even the most enthusiastic actor can do only so much surrounded by people caring so little about the quality of the film they are making.

Past Misdeeds: Solomon Kane (2009)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.


It's the year 1600. Mercenary captain Solomon Kane (James Purefoy) is a rather nasty man with a mean disposition, but of excellent talent in the killing arts. While on one of his plunder and pillage escapades with his men, Kane meets a large, faceless charmer of a guy wielding a flaming sword who introduces himself as "the devil's reaper", come to bring Kane's soul to where it belongs.

With luck, the mercenary survives his fight with the creature and escapes. One year later, the film finds its protagonist in England, where he is spending time in a monastery. Which is quite an achievement seeing that there were no monasteries in England at that time anymore; scriptwriters of period pieces should sometimes look into a history book of the era their movies take place in.

His encounter with the reaper has put the fear of the devil into Kane, and he has forsworn his wicked and violent ways and sworn never to take human life again. Alas, the monastery's abbot has had a vision. Seems like god told him to send Kane away to return to his childhood home.

Kane has some very unpleasant (noble) family baggage, though, and is not at all willing to go back to his ancestral castle. Be that as it may, the man obviously can't stay in the monastery when the abbot's imaginary friend says no, so he leaves and wanders the country, doing his best to be non-violent. On his travels, he meets the Crowthorn family, a handful of brave puritans on their way to America. Kane and the Crowthorns take a real liking to each other, and since this is a film with a redemption plot, this does not bode well for Pete Postlethwaite, Alice Krige and their children.

A horde of not completely human raiders under the leadership of a demonic masked fighter (Samuel Roukin) roams the land, killing many people and taking others as slaves. The Crowthorns and Kane have a run-in with one of the raider groups, an encounter that convinces Kane to take up killing again, if now for a better cause. Even with Kane's regained fighting spirit, the raiders kill the male members of the family and take daughter Meredith (Rachel-Hurd Wood) with them. Kane promises the dying Crowthorn to rescue his daughter whatever the cost, leaving Mrs Crowthorn behind alone in the deep dark woods to fend for herself. Very heroic.

Little does the ex-pacifist know that his way to redemption will lead him (after some adventures and detours) back to his family castle.

After the less than promising trailers and the not exactly excited sounding reviews, I went into Solomon Kane expecting the worst. As it turns out, the film isn't as bad as I had feared at all.

As an admirer of the Kane stories of Robert E. Howard this film is supposedly based on, I would not have been optimistic going into a film like this even under more promising circumstances. I was right with not being optimistic about the film in this regard: as a Howard adaptation, Solomon Kane isn't a success at all. Kane is more like an alternative world version of Howard's character than the one I know from the stories. Both Kanes might share their obsessiveness and their fighting prowess, but where the literary figure is driven by a sense of justice and adventure lust he can't admit to himself, movie-Kane is on a by-the-script-writers'-rule-book search for redemption, a search that a contemporary film script of course has to frame with family connections to the source of evil. A simple search for redemption just isn't personal enough anymore, and a hero just being a kick-ass demon-hunting adventurer is of course right out. In the tradition that has already annoyed me in more than one superhero movie, this is an origin story in which everything that is happening has deep connections with the protagonist's history, making his good deeds deeply solipsistic at their core instead of selfless and truly heroic.

This utterly predictable streak is the film's big weakness. Well, it and the tendency to lay the pathos on so thick that I suspect people have drowned in it during the production. I dare anyone not to giggle at the crucifixion scene; and yes, of course Kane rips himself off the cross, as is traditional in Sword and Sorcery films, in contrast to certain other crucifixions.

Having said that, I also have to admit that these shortcomings don't drag the film down as much I would have expected. The plot may be so bog-standard in its ideas more sensitive people will probably want to scream, but its execution is a lot more exciting to watch than you'd think. Director Michael J. Bassett manages to imbue his film with exactly the right feel for a pulpy, semi-historical Sword and Sorcery film. The film gets the needed mood of grimness and slight unreality just right, creating a world of fog, dirt and a bit of snow. It works on the part of the imagination that delights in Frank Frazetta paintings.

Another strength are the film's action scenes, at once grim and cool in a heavy metal record cover sense. They are even dynamic and thrilling enough to let one ignore the weakness of the CGI effects. Only the Grand Finale disappoints in this regard, but I'd rather put that on the boringness of the movie's big bad and Bassett's too conservative scriptwriting (again) than on his ability at directing good action scenes.

