Double Tap (1997)

Undercover FBI agent Katherine Hanson (Heather Locklear) has been building a huge case against various drug lords by posing as the provider of an effective money laundering service. Apart from her falling apart psychologically – which the movies tell me is perfectly normal in her job – things go well until a mysterious killer we will later learn is called Cypher (Stephen Rea) disturbs one of her business meetings by killing her two customers; though not her, for some mysterious reason.

Cypher apparently has a habit of coming to various US cities to murder the drug lords there and go back on his merry way afterwards like a screwed-up western hero; the man’s got a bit of Punisher thing going on. Unlike Frank Castle, he’s not against letting himself be paid for his murder sprees by shady intelligence people or gangsters, mind you. For reasons, Cypher also likes to talk about proper lawn care etiquette a lot, which does add some educational value to proceedings.

Hanson clearly feels drawn to the guy and his methods, maybe his gardening tips, but she’s also rather miffed he’s getting between her and her job. Obviously, an eventual team up and affair is a given.

Greg Yaitanes’s Double Tap may very well be the most late-90s near-DTV kinda-action, kinda-crime movie imaginable. It’s stylish to a fault, though not all of its style seems to be so much thought through as a means to express something – even if “something” is only a mood – but vomited out by the collective subconscious of its genre and its time, Jungian psychology finally made film.

So expect a movie consisting nearly exclusively of woozy indoor shots, or light-pollution sky-less night shots. Most rooms seem to suffer under the sort of ventilation that leaves the air sticky and nearly foggy, also orange; editing and camera work is erratic and often slow, never shooting any character interaction straight when it can make performances look vague instead of precise; most of the action sequences manage to be unparsable foggy messes without Yaitanes needing to go the Michael Bay route of random fast editing. Here, confusion comes more naturally and organically, like a well fumigated lawn, one supposes.

The dialogue is a mix of cop movie clichés, non-sequiturs, and utterly bizarre speeches with an emphasis on peculiar similes. There is, for example, talk by the big bad of filling a nunnery turned warehouse (all sets look like the same warehouse anyway) with nuns again so that Cypher hasn’t got a prayer, or something equally bizarre. And lawn metaphors, of course.

At the same time, the cast treats the whole thing with utmost seriousness – if you ignore Rea’s attempt at an American accent that can only be meant as a weird joke – going through the plot as if it were just perfectly sensible and in need of proper acting. We can only salute them for that.

If all of this sounds as if I wouldn’t recommend Double Tap, nothing could be further from the truth: while it’s certainly not a good film in the normal person sense of the term, its mood of wooziness and general bizarrerie combined with the pretence of being a completely normal bit of genre filmmaking is absolutely irresistible to me. All the elements that might be meant to come together as a standard genre movie of the slick and stylish persuasion come together into a whole that’s hypnotically strange and individual. Which is all anybody can ask of a movie.

Three Films Make A Post: More frightening than Frankenstein! More dreaded than Dracula!

The Last Thing Mary Saw (2021): If you want to know how not to make historical slow horror, this film written and directed by Edoardo Vitaletti should be a great teaching tool. It steps into all of the traps this sort of film can find its way in, starting with the belief that if you want to portray a period and society that’s all drab and dreary, your film needs to be drab and dreary too, and ending on pacing that’s leaden for no good reason whatsoever.

The film also never manages to bring its all too obvious thesis of “historical oppression of women and homosexuality by men was bad and killed the women struggling against it” to actual human life, never letting its concept become an actual story about actual people. It’s too concerned with hokey would-be authentic dialogue, lots of whispering, drab and dreary candle light like Barry Lyndon gone ridiculous to find anything genuinely human. And if all it has to say can be summarized in one easy sentence, what’s the point?

Trojan Eddie (1996): Whereas this Irish crime movie and very dark comedy by Gillies MacKinnon is all about things genuinely human. So it seeks and finds some kind of living spark even in the most oppressive idiots, and can be sympathetic without becoming bathetic. It is often very funny in the bleakly Irish style and very sad at the same time, never shying away from the brutality and pettiness of even its more sympathetic characters; yet it also never treats these as the only things they are. A cast full of people like Stephen Rea and Richard Harris certainly helps there, too.

In direct – and perfectly unfitting – comparison between this and Vitaletti’s movie, I can absolutely believe this film’s Ireland of the mid 90s as a place and time populated by actual human beings, where Mary’s is one in dire need of being fleshed out and taken beyond simplistic ideas about the past and the way people lived in it.

Shiva Baby (2020): Speaking of black comedies that are utterly sympathetic towards their characters even when they are treating them rather rudely and making them the butt of the joke, Emma Seligman’s tale of a shiva going very unpleasantly indeed for young Danielle (Rachel Sennott), what with all the lies she tells others about her life collapsing around her ears in public, is simply a fantastic film.

