Primitive War (2025)

Warning: there will be some spoilers, but since this is all pure pulp nonsense nobody should be too afraid to read on

During the Vietnam War. Colonel Jericho (Jeremy Piven in a performance so bad you have to admire the rest of the cast can keep a straight face around him) sends Baker (Ryan Kwanten) and his “Vulture Squad” of soldiers of dubious renown but high efficiency on a somewhat vaguely defined rescue mission into a particularly deadly valley. The Green Berets our protagonists are supposed to rescue there were meant to do something about a research base hidden deep in the valley, but that’s all need to you and apparently our soldiers don’t.

Turns out the valley is full of dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes that, ahem, “fell through a wormhole in the past”. Said wormhole was created by evil experiments devised by evil Soviet general Borodin (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor) – yes, like the composer but then, there’s also a Soviet character named Tolstoy which I believe is what goes for wit in this one – who attempts to do something – presumably evil and most certainly world-threatening – with particle accelerators.

Eventually, after many an adventure with dinosaurs, heroic sacrifice, and teaming up with an Eastern German scientist and dinosaur exposition expert (Tricia Helfer, whose bad German accent attempts actually sound like very bad Russian accent attempts), our heroes will have to take the fight to Borodin’s base.

It is very difficult to argue against a film that fulfils that old childhood dream of every good nerd to see soldiers fight against dinosaurs – as long as one doesn’t expect Luke Sparke’s movie (apparently based on a novel by one Ethan Pettus, but I’ll just take the film’s word for it) to be actually a properly good movie. Fortunately, this one does fall deeply under the “it’s not a good movies, it’s a great movie” umbrella where its myriad of flaws also happen to be insanely entertaining.

Firstly and foremost, this is such a deeply stupid movie it’s actually impressive – starting with the whole dinosaurs dropped, sorry, fallen, through a wormhole (probably landing with a big whomp sound effect) by Soviet mad science during the Vietnam War business, the film’s utter inability to convince anyone this actually takes place in 1968 however much CCR plays on the soundtrack (kudos to whoever managed to get the rights for the songs), and dialogue of such deep, clichéd stupidity it becomes nearly transcendent. Personal favourites here are the scene where Baker radios in his squad’s dinosaur problems to his superiors, and one of the dumbest “big rousing” speeches I’ve ever experienced, which is certainly not helped by Sparke’s decision to loosen the tension with a fart joke. No, really.

The special effects are all over the place – turns out cheap CGI dinosaurs with feathers are even more difficult to realize than dinosaurs without them – but make up for their wavering quality by the quantity and diversity of included dinosaurs. Plus, while it isn’t always good effects work, it is still done with visible love and enthusiasm.

While deeply, unironically stupid, this love and a sense of earnestness are really why this is so fun. Someone here must actually have put thought into details like the noise T-Rex jaws barely missing a victim must make – though the resulting noise is pretty damn silly. Which makes it somewhat bizarre that nobody put the same amount of thought into plot, dialogue, pacing or narrative structure, but hey! Soldiers versus dinosaurs and every damn war movie cliché plus every damn dinosaur movie cliché in a single movie! And even some romance – between two T-Rexes, in fact.

So thanks, Australia, this was deeply stupid, but also incredible.

Three Films Make A Post: The Greatest High Adventure Ever Filmed!

Festival of the Living Dead (2024): After having started out strong, the Soska Sister Jen and Sylvia don’t seem to be able to get a movie together that’s even vaguely in the ballpark of American Mary. It’s all sequels, ill-advised remakes and cheap guff, typically decently enough made but well beyond the filmmakers’ talent levels.

This Tubi Original flirts a little with being an actual sequel to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, but mostly, it’s a movie of braindead idiots sleepwalking through zombie movie tropes. Energy levels are low, and there’s little on screen here to tell me why I should watch this above the other dozen crappy zombie movies coming out every month.

