In short: Hennessy (1975)

Belfast in the mid-70s. Despite a certain amount of IRA connections, Niall Hennessy (Rod Steiger) has sworn off all violence for whatever Cause. This changes when his wife and daughter are shot – not exactly on purpose - by a panicked British soldier (who is afterwards promptly killed by an IRA sniper) during a minor riot that goes catastrophically wrong.

Before his family is even buried, Hennessy takes off to London – the promised killing of the whole British squad involved by his former IRA buddies isn’t quite enough for him, it seems. Instead, Hennessy’s planning to blow up the British parliament on opening day, timed to kill every MP, the House of Lords, the Queen and most of the rest of the Royal Family. That’s not a plan the IRA would reasonably underwrite, so Hennessy is soon hunted by his former best friend Sean Tobin (Eric Porter) as well as equally damaged Special Branch Inspector Hollis (Richard Johnson).

Don Sharp’s mid-70s thriller is – not unexpectedly – quite a good film that does some rather interesting things, most of them well. Particularly striking is the horrible awkwardness of the violence in it, the death of Hennessy’s family setting up the style in which the film portrays violence as something that – once put in motion – tends to escalate to the point of catastrophe, something that would be funny if it didn’t leave so many dead bodies; the idea of controlled violence committed by professionals leading to computable results contemporary action cinema loves a little too much is completely alien to the film. Here, things escalate, people make mistakes, and innocents have to die for them, until mass murder doesn’t feel so much like a choice anyone makes but as something they just happen to commit because that’s what using violence to solve any conflict in the end will lead to.

Sharp isn’t much for Peckinpah-style slow motion blood baths in his portrayal of bloodshed; the tone of the violence here is much more matter of fact, lending everything that happens a – quite horrible – kind of logic. Generally, Sharp goes for the gritty and unsentimental style you’d expect from this kind of thriller shot in 1975, and doing the expectedly good job with it.

The director also somehow manages to reign in Rod Steiger’s love for scenery-chewing, dragging a quieter and more effective performance out of him whose only flaw is the bad Irish accent. But then, the film is full of those – just listen to what Lee Remick does -so I won’t blame Steiger too much.

Island of the Fishmen (1979)

aka Screamers

Original title: L’isola degli uomini pesce

Prison ship physician Lt. Claude de Ross (Claudio Cassinelli) finds himself in the unfortunate situation of being adrift in a skiff on the open sea with a boatful of prisoners he rescued when the ship they were all on went under. Things don’t improve when the gang crashes on a mysterious island, for the local fish person population soon kills off most everyone except for the Lieutenant and two of the prisoners.

At least the island is not completely unpopulated of people (probably) not from Innsmouth: the trio soon encounter Amanda (Barbara Bach) who warns them off and basically tells them to shoo back to sea; curiously, that’s not an offer Claude takes. Instead, the stranded follow Amanda to the nice little mansion where she lives under the thumb of sadist prick Edmond Rackham (Richard Johnson), a voodoo priestess maid (Beryl Cunningham), and a handful of “natives”. Edmond clearly has plans for his unexpected guests, though it takes a bit for him to go beyond saying every sentence he speaks with improbable sarcasm (there’s not a single word the dubbing actor says that isn’t surrounded by invisible air quotes of doom).

Let’s just say the man’s plans have something to do with the fish people, the mad scientist (a terribly sick looking Joseph Cotten playing a terribly sick man) he hides in his house and who spends most of his time spying through peepholes, the lost race of Atlantis, and so on, and so forth.

I am a great admirer of Island of the Fishmen’s director Sergio Martino’s giallos. However, his work in other genres wasn’t always as fine, with films whose quality was all over the place. Island is very much all over the place, too. At its core, it’s a somewhat Vernesian adventure movie often pretending to be a horror film that follows the old rules of one damn thing after another plotting, and contains nary a second that makes any damn sense at all. I, at least, did have a hard time understanding what Edmond’s plans were actually supposed to be, why he does what he does, and other completely unimportant questions.

