Three Films Make A Post: It'll never let you go

1917 (2019): As a technical feat, and an example of visually extremely beautiful filmmaking this war movie taking place in World War I, shot in two long shots, is an incredible achievement, deserving all the copycats of its tech that’ll surely follow. It’s a film I found myself appreciating on the level of craft a great deal. However, I believe it is exactly this focus – I’m tempted to say fixation - on the technical that makes the film lose emotional impact for me, the humanity it is trying to speak of buried under layers of prettiness and technical chops until it can hardly move. No character in the film has an actual personality, but then, director Sam Mendes’s structural decisions make personalities pretty unimportant, what with no interaction between characters ever having any impact later on in the movie; a swelling score alone is not enough to make me care. Philosophically, we do learn that war is indeed hell, but the why and the how seem to interest Mendes as little as treating his characters as anything beyond ciphers with suffering facial expressions.

Shelter Island (2003): Despite a couple of pleasantly weird details – the film’s protagonist played by Ally Sheedy is a pro golfer turned motivational speaker for example – Geoffrey Schaaf’s thriller about the plot a million late night TV thrillers followed in the decade before, is about as bland as they come. Not clever enough to do anything interesting with the slight variations in its set-up, not sleazy enough to tickle the exploitation bone, and as obvious as “twisty” thrillers come, this one’s about as interesting as watching a middle-aged guy fall asleep watching it. It’s pretty short, though.

The Man with the Magic Box aka Czlowiek z magicznym pudelkiem (2017): But let’s end this on a high note, with this weird (in all the best ways) Polish movie by Bodo Kox concerning a dystopian society that feels like a culturally Polish variation of the kind of society Terry Gilliam would be into making a movie about, psychic time travel, and love across class divides. It’s full of brilliant little ideas realized with the kind of verve that’s usually the result of a fecund imagination coming to life, driven by a weirdness that has its own internal logic, and shows a view of life that’s like an Eastern European shrug that can hardly disguise an honest romanticism.


It’s also really beautiful to look at, Kox turning found locations into organic parts of a strange near future (and the strange land known as the past), while leads Olga Boladz and Piotr Polak breathe human life into characters other films would treat as abstract ideas.

Full Eclipse (1993)

Max Dire (Mario Van Peebles) doesn’t just possess a quintessential US action hero name, he’s also a cop who likes to use two automatics at once while doing the traditional action movie hero lunge that usually ends in a belly flop. Even more typical, Max’s partner is too old for this shit, and reads his wedding vows to his partner in his first scene, before suggesting they wait for backup while confronted with a hostage situation. Obviously, partner guy gets himself shot when Max decides not to wait for backup, causing some choice screaming of “noooooooooooo” from our hero, as well as slow motion shoot-diving.

In a pretty funny subversion of genre expectations, the partner survives. He does end up in a coma, though. However, while Max is off annoying his and his wife’s obviously long-suffering marriage guidance counsellor by being a bit of a twat, some mysterious mystery man mysteriously sneaks into partner dude’s hospital room and injects him with some mysterious fluids. Before you can say “mysterious, sir!”, Max’s partner is better than ever, getting back to duty in what looks like about a day (after having been shot in the chest four times). There’s something not quite right with him anymore, though. Whenever he is own screen, there are growly noises on the soundtrack; he is rude to donut sellers; and when it comes to law enforcement, he acquires a style even his action movie cop partner Max finds too much, correctly describing him as “Dirty Harry on crack”. But no matter, for a couple of scenes later, partner dude walks into a bar full of cops to commit suicide in full view of his loving partner. Oh well, movie over.

But wait, there’s much, much more, for Max is soon contacted by police psychologist Adam Garou (Bruce Payne), clearly the king of subtlety. Apart from his day job, Garou turns out to be the head of a secret police kill squad who “keeps the streets clean” by murdering arms and drug dealers, theirs wives and probably their baristas too. Garou’s “pack” does this not in the old-fashioned manner of just brutally gunning their victims down while holding self-justifying speeches. Instead, they shoot up a mysterious fluid, turn into the kind of people who kill with fang and claw, and clearly have a lot of fun doing it. Garou really, really wants Max on his team, but our hero is made of somewhat sterner stuff and declines. Why, he even tries (if not terribly hard) to sic his boss on the pack, which of course leads nowhere.

Perhaps an offer he can’t refuse of extramarital doggy style sex from Garou’s pack member Casey (Patsy Kensit) will convince Max to join?

Before Game of Thrones was even a twinkle in the eye of George R.R. Martin, when the three little letters “HBO” more often than not suggested softcore porn thrillers, this happened. As the plot of the first fifty minutes or so suggests, “this” means a wonderfully insane pairing of every US action movie cliché ever with a bizarre werewolf tale directed by good old Anthony Hickox who clearly enjoys working on a TV horror movie that looks as if it had a better budget than most contemporary direct-to-DVD action films, and suffers from none of the restrictions of network TV when it comes to sex, violence, and Van Peebles.

If you’re going into this thing looking for depth, clever ideas, and what we call “good writing”, you should probably avoid this at all costs, even though the film’s use of the old “walking dead partner” is at least a bit clever. This one’s all about explosions, slow motion, dubious sexiness, Mario Van Peebles in ripped outfits, and hilarious werewolfery, packing as much awesome nonsense into a bit more than ninety minutes as possible. Judged on that ambition, Full Eclipse is a huge success, full of details that are stupid fun at its most bizarre. For example, what’s the mystery fluid that makes werewolves? Garou’s brain fluid, of course!