Companion (2025): If there’s one thing holding too many “progressive” horror movies back right now – and I say that as a socialist much closer to their political ideals than MAGAs, incels and other real life horrors – its the smug self-satisfaction about the rightness of their world view that reminds me of myself in my twenties, with its complete inability to realize that it’s all to easy to win arguments when all you ever do is argue against straw men. Worse, this brand of smugness tends to lend films a particular self-satisfied air with any little twist, any half-bright idea in their scripts, and an inability to look at one’s own work and see its flaws.

This goes very much for Companion, a film of middling twists it very clearly believes to be incredibly deep and intelligent, and a slick surface of ultra-competent filmmaking that has very little of any depth or interest going on below its polished surface.

The only thing this really has going for it is the rightfully admired Sophie Thatcher. Who also happens to be in Heretic, a great example of how to do progressive horror without intellectual shortcuts.

The Guns of Navarone (1961): Speaking of intellectual shortcuts, during the course of the German election, I really needed to watch a movie where a lot of Nazis are killed. J. Lee Thompson’s war/spy movie classic fit the bill nicely. It also has a starry cast playing your typical Alistair McLean bunch of competents, rather a lot of great action scenes – during which indeed a heart-warming amount of Nazis die – and a couple of absolutely icy war is hell moments.

Gregory Peck is particularly great in this one, mixing the reticence of a man who has already seen and done too much in this war with the coldness of a man willing to do even worse if necessary.

A Bridge Too Far (1977)

Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far concerns Operation Market Garden, the Allies’ ill-fated attempt of winning the World War II early via an ill-conceived operation in the Netherlands. Ill-fated because – at least in the film’s telling – valuable intel was ignored, important equipment was unusable and anyone at all managed to survive the waves of background incompetence because the men on the ground where particularly tenacious – and probably so used to the War’s combination of idiocy and horror by now, they had learned to cope with it.

Attenborough clearly wasn’t a fan of General Montgomery, and thus the man becomes an off-screen incarnation of bad planning and wilful ignorance – however much one reads this as historically accurate, it certainly isn’t an invalid opinion. In general, Attenborough has little time for those upper echelons whose boots never touch a war zone and let others do the dying, and focusses on characters – all played by an astonishing amount of acting talent – who live or – more often - die by those decisions. The film also spends some time on the impact Operation Market Garden had on the civilian population of the Netherlands, and eventually ends on a handful of survivors in a haunting shot that shows little enthusiasm for any war, even a just one.

Tonally, this is a very strange film: about a third of it feels and sounds like a stodgy but extremely high budget British war movie with a terrible score and performances of a style that belong in this sort of thing (old chap), even when it’s, for example, the usually not at all stodgy Michael Caine hired for it; another third is a series of very 70s New Hollywood style vignettes featuring guys like Gould, Caan, Redford and Hackman (with a bad Polish accent) doing their very different thing in the kind of scenes you’d expect them to be in. The final third mostly concerns the particularly unpleasant adventures of one Lt. Col. Frost having to go through a kind of synthesis of Old Britain and New Hollywood, with a measured and careful performance by Anthony Hopkins, full of moments that are just as bitter and human as those in the American part of the film yet still feel very British in perspective and manner.

Curiously enough, this disparate mix works for the A Bridge Too Far, at least to a degree. Perhaps because it mirrors the very different approaches to warfare brought by the different Allied fighting forces, or perhaps because it simply speaks to my sense of perversity.

Three Films Make A Post: It's High Noon at the end of the Universe.

Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983): To get out of the way what every write-up of this one, however short, must contain: there’s nary a metalstorm in Charles Band’s film, nor is Jared-Syn destroyed.

Most probably, there’s just no time in-between the attempts to squeeze tropes of the western, post-apocalyptic exploitation and the kind of magic you encounter in space operas into some kind of script-shape; there’s also surprisingly little time for actual fun visible on screen, and even Tim Thomerson and Richard Moll seem to sleepwalk through the affair. For a “one damn thing after another” kind of film, this feels curiously bland and uneventful – if ever “meh” was an objective, palpable quality, Metalstorm achieved it.