But hey, the film does feature the fish people its title promises rather extensively, as well as the obligatory scenes of our wetly clad (clearly, Martino did his best to get around Bach’s no nudity clause in a Bollywood approved way) heroine having a good time with them. There are completely useless (and mildly offensive, as are all the non-white characters, though you gotta admit the white people here are generally pretty offensive too) voodoo rituals, lots of shouting and running around by everyone, an explosion or two, a mad science villain speech each for Johnson and Cotten, as well as a pretty crazy soundtrack, and an English dub that sounds as if we’re listening to a first run through with especially bad accents (Johnson’s voice can only be heard but not described, unless nasal to the degree of cosmic terror counts, while Cassinelli dubs himself as a Frenchman with a heavy Italian accent). And fish people. In other words, I find it pretty damn difficult to find a bad word to say about the film, even though Martino’s direction is uncommonly bland for the third-most stylish giallo auteur, the plotting is, well, not actually plotting, and there’s not a single sensible idea in the movie.

Well, I’ll just admit it, this is exactly as awesome as it sounds.

In short: Danger Route (1967)

Jonas Wilde (Richard Johnson) is working as a killer for one of the British secret services; as it goes with jobs like this, he’s gotten sick and tired of it, particularly since he’s acquired Jocelyn (Carol Lynley) as the kind of girlfriend that makes a man think of retiring. Also, not killing people for money anymore.

However, shortly after his latest job and before he can do anything about his retirement plans, Wilde is called in for an emergency assassination on British soil. The Americans have gotten hold of an Eastern defector, but Wilde’s superiors are convinced the man is in fact a double agent who will do incalculable damage if he’s not “gotten rid of”. The job doesn’t sit quite right with Wilde, particularly when curious things start to happen around the new job. His contact Ravenspur (Maurice Denham) suddenly grows a niece (Barbara Bouchet) who just happens to be in the game too, and Wilde can’t shake the idea the defector isn’t the only one who is to be gotten rid of.

He’s quite right, too, and that’s not even the worst thing Wilde will learn in the next few days. Well, at least he’s tough and unpleasant enough to have a chance for survival.

Most of us know Amicus as purveyors of horror anthology pictures, but of course the company did work in other genres too, like the mid-level realist spy movie Danger Route. The film is neither as kooky as your typical Eurospy movie or James Bond film nor as complex and dark as Le Carré style espionage films but moves on that middle ground where the spy work is relatively down to Earth yet not quite enough so to be believable as naturalistic.

On a philosophical level, the film prefers a somewhat tired bitterness and a very general feeling of disgust, a disgust that is in large part shared by its hero, who is disgusted by the things he does for a living (and once for Queen and Country), disgusted by how good he is at them, clearly disgusted too at the way he uses people like Diana Dors’s (fittingly sadly played) lonely alcoholic housekeeper, and certainly disgusted by the duplicity of everyone around him. Johnson expresses this disgust with deeply tired look and the facial expression of a man who really can’t smile at himself in the mirror anymore. The way Johnson plays him, it’s quite clear that Wilde expects the betrayals he is going to suffer during the course of the movie as the logical consequence of all the betrayals he has committed – and continues to commit - himself. In what feels like a twist of bitter irony, the only times Wilde really seems to be without doubts is when he commits the violent acts he has begun to abhor.