It is sharp, observant and often cutting without ever becoming cruel, using specificity of time, place and characters in a way that can’t help but produce insight even in viewers not sharing them. Seligman’s a very precise and visually interesting filmmaker, using camerawork and blocking as tellingly and elegantly as a great martial arts film/musical.

Still Crazy (1998)

Tony Costello (Stephen Rea) the keyboarder and sane member of 70s also-ran, nearly great rock band “Strange Fruit”, the kind of band that never quite “made” it, tries to get the old gang back together. It’s easy enough roping their old manager, greatest fan and emotional and professional anchor - also the actual protagonist of the movie - Karen Knowles (Juliet Aubrey) back in again, for the “normal” life clearly bores her shitless by now, but it will take some doing to get the rest of the guys in. They aren’t exactly the best of friends, after all. There is the lure of never fulfilled dreams though. Sure, bass player Les (Jimmy Nail) has managed to build a half-way successful roofing business but where’s the fun in that? And drummer Beano (Timothy Spall) – well, he’s a drummer. The toughest nut to crack will be singer Ray (Bill Nighy). Ray, you see, was only ever the replacement for their first singer - the brother of their now vanished guitar player – who died of a drug overdose, and even apart from that, nobody really liked him, seeing as he is a bit of a pretentious twat. On the positive side, his huge-ass mansion is for sale, so a successful reunion tour just might be exactly what he needs. Of course, even if Karen and Tony will manage to get the band back together, touring life might just break them up again.

Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy is a rather lovely film that uses a lot of well-worn rock and music movie tropes and clichés to talk about what it means to grow older when one hasn’t quite got rid of or perhaps never even wanted to get rid of, those pesky dreams. In the process, the film is at once making fun of many a myth of rock (and 70s rock in particular) and very much showing itself to be in love with these myths.

This seems only fitting for a film whose tone fluctuates between comedy and bittersweet drama, and which will repeatedly show the sad parts of a character it makes the butt of a joke often enough. The director mostly manages to do right by both sides of his film, too, making fun of his characters from a position of understanding and probably even love. I’ve never been fond of comedy that’s based on hatred and superiority towards one’s characters, so this sort of approach resonates well with me. It also presents a more complex view of humanity than you’d expect of a film that does after all end on exactly the sort of all-including and forgiving rock number on stage you’d imagine it to end on. Sometimes, the film clearly believes, you’re the joke, and sometimes you’re the one telling it, and sometimes you’re the asshole without even noticing, and nobody is perfect. Which may not be deep insights, but still deeper ones than those quite a few of us seem to live by.

The film’s also frequently as hilarious as it is supposed to be, thanks to a cast that’s highly capable of the dramatic parts of the film but also joyfully jumping into the moments of greatest silliness. So if you ever wanted to see Stephen Rea look for his nest egg, a tooth Jimi Hendrix lost in a bar fight, this film is for you. Best in class here, it has to be said, is Bill Nighy as Ray, on stage going through an inspired cross of the performance habits of Robert Plant and Ozzy Osbourne (with a bit of early Peter Gabriel thrown in when he’s in a particularly troublesome mood), and off stage portraying him as a guy trying to hide his very thin hide and his lack of confidence behind a mix of prickliness and pretentiousness, all the while keeping the man weirdly likeable for someone who should be all rights be completely insufferable.


As I said, it’s all rather lovely.

Citizen X (1995)

The early 80s in Soviet Russia. Policemen stumble upon a number of corpses in the woods. Most of the dead are children and teenagers, who have been stabbed, mutilated and raped before and after death. Nobody seems to care too much, but newly appointed forensics scientist Viktor Burakov doesn’t just care, he is convinced these are the victims of a serial killer (Jeffrey DeMunn) who picks out his victims from the young and the destitute in railway stations. He is even be able to convince his direct superior, Colonel Fetisov (Donald Sutherland) of the truth of his conclusion, so Fetisov makes Burakov an actual policeman and gives the case to him. However, this being the Soviet bureaucracy in its worst phase, Fetisov has other bureaucrats to appease. It doesn’t help that Burakov has somehow managed not to learn some basic techniques of survival, like never saying what one truly thinks to hard-line bureaucrats, so he early on actively antagonizes exactly the sort of people who’ll go out of their way to put stones in his way for the next decade, a mounting pile of bodies be damned.

Then there’s the little problem that serial killers are obviously a product of the decadent Western lifestyle and just don’t exist in the USSR, so there’s no infrastructure at all to deal with a case like this, even if the bureaucracy were able to accept it. Instead, Burakov is ordered to round up “known homosexuals” and has to listen to complaints about investigating party members in good standing. Despite a heavy psychological and personal toll, the hatred of his superiors except Fetisov - who increasingly becomes his ally and friend - and little resources, Burakov keeps on the case over years, until the dawning of perestroika makes it possible for him to take steps that can lead to the apprehension of the killer.