The Sea Wolves (1980): Speaking of bland, Andrew V. McLaglen’s war as a boy’s own adventure for old men movie does share that quality on a much higher budget level. Despite the presence of Gregory Peck, David Niven and Trevor Howard – all past their prime but usually still perfectly able to carry a dumb adventure movie – there’s a foot-dragging and disinterested quality to direction, script and acting that makes the whole “war as adventure” angle particularly problematic: after all, shouldn’t a movie doing that sort of thing not at least do it in a way that’s actually entertaining and exciting to watch?

Roger Moore adding his usual old man every woman wants to screw shtick to proceedings does nothing to improve things either.

Look Back (2024): But let’s end on a positive note. This sixty minute anime by Oshiyama Kiyotaka (who not only directs but is also responsible for production, character design and co-scripting) is an utterly lovely thing – a heartbreaker that earns its central moment of sadness, as well as a film about a complicated female friendship (or let’s be honest here, Lesbian love not named such to not scandalize certain people) that doesn’t attempt to come-up with a clear-cut answer to anything, and a film that doesn’t use its moment of magic to heal all things broken.

The Safecracker (1958)

Colley Dawson (Ray Milland), designing safes for rich people who use them to lock up treasures for nobody to see, has enough of the small life: fast cars, pretty women and touching said treasures loom large in his mind. So when an antiques dealer (Barry Jones) makes him an offer to put his talents to a safe-cracking use, Colley is easily convinced to start on a rather lucrative side-career.

To have use of his ill-gotten gains right here and now without alerting the police with a sudden influx of money, Colley starts on a double life, playing the daring safe-cracker and playboy under an assumed name on the weekends while keeping up his old life-style – including living with his elderly mum – on weekdays. Eventually, he gets caught when he ignores warning signs and directed warnings. He is sentenced to a ten year prison sentence.

However, in 1941, when World War II isn’t going terribly well for the British, Colley’s talents are in demand for a commando mission. The mission’s goal is to photograph secret documents kept in a safe in mansion in occupied Belgium that would disclose the whole of German spy operations in the UK. Particularly, doing this without the Nazis figuring out it happened would be quite a success for the British. Offered a full pardon on success, Colley agrees to take part in the mission, despite his decided lack of patriotism.

Ray Milland dabbled in directing from time to time, and clearly was a fan of directing himself. He’s still trying to hang on to his old charming, somewhat roguish image here in 1958, but at this stage in his career, “roguish” often turned out somewhat sleazy. Which isn’t a bad fit for Colley at all, though I was never quite sure Milland actually realized that was the impression he gave.

As a director, Milland isn’t terrible; he certainly isn’t great either. He has a tendency to use the least interesting shot in too many scenes, and doesn’t have a great hand for pacing either, leading to a lack of tension and a sluggishness not great in the sort of genres this is dabbling in.

The script doesn’t help there either. Structurally, this is a film of two halves from different genres, both of them not terrible successful. First, we have a heist movie that isn’t terribly interested in actually making the safe-cracking business exciting, focussed on a character who doesn’t change in any way once he’s turned from safe-maker to safe-cracker. Thus, the film is more going through the motions of a crime movie than actually being one. The second half does the same with war movie tropes. Again, there’s little tension; again, Colley isn’t changed by any of his experiences; again there’s an aimless, ambling quality to the way scenes are set-up. Not even the climactic raid appears to be all that tense.

Now, one could argue the decision to not have Colley experience any sort of inner redemptive arc as a somewhat interesting and uncommon decision, but since this leaves us with a character that goes through hardship and error completely without much of interest to an audience happening with him, I’d argue it’s an inherently boring decision as well. In the hands of more accomplished director and much more accomplished writers, one could of course do something with this reversal of expectations about how this sort of film is supposed to play out, but as it stands, this just makes a pretty lifeless film even more uninvolving.

Three Films Make A Post: World War Two was just ending. World War Murphy is about to begin.

Murphy’s War (1971): When he was on, Peter Yates could be a great director; when he was off he did tend to make at the very least interesting failures. Murphy’s War, a film about an Irish airplane mechanic with an improbable accent despite being played by Peter O’Toole who makes increasingly insane attempts at taking vengeance on a German U-Boat crew right at the end of World War II, lands somewhere in the middle. There are some riveting set pieces, some excellent tender or hard character moments, but the film is also full of scenes that go on far longer than they need to or should. Worse, it never manages to convince me of Murphy’s increasing derangement, never really finds an angle to show his inner life in a way that makes sense. It doesn’t help that the ending jumps gleefully over the line between the heightened intensity and absurdity of an action movie ending and sheer, goofy nonsense.