While there really isn't much room to do anything impressive on the acting front for anyone, I am still quite impressed with James Purefoy's performance. The actor does a fine job of deliberate, yet subtle overacting and treats his character's standard redemption arc as if it were Shakespeare. There's a seriousness about his approach to Kane that makes this one-dimensional character at times nearly feel like a charismatic person, possibly even someone whose redemption would be a good thing. Plus, Purefoy is also pretty good in the action scenes. One can't help but wonder how excellent Purefoy would have been as Howard's Kane.


Solomon Kane is a terribly flawed film. I would have wished for it to be either more imaginative or at least closer to Howard than it being generic historical pulp fantasy, to be a bit more willing to take risks with its narrative, but in the end, I can't say that it isn't fun, at times even exciting, to watch.

Past Misdeeds: Livide (2011)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Lucie Klavel (the fantastic Chloé Coulloud) starts a practicum with mobile geriatric nurse Catherine Wilson (Catherine Jacob) as part of her training. One of the patients the rather cynical Wilson visits once a day is former famous ballet teacher Madame Jessel (Marie-Claude Pietragalla). Madame is very very old, and not much more than a husk of a woman hovering forever between life and death in a coma in her large, increasingly creepy, home. She is also supposed to be very rich; if Lucie believes what Wilson tells her, there's said to be some sort of treasure hidden away in the house, but Wilson has never found it, even though she tried.

When Lucie tells the story to her boyfriend Will (Félix Moati), he can't help but see himself, his brother Ben (Jérémy Kapone) and Lucie breaking into the house and finding Jessel's treasure. Thus, they could leave their certain futures of dead-end jobs and loveless families behind. At first, Lucie is less than thrilled by Will's idea but some family trouble with her father and a visit by/hallucination of her dead mother (Béatrice Dalle) change her mind. It would, after all be a dream to just have enough money to flee and leave all troubles behind (that's how money works, right?). If Lucie knew what the audience knows about Wilson and her connection to a series of local child disappearances, she probably would have second thoughts about her new life of crime, but she doesn't.

When the trio break into Jessel's house - on Halloween night, no less - they find rather more than they would have wished for; finding the taxidermied body of Jessel's daughter Anna (Chloé Marcq) in a ballerina outfit in a room set up as a grotesque, life-sized music box is just the beginning of an ordeal that becomes increasingly surreal.

I wasn't much of a fan of Alexandre Bustillo's and Julien Maury's first film, Inside/À l'intérieur. That film's overdose of shocking violence was so thick, and its grotesqueness so at odds with the narrative tone I ended up not shocked but provoked to laughter, some fine acting and the directors' irreproachable technical abilities notwithstanding.

Livide still contains its share of physically improbable (and rather awesome) gore, but where Inside’s sense of the grotesque and its hyper-realist mood collided in a bad way, Livide haunts a place between the supernatural movies of Dario Argento (whose Suspiria gets a shout-out that suggests this as an alternative version of Mother of Tears perhaps more fit for those disappointed by the Argento movie's closeness to the Demoni films and other movies of that style rather than Suspiria and Inferno; I'm one of the crazy-people who actually liked Mother of Tears, so don't ask me, please), Fulci in his brilliant phase, and European fairy tales in their pre-bourgeois form before the Brothers Grimm tamed them for a more uptight audience. In that context, the film's sense of the grotesque and the grotesquely violent is particularly effective, for a film that does not strive to be a copy of reality can quite pleasurably creep along paths its naturalistic brethren should eschew.

In its narrative structure Livide is a rather fascinating example of a movie which fulfils everything that could be asked for from a very generic horror movie while still having a mind completely of its own. Every viewer even slightly in tune with the horror genre will of course know the comatose ballet teacher to be anything but the mild type of living dead her permanent sleeping habits would suggest her to be, and will expect her to do rather nasty things to our protagonists when they break into her realm; we all know tune and words to this particular song by heart.