Seth Holt (a director with a bit of spy experience via the TV show Danger Man) films this bitter little piece without any grand gestures, concentrating on the performances of his lead and a bunch of fine supporting actors, giving everything the appropriate leanness as well as providing moments of effectively unpleasant violence that turn Danger Route into something of a lost gem of the espionage genre.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,spies,seth holt,richard johnson,carol lynley,barbara bouchet,gordon jackson,diana dors

The Night Child (1975)

Original title: Il medaglione insanguinato

Little Emily Williams (Italian horror's favourite red-headed child Nicoletta Elmi) hasn't been quite alright since her mother died in a mysterious burning incident. Although Emily's father, BBC documentarian Michael (Richard Johnson), and her nanny Jill Perkins (Evelyn Stewart) are doing their best to keep her safe and sane, the girl is still plagued by horrible nightmares and suffers from fits the family doctor diagnoses as "mental breakdowns". Emily has another one of those just before her Dad is supposed to travel to Italy for a documentary about paintings of the devil. Following a recommendation of said genius doctor, Michael takes Emily and Jill with him to Italy.

There, very strange things begin to happen. Emily's nightmares turn into daytime visions of herself - or a girl looking like herself - fleeing from badly made-up medieval peasants in full-on angry mob mode. It's a scene right out of a mysterious painting also containing a burning woman falling to her death just like Emily's mum did that her father has become fascinated with. The girl sometimes acts as if she were not herself, suddenly playing piano much better than she should be able to, or doing some of that "devil child" shtick. An amulet that belonged to the Emily's mother seems to have a strange influence on her, as if someone else would take possession of the girl's body sometimes. Might the amulet and the painting have something to do with each other?

The owner of the painting, Contessa Cappelli (Lila Kedrova), who fancies herself as something of a medium, utters dire warnings, at least.

Emily's mental health surely doesn't improve when Daddy falls for his local production assistant, Joanna Morgan (Joanna Cassidy), and it seems only to be a question of time until something violent will happen. When it does, it doesn't exactly hit the first person you'd have expected.

Massimo Dallamano's The Night Child is a bit of a problem child itself. While about half of the film shows Dallamano's great abilities at putting thematic weight behind the pictures of his film and making them beautiful at the same time, the film's other half is visually peculiarly bland and generic, even insecure, as if half the film had been directed by someone on the level of, well, Sergio Martino at his best, but the other half by Sergio Bland. For every brilliantly composed scene that uses real locations to conjure up a sense of the unreal and shows the film's setting in Italy as a place where the irrational and the supernatural seem perfectly natural, there's another scene done in the blandest of point and shoot styles to drag the film's elevated mood down again. The Night Child permanently wavers between a highly stylized aesthetic and the careless shrugging of a directing hack-job, never settling down into a mood or tone, therefore never becoming as immersive and dream-like as it would need to be to actually work. Then there are special effects so miserably bad even I am not able and willing to look beyond them.

The same puzzling schizophrenia also is at work in the film's script. There are some highly clever touches in the way Dallamano presents the past and the present mirroring each other, some moments of psychology that ring absolutely true, but there's also just as much useless back and forth - especially between Johnson and Cassidy - that does not have much of a function besides making the film longer. I'm quite used to European horror films of this era having pacing problems, or being uneven in tone, but The Night Child suffers much more from these problems than its peers, because it not only lacks focus, but also seems unsure what it wants to be about. There's a fantastic film about a very ill girl unable to cope with reality in there, and about a past that resonates so strongly with the present that the present can't help but take on its form, but watching The Night Child, I'm unsure if Dallamano wanted to make that film.

I'm pretty sure he didn't tell his actors either way: Johnson and Cassidy come over as just terribly bland (yes, that word again), unable to carry their part of the movie. This is especially problematic in Johnson's case because it would have been his job to help make Nicoletta Elmi's performance look better. Visually, the girl is quite right for her role, but her acting is as mawkish and fake as you'd expect from a child actor who's mostly left to cope for herself by her co-actors; although it has to be said that the scenes between Stewart and her are generally a bit better. Stewart and Lila Kedrova are the only two actors on screen (and I don't blame Elmi, she was after all only ten years old) who really seem interested in what they're doing.

Of course, given the parts of it that are beautiful and clever, The Night Child is far from being a bad film; it just feels like a failed effort at achieving something.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,horror,reviews,richard johnson,joanna cassidy,evelyn stewart,lila kedrova,massimo dallamano