Also on board for your delectation are crap werewolf make-up - later on heightened to a werewolf costume that looks more like a bear costume - clear attempts at getting at some of that Wolverine fandom, a master plan that makes no sense whatsoever, gratuitous nudity, hilarious (or was that “steamy”?) sex, and one batshit insane thing a minute. All this is directed by Hickox with verve, style and as much cheese as he could pack in, which, given Hickox particular set of talents as a director, is a lot.


The only thing about Full Eclipse I did not find enjoyable is a rape scene that’s just too unpleasant to belong in a film quite this silly.

Three Films Make A Post: It's diabolical! It's daring! It stalks, it cuts, it rips!

Debug (2014): Call me conceited, but I always get a bad feeling when a movie is written and directed by somebody who is mostly working as an actor, despite there being clear and rather fantastic exceptions to the rule that actors can’t write and direct for shit unless they bring a ghost writer/director or two. David Hewlitt’s Debug is not going to change my mind on the matter either, for while the film’s technically competent on the direction side, it’s also a text book example of a film that makes the wrong choices for mood, characters and everything else with every single edit.

And that’s before I’ve even come to the atrocious script, a kind of lite version of the lovely but already not exactly intellectually brilliant Event Horizon. The script doesn’t know how or when to exposit effectively, how to build up to its supposed scenes of suspense or fright, and instead just lets things happen without seeming to have any control over its own narrative. The characters are one-dimensional and – despite a decent cast – uninteresting, and the dialogue’s just embarrassing, with no single line that sounds as if an actual human being would speak it, nor one that at least sounds cool. I thought I’d be so easy to please with SF/horror that no film in the small sub-genre could manage to not entertain me at least a little, but this thing’s beyond any hope.

Timebomb (1991): This action film with conspiracy thriller elements by Avi Nesher featuring good old Michael Biehn and Patsy Kensit as the least believable (and impressively stupid) psychiatrist imaginable on the other hand did entertain me quite a bit. The script doesn’t exactly hold up to scrutiny (but then it’s not paced to be scrutinized, really) but Nesher’s a consistent director with a decent eye for keeping things rolling, there’s some entertaining nonsense about brainwashing, and the cast (also including a ranting Richard Jordan, a completely wasted in a non-role Robert Culp, our old friend Billy Blanks and Tracy Scoggins) is getting into it with a degree of enthusiasm.

There are even one or two scenes – the shoot-out in the porn cinema in particular – that are as good as US low budget action gets, and given these scenes aren’t in a film that bored me before them, this is a minor for me.

Eden Lodge (2015): Despite marketing material that makes Andreas Prodromou’s film look like a British version of slasher, torture porn and backwoods cannibal flicks, this is actually much more in the tradition of 70s British thrillers, with some bits and pieces of the more hip genres stitched onto the proceedings (one suspects for better saleability). Unfortunately, it’s not a very gripping entry in any of its genres, with not terribly much happening in it that’s actually very thrilling at all, the psychological suspense never really arriving, and a hesitant air to the proceedings.

The film is pretty to look at though, and, as it so often goes with films that leave me absolutely cold, clearly made by basically competent filmmakers making a basically competent film without anything in it you’ll remember a day later, and not much more you’ll actually be interested by while watching it.

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,american movies,british movies,in short,sf,horror,action,david hewlett,avi nesher,michael biehn,patsy kensit,andreas prodromou

In short: Bad Karma (2002)

Mental patient Maureen Hatcher (Patsy Kensit), violently breaks out of her cosy little hospital to finally get the opportunity for a decent get-together with her psychiatrist Dr Trey Campbell (Patrick Muldoon). You see, ever since she was kidnapped and tortured by a guy who thought he was the reincarnation of a victim of Jack the Ripper, Maureen has been convinced she is the reincarnation of Jack’s girlfriend and partner Agnes. And Trey for his part is of course supposed to be the unwitting reincarnation of Jack himself.

So off Maureen goes to the island where Trey and his family (Amy Locane and Aimee O’Sullivan) are on vacation to do a bit of psycho killing and family threatening to awaken the spirit of her beloved.

Now if you think all this does sound rather stupid, you really haven’t seen veteran director John Hough’s embarrassing presentation. It’s Hough’s final movie, and one can’t help but think it would have been less cosmically horrifying if the poor guy could have ended on a slightly less crappy note, like an episode of a soap opera or something. As the film stands, Hough – a man whose films I disliked more often than not but who clearly had all the basic competences of a filmmaker – directs the thing like a particularly bad TV movie, with no suggestion of a sense of atmosphere, going through the usual motions of the serial killer thriller without conviction or interest, adding some mild and boring sleaze to it while this long-suffering viewer can barely keep his eyes open. Not that there is much to see, mind you.

Hough’s non-efforts are further dragged into nothingness by a particularly stupid script with dialogue which finds that difficult to reach place where the insipid meets puffed up self-importance.

The only good thing about this is Patsy Kensit’s performance (how often do you expect to read that sentence anywhere?). Kensit is cheesing it up quite enthusiastically, making absurd crazy-faces, and putting extra emphasis on the most stupid parts of the dialogue, excellently wallowing in all that is wrong with the movie. Too bad the rest of the cast is so wooden and drab, because if they had been playing up the absurdity of the affair this much, too, Bad Karma might still have become an entertaining bit of nonsense, instead of the boring bit of nonsense it turned out to be.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,thriller,john hough,patsy kensit,patrick muldoon,amy locane