However, at the same time it sings this tune, Livide isn't at all willing to accept its simple plot set-up as an excuse to only tell us a story we already know too well in exactly the way we expect. At first slowly, then with increasing intensity, the film's subtext about young women living in more or less terrible situations trying to free themselves takes control of Livide's more generic elements; the more fantastic the film's surface becomes, the more its symbolic level becomes an indistinguishable part of this surface, until the film ends in a scene that's perfectly in keeping with the fairy tales it uses for its own ends, and also completely divorced from reality as most people see it, or expect to see in their modern horror movies. Unexpectedly, Livide also allows itself to end on a hopeful note it can only reach because it dares to humanize (at least one of) its monsters; freedom - such as it is (the film seems neither painfully optimistic nor cynical about freedom's nature) - is won from recognizing a shared humanity between monster and human, of their outward differences, even their identities, dissolving by way of the grotesque. Like in the literary horrors of Caitlin R. Kiernan, of whose books Livide's treatment of the grotesque and the monstrous, reminds me quite a bit, there's not only danger and horror to be found in facing monsters but also beauty and (at least some kind of) truth.


In this context, it seems nearly irrelevant that Livide at the same time also just works very well as a surreal and moody horror film, but work well it does; it's not impossible that exactly its grounding in safe genre formulas is what gives Livide its power.

Past Misdeeds: The Sisters (2004)

Original title: Pee chong air

Pim (Linina Phuttitarn), the last surviving member of a small-time band, explains to a (up until the movie's very end faceless) cop what happened to her and her band mates when they spent a night in a hotel in the country.

At first, they were only somewhat disturbed by peculiar and unsettling noises coming through the air vent in the ceiling, but soon they learned that they shared a room with a very angry female ghost staring at them from above. Escaping into the lobby didn't help much. In fact, one of them got so panicked by further ghostly manifestations in an elevator shaft that he ran out of the hotel and right into a car.

You'd hope that leaving the hotel would protect the young people from the ghost's wrath, but unfortunately she followed them to the hospital their run over friend was brought into to die. The ghost was also bringing one of these especially disturbing child ghosts with her, so it’s not surprising the next band member died in the hospital by ghost-induced suicide.

At least the less frightening ghost of a teenage girl appeared and helped the band (and us) out with some exposition. The ghost following them around belonged to a murdered prostitute whose head was deposited in the air vent the ghost initially crawled out of. Teenage ghost was her sister.

Thusly informed, our victims - having no time for scepticism – decided the safest course of action was to seek help in the nearest Buddhist temple. The head priest there already had experience with this particular ghost, and was able to tell our protagonists that whoever sees her soon dies or goes insane. He did, however, know of a ritual that could help lift this curse - but he needed everyone to sleep in the coffin of someone who died a violent death as a part of it, and it had to happen before midnight.

The whole ritual business did not work out as well as the friends had hoped, of course, and the next day found the two last survivors doing research like good Call of Cthulhu characters, delving deep into the sad and tragic past of the ghost and the rather distressing present of her family.

The seeming randomness of the supernatural attacks on the protagonists and a general feeling of inexplicability of the first half hour of The Sisters reminded me heavily of the work of Takashi Shimizu circa the original (well, original big screen) Ju-On. Director/editor/cinematographer Tiwa Moeithaisong (who directed the fantastic Meat Grinder in 2009) uses visual techniques that reminded me a lot of Shimizu - long shots from strangely disturbing angles that suggest something malevolent abound, camera movement that is slow and lingering like a paranoiac's dream.

Less Shimizu and more Moeithaisong as I learned to love him in Meat Grinder are the at this early point more confusing than illuminating fragments of flashbacks (inside of the flashback that is Pim's story for an extra dose of confusion) and the excellently artificial colour schemes in which Bava-green of course indicates the cracks through which the supernatural seeps. All this combines nicely into a feeling of losing touch with linear reality in a receptive viewer like me, so I have to admit I was a little disappointed when the ghost began to make sense.

Explanations in horror films always carry a risk of pushing the viewer out of the realm of the unexplained and creepy into the less dignified castle of ridiculousness, but Moeithaisong avoids falling into this trap by the matter-of-factness with which his film delivers its answers. Elements like the "sleeping in the coffin of a someone who died a violent death" business or the expository ghost sister should be plain ridiculous, yet the simple, underplayed earnestness with which they are presented makes them - if not exactly belonging into reality as I understand it - perfectly fitting elements of the story.

It is also illuminating to see how far a film can come without having psychologically defined characters or clear character types in it. Apart from one of them, the band members have no distinguishing character traits whatsoever, yet I found them less annoying than the usual assortment of jock, nerd, slut and good girl that typically make up horror film victims. They don't need to have more specific characterization because their characters or motivations have nothing to do with what happens to them, and their actions before they meet the ghost are utterly unimportant. These people are as doomed as soon as they step into the hotel room as the woman who would become the film's ghost was doomed through the accidents of birth (or karma, I suppose).