La muerte del chacal (1984): This mixture of Mexican action cinema standards and giallo and slasher tropes directed by Pedro Galindo III and starring the dynamic facial hair of brother duo Mario and Fernando Almada is not a perfect film by far – it does tend to drag rather a lot in its first half – but it certainly has a couple of really neat ideas. Particularly the way the mid-act plot twist runs against all audience expectations is rather a thing to behold, especially in a film where you’d never expect any such thing to happen.

After this, the film turns full-on slasher, with still a bit too much feet-dragging for its own good, but also some genuinely cool suspense scenes and stylish kills, as well as an awesomely goofy scene in which one Almeda kills a Doberman with his bare hands in a manner so ridiculous, even a dog person might laugh.

Incantation (2022): I know, quite a few people go really nuts about Kevin Ko’s Taiwanese POV horror movie. It is certainly a film made with the highest competence, full of well-timed shocks, with some creepy ideas, but I also find it nearly aggressively derivative of the traditions of J-Horror and creepypasta (its big, obvious plot twist is taken directly from the latter realm). Which does not make it a bad movie, or even an unenjoyable one, but one that’s a bit too much like a clockwork made out of stolen and borrowed parts to truly do something for me.

Escape to Athena (1979)

Greece during World War II, shortly before the Allied invasion. Major Otto Hecht (Roger Moore with a really weird accent) is not your typical Nazi, he only plays one to get what he wants, and tries to keep victims to a minimum. Having worked as a shady art dealer before the war, what Hecht wants is to plunder the ancient treasures of Greece, as he has done with those of other countries before. For this, he’s acquired his own little collection of POWs useful in this sort of thing, like archaeologist Professor Blake (David Niven), climber and all-around athletic wonder Nat Judson (Richard Roundtree), and non-cooking cook Bruno Rotelli (Sonny Bono, but don’t worry). The plus for these guys is that they are kept on a comparatively long leash by a man who’s not going to shoot or torture them for the smallest affront. As they well should, they use this to make the Nazis’ life in Greece as difficult as possible with repeated escape attempts and small and large sabotages.

Things get even more lively when Hecht acquires stand-up comic Charlie Dane (Elliott Gould) as his new scribe (don’t ask), and Charlie’s burlesque dancing partner Dottie Del Mar (Stefanie Powers) as the woman he wishes to convince of sleeping with him. These two bring with them even more anarchic energy then the rest of Hecht’s crew, as well as contact with the Greek resistance leader Zeno (Telly Savalas). Following various acts of repression by the SS, and because there’s a submarine station that needs to be destroyed before the Allied landing, Zeno and Hecht’s crazy kids decide to simply take over the Nazi base.

Afterwards, there’s perhaps time to steal some art treasures from a nearby mountain cloister, unless there’s something more relevant to the war effort there, of course.

At times, George Pan Cosmatos’s Escape to Athena has a tone comparable to the great World War II action comedy Kelly’s Heroes. It’s never quite as brilliant, mind you, but if you can live with a less than serious approach to World War II, this is still one of the better examples of the form. Particularly the film’s first half is full of off the cuff, often clearly adlibbed, humour that can get so bizarre to border on the nonsensical. House favourite Elliott Gould has some of the best absurd non-sequitur lines here, of course (and I’m pretty sure he’s come up with them himself). Those often make little sense but are outrageously funny as the man delivers them. In the more scripted feeling bits, Moore – at the height of being James Bond – actually manages to turn an art-stealing Wehrmacht officer into so charming a rogue, I’m even perfectly willing to buy into his later changing of sides to the good guys; whereas Powers really does the traditional role of the perhaps not quite as ditzy stripper with the best of ‘em.