(Freely) based on the actual case of the serial killer Andrei Chikatilo and the men who tried to catch him, Chris Gerolmo’s HBO TV movie is an exceptional film. Well, except for the absurd – and given the high standards of the rest of the production patently ridiculous – decision to have the actors play their roles with fake Russian accents, the sort of thing that’s okay – yet still stupid – in a pulp fantasy context but that’s tonally completely out of whack with a film like this.

For the film plays out as a dark, earnest, character-based police procedural without action scenes and little on-screen violence, with the wrinkle that in its historical context, quite a bit of the procedural aspect is political in nature and concerned with Burakov’s first surprised, then angry and later depressed attempts to get the Soviet bureaucracy to see reason, something no bureaucracy tends to be well equipped for at the best of times and in the best of places – and the USSR in the 80s certainly was not the best of much. Through Burakov’s eyes, the film paints a picture of the USSR of the time as a place of quiet desperation where the greyness of the surroundings seems to wash into the minds of people who mostly seem beaten and bruised far before the end of the Soviet Union, living as they do in a country that seems a lot like a corpse that just hasn’t realized it is dead. Obviously, this isn’t a phenomenon exclusive to a specific time and place, and it is therefor not difficult at all to also apply the film’s view to other times and places – and not just under strictly totalitarian systems – where a culture of not seeing, not speaking, and scapegoating dominates; not always as obviously and heavily as in the film, but “not as bad as a utopian dream gone bad” isn’t much of a compliment.

However, despite its bleak portrayal of Soviet life, Citizen X isn’t a hopeless film. It also shows how Burakov’s tenacity and passion (and how Communist is the idea of this guy spending his whole life to improve that of his community?) slowly burns through Fetisov’s detached cynicism and turns that effective functionary into a human being again; and in the end, it also shows them catching Chikatilo.

Its treatment of Chikatilo – with whom we spend a few scenes from time to time during the investigation – is very typical of the film. Instead of going through melodramatic contortions and portraying him as a monster with the usual eye-rolling and “quid pro quo, Clarice”-ing, the film and DeMunn characterize him in a much more disturbing way: as a small, sad, pathetic man committing monstrous acts for reasons he clearly can’t fully comprehend, inadvertently enabled by a time and place that can’t even find enough passion to care about dozens of murdered children.


The acting is generally excellent, with half a dozen brilliant performances, all lacking in showiness yet full of nuance and a feeling of human veracity so strong, after twenty minutes or so I didn’t even hear the stupid accents anymore because I was too engrossed in what the characters were saying, what they could only express through their body languages, and why.

In short: Werewolf: The Beast Among Us (2012)

Some time in the 19th (I think) Century in backlot Europe (quite fittingly embodied by Romania, still the Mecca of direct to video films) with the typical mix of confusing accents and dubious historicity, with the Universal logo at the beginning of the film sort of making it a canonical of Universal Horror Backlot Europe (or the UHBE, as we call it). It’s a place where people can say sentences like “this is no common werewolf” and make sense, because werewolves and wurdulaks are real there.

As real as, fortunately, a merry band of monster hunting mercenaries - among them Ed Quinn, Ana Ularu and Florin Piersic Jr., or the cowboy, the woman with the crossbow and a flame thrower for burning monster corpses, and the guy who puts in silver fangs to fight werewolves, respectively.

A small village needs their help quite particularly, for an especially nasty example of werewolf kind is eating its way through the population. Why, it doesn’t even need the full moon to kill! The local doctor (Stephen Rea) and his young assistant - and our viewpoint character - Daniel (Guy Wilson) can’t do more than get rid of the corpses and shoot everybody in the head who was bitten, so more professional help is badly needed. However, things will get much more complicated.

For a Louis Morneau film, Werewolf is nearly glacially paced, with about forty minutes going by before the plot starts to get interesting. That’s the nature of the beast with the 2010s’ type of direct to video fodder, of course, but it’s a bit of a shame when the problems of the form infect directors who can do much better.

This isn’t to say this is not at least a somewhat worthwhile movie: its worldbuilding of backlot Europe is actually pretty great (or at least, the effort put into thinking about it as a place with its own rules the script makes is), as is the cornucopia of silly details like the flame thrower, the fact the world contains monster hunting mercenaries, as well as the increasingly baroque additions to that world the film continues to make (some of which are too spoilerish to mention here). Plus, once the film does get going, its plot becomes actually interesting, the film adding stray bits of gothic romance, mystery, and some not half-bad ideas of its own, making the film more complicated, more interesting and even a bit original. At least I haven’t seen its elements together in this form before, and that counts for much in my eyes.

Once the sudden acceleration starts, it becomes more of a Morneau film too, with the by now expected (and in this case rather sudden) fast pacing, the sure hand in directing action and suspense, and a sense of concentration that still works in a film like this that likes to just pile on the silly details and let god – or the audience – sort things out. It’s entertaining enough, and while I’m sure Morneau could have done more with a mildly (that guy’s never been a blockbuster director) higher budget, what he did with this one is entertaining enough.