In the end, the only character whose psychology the film explains or is interested in is the ghost, and her psychology it explains in such a roundabout way a viewer has to work to comprehend it.


If a viewer doesn't want to put that work in, she will probably still be able to enjoy The Sisters as a solid piece of contemporary Asian horror.

Past Misdeeds: Le Seuil Du Vide (1974)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.


The painter Wanda (Dominique Erlanger) flees from the rather bitter end of a love affair, chancing into renting a small, windowless, uncommonly shaped room in Paris. Her landlady warns her not to open a locked door in her room beckoning to Wanda, but the mysterious portal does of course not stay locked for long. At first the blackness of the void lurks behind it, curiously reflecting the light not in the way normal darkness should.

In an impulse between curiosity and self-destructiveness, Wanda decides to paint inside of the void. From then on, her behaviour changes rapidly. At times, it seems like the artist is becoming a different, older person altogether. She also has meetings with the not quite right elderly that might just be hallucinations of a haunted mind, and has visions which seem to hint at coming doom. Wanda may be dreaming, or she may be the victim of a magickal attack and a rather roundabout occult conspiracy.

As far as the Internet tells me, Le Seuil Du Vide's director Jean-Francois Davy was better known for his pornography (softcore? hardcore? who knows?) when this was made, but the film goes in quite a different direction than one would expect, eschewing directly exploitational elements more than many contemporary art movies did. If you're going into this hoping for breasts and blood, you will be sorely disappointed.

There is no good reason to be disappointed here, though, because Davy is not trying to go for that type of European movie of the fantastic at all. Instead, Davy works in the same realm as Jean Rollin in his less explicitly erotic moments, creating a very personal mood of the strange and the fantastic that lacks obviousness. A different director could have told the same story Davy tells as a thriller about an occult conspiracy, or as an art house film about a woman losing her grip on reality after a love affair gone bad, but Le Seuil feels divorced from these possibilities.

Davy seems to have no interest in being thrilling, or in downgrading the experiences of his audience or his heroine into the realm of the mere allegorical; he is in the business of turning his film into a world of its own, with rules that are different from those in our world, but also quite different from the rules most other movies decide to follow.

At times, the director's visual world threatens to become a little too private, a little too divorced from the idea of communicating with an audience, but is usually saved from becoming too self-indulgent in the wrong direction by Dominique Erlanger's performance. She has the slightly girlish charm French cinema (of every persuasion) is so obsessed with, yet she also manages to lead the viewer through the film's more unclear passages through an ability to stay believable as a real person in moments of greatest unreality.


Le Seuil Du Vide is a very peculiar film, deeply entrenched in very French ideas about the use of the fantastic in movies, as little interested in the narrative structures of genre cinema as a film can be while still being part of genre cinema.

Past Misdeeds: Blood Beat (1985)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.


It's Christmas time in the highly isolated wilds of rural Wisconsin. Artist Cathy (Helen Benton) and her extremely beardy boyfriend Gary (Terry Brown) are awaiting a seasonal visit by Cathy's children Dolly (Dana Day) and Ted (James Fitzgibbons).

Ted is bringing his new girlfriend Sarah (Claudia Peyton), but the hope for a friendly first meeting with the family already evaporates on the doorstep. Cathy has a habit of just staring at the poor girl without even trying for small talk and nicety that Sarah finds deeply disturbing. Why, it's as if Cathy would look right into her mind and disapprove of what she finds there!

In fact, Cathy possesses some sort of psychic powers the film defines as "the powers of good", and while the rest of the plot is going on, Cathy will have shaking fits and visions of something terrible that is going to happen.

Sarah's day doesn't get any better when Ted and family are dragging her with them to murder innocent deer. At the moment of the killing shot, Sarah throws a fit, scares the deer away, runs off screaming through the woods and right into the arms of a guy whose guts are hanging out. Must have been one of those hunting accidents.

After that bit of fun, and a visit by the police, the girl tries to sleep off a bit of stress, but only falls into a strange dream (or is it?) in which she finds a samurai armour and sword in a chest in her bedroom. She cuts herself on the sword and falls out of bed.

Soon, a blue glowing guy in samurai armour wanders through the (suddenly surprisingly populated) area and kills people, while Sarah has finely timed orgasms.

A few killings and orgasms later, the blue glowing samurai guy decides to attack the family home, but he has to go through Cathy's awesome power of shaking her glowing red hands first.