Even in the early and lighter parts of the film, there are moments that are perfectly honest about the actual experience of Nazi occupation and resistance work. Cosmatos portrays cruelties and senseless slaughter matter-of-factly and with no misguided attempts at squeezing humour in there as well; these are the things that happen around them while our POWs are in their private little comedy, and this comedy, for one, is not going to pretend otherwise.

As little as it’s going to pretend that developments like finding that Dottie is an expert diver perfectly fit for the business of blowing up submarines, or the bizarre show our heroes put on to distract the Nazis once it’s time to take over their base, are anything less than great, goofy fun.

Eventually, everybody does land in a somewhat harsher bit of war action than they were before in scenes of action movie mayhem that late 70s style Cosmatos handles with the expected panache. The big battle in the town’s streets and the grand finale on the mountain are particularly great. So great that it seems fair to director and characters that they are allowed to go out like they came in with some hot dance moves by Savalas and various bits of funny business.

Why this extremely entertaining, goofy but not stupid piece of filmmaking has landed on more than one list of the worst films ever made, I have no idea.

Three Films Make A Post: Hope Burns Brightest in The Cold

Black Crab aka Svart krabba (2022): Some time in the near future, when Sweden is struck by a civil war between groups the film doesn’t bother to define for us, a group of soldiers is tasked to ice-skate over the ocean behind enemy lines to transport some canisters that’ll win the war for their losing side. The movie directed by Adam Berg is going for the whole universal/archetypal thing, apparently, so giving the audience the space to decide if they actually want these characters to achieve their goal is not in the cards; or any actual, concrete politics. Also not in the cards is anything amounting to characterisation for anyone but Noomi Rapace’s character. She gets a lot of superfluous flashbacks to early civil war life with her daughter that do very little for the movie yet take up quite a lot of time.

The film is a war movie made by people who somehow managed to miss how films in this genre understood how to speak about something universal by focussing on the specific, and decide that vague handwaving is the way to go instead. We do get as many war movie clichés as we never wanted, all of which I’ve seen realized in so many better films.

Windfall (2022): I liked director/co-writer Charlie McDowell’s The One I Love from a couple of years quite a bit as a very clever contemporary and adult movie-length Twilight Zone episode. This thing with Jason Segel, Lily Collins and Jesse Plemons is rather less successful, playing out like an attempt to make a somewhat contemporized version of a Coen Brothers film in the Fargo mode crossed with a TV show bottle episode. Just one that can’t seem to get up the imagination to give any of its three characters any amount of depth – after the first couple of scenes, you really know all you need to know about everyone, and nothing of interest will be revealed about their personalities. Also missing are a sense of timing – the ninety minutes drag as if they were three hours – and really much of a point.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1982): Fortunately, this P.D. James adaptation by the usually rather more experimental than he is here Christopher Petit rides in to save this post – or rather its writer – from complete frustration. The seldom seen on screen Pippa Guard plays secretary turned private detective Cordelia Gray with quite a bit of presence, generally finding something interesting to add to any standard detective movie scene. And there are a lot of them in a film as chock-full of detective movie tropes as this one is. Petit and his fine cast use most of these tropes for good, making a pretty meandering film whose sense of meandering isn’t a weakness but very much the point of the whole endeavour, because it provides ample opportunity to think about class, gender and obsession.

Three Films Make A Post: War. It's A Dying Business.

Nightshot (2018): This French POV horror piece directed by Hugo König concerns the misadventures of an urban exploration streamer played by Nathalie Couturier, and her camera dude when they do a nightly visit to a creepy old sanatorium and asylum with a history of dubious experiments on its patients. The film does try to stand out from the dozens of other POV sanatorium indies by taking on a one take gimmick. Which also shows an admirable willingness from the filmmakers to put extra work, given that the choreography needed to pull something like that off is considerable.

Unfortunately, the one take/one shot business doesn’t really achieve much for the film; on paper, it’s “more realistic” for what is supposed to be a live stream but in practice, there’s little here that makes much of a difference between this and other POV sanatorium movies, so things never get terribly exciting. To be fair, there are couple of pretty clever shocks, and the practical (and live) effects are certainly fun to behold.