Blood Beat is a peculiar regional picture made in Wisconsin by a (as far as I understand) Frenchman named Fabrice A. Zaphiratos, but supposedly edited in Paris, France. Its structure and texture have not much to do with European horror, but are completely in tune with the obscure and weird work done during the 70s and 80s by filmmakers working in the most improbable parts of the USA.

Watching films like this is often a problematic experience for the unprepared. Their flaws are all too obvious while their charms depend on a certain state of mind in their audience, a willingness to forget standards of professional filmmaking and just enter the world of a film wide-eyed as if exploring a parallel dimension.

Zaphiratos' film doesn't make this exploration too difficult for a willing viewer. Sure, it shows its probably non-existent budget through laughable special effects and a confused and confusing script, but at least Blood Beat's wild detours off the road of logic or just simple narrative progression are already a part of what makes the film as interesting an experience as it is. The film's world is a place where the usual rules of the progression of time and space don't exist, where amateur actors are either reacting much too cold and distant to everything or are jumping into hysterics at the slightest provocation. I like to compare this peculiar type of acting so typical of local filmmaking to aliens trying to emulate human emotions without ever having experienced any for themselves.

Zaphiratos' direction is quite the thing, too. Besides providing Blood Beat with the usual distracted and obscure feel, overly slow pacing and bad sound, Zaphiratos also shows remarkable cleverness when it comes to his film's visual side. Blood Beat is full of scenes shot from skewed and slightly disturbing camera positions, sudden shifts from lingering, static shots to quick cuts and lots of camera movement. It's the work of a director pulling out all the stops he can to draw his audience into his film, without a care for the silliness of the things that are happening on screen and as far from the self-deprecation of camp as possible. There's a mood of wrongness to evoke, and this director is damn well going to evoke it.

For most of the time, Zaphiratos' technique of overloading the audience's brain with strangeness embedded in moments of boredom works fine. Blood Beat's finale however is too silly and needs too much of the non-effects to keep to the moodiness of what came before. The finale has its cheesy charms, to be sure, but it's a grating step away from the utter weirdness that came before into the realm of the merely unintentionally humorous.


But of course, one shouldn't go into a film like this expecting it to work all the time. The moments of floating nonsense are what counts here, and Blood Beat delivers quite a few of those.

Past Misdeeds: Una Rata En La Oscuridad (1979)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Two sisters are moving into a rather shabby looking old dark house. Josefina (Ana Luisa Peluffo), the older of the two, has taken the role of replacement mother for her sister Sonia (Anais de Melo), although that doesn't seem to discourage her from practicing a rather problematic kind of sisterly massage women practice. When they are not having pillow fights or pyjama parties.

As is so often the case with old dark houses, strange things begin to happen to the sisters. At first, it's just the appearance of an unnaturally persistent rat (played by an anonymous rat method actor of the highest calibre), or the shadow of a woman (Ricardo Cortes) roaming the house - the simple spooky things. Soon the strange activities begin to increase. The camera and the furniture develop an unpleasant tendency to shake, and the female shadow turns out to belong to a transvestite sneaking through the house. The sneaker being a transvestite (or a cross dresser, the film really isn’t going into details here, or anywhere) seems to be supposed to be something of a twist reserved for the film's ending, but it should be quite obvious to anyone with eyes, so I see no reason not to spoil the "surprise".

A bit later, our transvestite friend begins to grope Sonia in her sleep, which the woman enjoys quite a bit. After their night of sweet sweet copulation, Sonia doesn't want to leave her bed anymore, develops a drinking (in bed, oh no!) habit and tells Josefina that she wants to kill her. Later still, Sonia actually tries her luck at strangling her sister. But don't worry, Josefina will live and she will get some of that sweet sweet groping love too. In fact, Josefina will do her sister one better and dream of doing jazz dance during her big sex scene.

Alas, it all will have to end in tears and more flying furniture.

I don't know much about the state of Mexican horror cinema at the end of the 70s when Una Rata was made, but going by the film's rather impoverished look and the way other Mexican genre movies of the time I’ve seen worked out, it's not much of a stretch to theorize that it was in its death throes. There's an aura of shabbiness surrounding everything I find all too typical of the products of film industries which have seen better days.

Una Rata is one of only a handful of films directed by Alfredo Salazar, brother to Mexican genre film impresario Abel Salazar and writer of just about every horror or lucha movie made in Mexico not written by Fernando Oses, and on one hand, it's not much of a surprise he didn't direct too many films. Salazar's style is just a bit too dry, the pacing of his film just a bit too much on the slow side (even by the rather relaxed standards of Mexican filmmaking of this type), his talent for mood-building just a bit too skewed to the patently weird side of the tracks. On the other hand, Salazar - at least in this film - seems much more interested in making a film bound to entertain its audience than many of his contemporaries, who all too often were making strings of filler instead of movies.

Fortunately, Una Rata is heavily influenced by the wild and weird world of Italian 70s horror in just about every aspect, and I for one can't find fault with the decision to at least make a mind-blowing film when you can't make a "good" one.

The recreation of Italian horror taking place here is a highly successful one and only begins with a soundtrack of perfect mock-Goblin quality, random moments of sleazy lingering on naked female bodies and the over-heated melodramatics of the acting. The core experience of Italian-style horror does of course not lie in in minor things like the soundtrack, a bit of inappropriate nudity, or hysterics, but in a film's insistence of making no sense whatsoever.

Salazar's film is especially successful in this regard. The film doesn't answer even a single question it brings up, gives no explanation for anything that is happening and does not care a lick about character motivations. In short, the sort of viewer who complains about the (imagined) lack of explanations in the finale of Lost would probably go mad from frustration watching this like a Lovecraft character having read his family tree. Who is the transvestite? Why is he doing what he does? Is he an actual transvestite or just a guy dressing up as a woman to disguise himself for some reason? What's up with the portrait of a woman the camera and Sonia's gaze linger so lovingly on? Is the rat causing the telekinetic phenomena? Salazar and the film don't tell, and frankly, I don't think Salazar knows or cares as long as his film causes its viewers to stare in disbelief and befuddlement.


I'm quite sure Una Rata En La Oscuridad's main goal is to trap its viewers in this blessed state of perpetual confusion, and man, does it ever. 

Past Misdeeds: Nosferatu

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

I find writing about silent movies - much more so than actually watching them - exceedingly difficult. While I usually don't even flinch anymore when confronted with differences in style or filmic language, silent movies always seem to come from more than just a different time or place and to deserve a more scholarly treatment than I am capable of.

The problem is amplified even further when a film has been as heavily analysed as Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Nosferatu - Eine Symphonie des Grauens. There is probably not much to say about it that hasn't already been said. Fortunately, the nice thing about blogging is that one's personal lack of knowledge does not always need to keep one away from trying to wring out a few words about a film.

Even better - I'm not all that interested in talking facts about movies anyway, especially not about films like Nosferatu which invite one to be read as dreams rather than narratives.

This method of watching silent movies as if they were other people's dreams, forgoing the need for logic, plot and other unnecessary ballast is the best way to derive pleasure from them for me and makes it easier to watch European films of the silent era than the often slicker American ones which on paper keep much closer to our modern sensibilities.

The German filmmakers of the Weimar Republic were a very peculiar mix of the commercial filmmaker of today and the mad scientist of future movies, giving their better films a mood that I find quite close to that of other films better understood as dreams than as narratives - the European exploitation movies of much later periods. Yes, I propose to watch Murnau films as if they were made by Jess Franco.

The commercial interests of Nosferatu are obvious. Taking the basic plot of a novel like Stoker's Dracula (of course without paying the author's estate) as the base for your film is as commercially minded as anything Roger Corman ever did, although Corman would never have been so obvious about it that you could have sued him.

But I don't think that the interesting parts of Nosferatu are those close to the book. It is much more important which parts of the book Murnau and his scriptwriter Henrik Galeen chose to ignore.

I see the original Dracula as a modernization of Gothic tropes for the contemporary British audience of the 1890s and have a lot of sympathy for interpretations of Dracula as standing in for venereal disease and/or the fear of the Other. Murnau's film, though, isn't interested in syphilis or modernization of tropes at all (which doesn't mean that he has nothing to say about/to his contemporary world - that part comes automatically). On the contrary, Nosferatu is full of the medieval attacking a present that seems already too much in thrall of the past anyway. Isn't that very German of it?

For me, as someone who finds parts of it still downright terrifying, this is the point from which the film derives most of its strength: Max Schreck's Nosferatu is an ancient, ancient thing come to eat up the future and drag the present back into his past of rats and plague, not so much a corrupting influence as Dracula is, but a regressive one. Nosferatu's horror is the horror of a past that has never been laid to rest and so just keeps shambling on, smothering the young and preventing a future that's worth living.


Seen from this angle, the end of the film itself starts to look horrifying. Even though the past is laid to rest, Ellen Hutter's youth and innocence have to be sacrificed and she herself has to become something exceptionally medieval herself - a saint. And where I stand, there is nothing more horrifying than a saint when you are trying to cope with the present.

Past Misdeeds: Qurbani (1980)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.


Rajesh (Feroz Khan) leads the charmed life of a manly man Robin-Hood-like thief, a life that is more than a little sweetened by the existence of his beautiful nightclub singer girlfriend Sheela (Zeenat Aman, alas not allowed to do more than that description promises). Between random motorcycle riding and disapproving of Sheela's job (but hey, she disapproves of his job too, so they're on the same level here), there's not much that troubles him.

Until one of his jobs goes wrong and he meets his own private nemesis in the form of Inspector Amjad Khan (Amjad Khan, playing himself, but as a rather sleazy cop!?) and goes to jail for a bit.

While Rajesh is behind bars, Sheela meets single dad Amar (Vinnod Khanna), and befriends and nearly falls in love with this second hairy-chested piece of manliness, who comes with the bonus of being a widower with a highly decorative daughter. Sheela's taste in men is a little dubious, since Amar did also stand on the wrong side of the law once, working as a smuggler for Rakka (Amrish Puri), until he disagreed with his boss's personnel politic of shooting people who fail at their jobs and quit.

When Rajesh gets out of jail, he and Amar meet and fall madly in love with each other (well, the film calls it friendship, but isn't really fooling anyone).

This could be the beginning of a wonderfully progressive three person relationship with bonus child, but alas, Rajesh's jail acquaintance Vikram Singh (Shakti Kapoor) and his sister Jwala Singh (Aruna Irani and her mad contact lenses of doom) have other plans.

They really, really hate Rakka (or his afro), you see, so much so that Jwala has an illuminated portrait of the man on her living room wall next to her horse pictures.

What better method to take revenge on him could there be than to kill him and blame the deed on Rajesh whom they'll only need to rope into stealing all of Rakka's money? Rajesh isn't too enthusiastic about the whole thing - even without knowing about the scape goat part - because he has promised Sheela to give up on his wicked ways. But what is Amar's little daughter Tina (Natasha Chopra) good for if not for being kidnapped to press Rajesh into service?

Qurbani was edited, produced and directed by Bollywood's hairiest chest Feroz Khan himself and say what you will about his overly manly acting, he does handle his three other jobs very nicely indeed.

His direction shows a much finer eye for frame composition than was typical for some of Hindi cinema at the time, as well as a love for weird camera angles, and a more than a little dubious sense of fashion without ever overdoing it and getting so crazy as to be eyesight-destroying.

The obligatory musical numbers by Kalyanji Anandji are mostly Bollywood standard, not as mad as they sometimes get, but extremely useful to strengthen the emotional underpinnings of the film and delight its viewers with the lesser of Zeenat Aman's talents.

It has to be said that super macho Feroz Khan was an equal opportunity cheesecake director, and so friends of hairy, sweaty manliness will have their own moments of joy here.

Of course the film features the typically enthusiastic and slightly insane fight choreography of its time and place, with lots of jumping and kicking, a serious amount of back flipping and a friendly disinterest in physics or the way human anatomy functions. All of that is of course a good thing if you're like me and like your action scenes entertaining instead of realistic.

The whole film has a very fine flow to it that even the usual annoying scenes of comic relief (Jagdeep in the house, why does nobody burn it down?) can't disturb too much.

The plot consists of a merry randomness of incidents which are less bound by logic than by Qurbani's thematic core of male friendship and sacrifice (as the title promises). Somehow, Khan manages to tie up his plot threads satisfyingly enough to come to a tight and exciting finale and a surprisingly poignant ending that shows a spiritual connection to the brand of epics of manly friendship people like Cheng Cheh or John Woo traded in in Hong Kong.
Now, all this might sound like a million other action melodramas, and Qurbani is most certainly never original in the things it does, but the trick lies, as it often does, in the film's flawless execution of its tropes, and in the sure hand Khan shows in deciding when to use them.


There is something deeply satisfying about a film like Qurbani that knows which buttons a genre film has to push and then pushes them expertly and incessantly with a sort of relish that stops just shy of decadence.