Sleepwalk (1986): This is the tale of a woman whose life is slowly being made weirder thanks to an ancient Chinese manuscript she is translating for a dubious Chinese doctor (whose henchmen is a young Tony Todd). In tone and style, Sara Driver’s movie is a very typical piece of mid-80s New York independent filmmaking, so expect a sense of the surreal, good taste in music, and a lot of beautiful shots of dirty city streets, as well as a floating and meandering plot carried by actors – in this case it’s mostly Suzanne Fletcher doing the work – who love making strange, deadpan acting decisions.

Too Late the Hero (1970): A few years of a wonderfully idiosyncratic career after The Dirty Dozen, director Robert Aldrich returned to the men on a mission style of war movie. Where some viewers – not me, mind you - read the brutal finale of the earlier movie as pure action movie glorification of violence, really nobody will be able to interpret this war movie that way. Too emotionally brutal is Aldrich’s portrayal of a group of soldiers (including Michaela Caine, Cliff Robertson as the mandatory American, Ian Bannen and Denholm Elliott) to get confused about the film’s anti-war stance here. Apart from being honest and bitter about the way war compromises all human ethics, this is very much a meditation on fear, the concept of Cowardice, and the sometimes necessary irrationality of heroism committed by cowardly men.

It’s not a film that judges cowardice and fear like certain old-school war movies would have, but seems more interested in understanding what these words actually mean, and how different the breaking points of different men are.

In short: The Red Ball Express (1952)

World War II, during the Allied invasion. Patton’s tank division is pushing forward so quickly, he’s regularly outrunning his supply lines. To keep things rolling towards Paris, the US military creates a mobile truck supply line through France, colloquially called the Red Ball Express by the grunts.

The units are thrown together, racially integrated (I believe that would have been the term then), and not necessarily manned with soldiers missed by their old comrades. The Red Ball Express unit the film is concerned with is lead by Lt. Chick Campbell (Jeff Chandler), who seems to be that curious war movie Lieutenant, a highly competent man who cares for his soldiers. The unit sergeant, Red Kallek (Alex Nicol) doesn’t see his commanding officer that way, though, for he knows him from civilian life and makes him responsible for the death of his brother.

Another problem, apart from the Wehrmacht, mine fields, and lots of mud, are the at times strained race relations, exemplified via the trials and travails of one Private Robertson (Sidney Poitier).

Shockingly enough for a movie made in 1952 by a white man (the great Budd Boetticher), Red Ball Express has more than one black character in a speaking role; even more shockingly, the film itself doesn’t treat its black characters any differently than it does the white ones, hell, they’re not even the odious comic relief. It’s shocking in the best possible way to see a film demonstrating that old promise of America of equality by simply, without grand gestures, actually treating people equally. The way the film resolves Robertson’s problems will obviously not be completely to the taste of the 2020s, but there’s a calm fairmindedness about the film’s serious moments that I’m not going to criticize from a distance of seven decades.

This treatment of social issues fits well with Boetticher’s direction style, a tendency to create verisimilitude through a calm look at all kinds of interactions, and through an eye for details that in this case helps fit the actual documentary footage the film uses to portray more than ten trucks or so into the rest of the movie. Boetticher always seems genuinely interested in the way people relate to each other, in the same way he is interested in the practical issues of driving trucks through a warzone. The humour and the romantic elements haven’t aged quite as well as the rest of the film, but since the narrative is very episodic, it simply makes sense to include episodes of levity, too.

And even though The Red Ball Express is so episodic, and therefore not following typical dramatic structure in every point (insert US war movie Ozu comparison here, if you like), there is room and budget for a couple of fine action sequences, particularly a fight against some German hold-outs early on, and a race through a burning French town right at the end.

In short: Da 5 Bloods (2020)

It’s not difficult to believe that films like this are a bit of a defence mechanism by Netflix against the type of critics that seems more interested in watching movies exclusively in the overpriced hell-holes known as cinemas, proving that they do indeed care for film as an art (not something the same critics usually ask of older multi-national companies).

It’s obviously all good when this gets someone like Spike Lee the money and the space to make the kind of film he wants to make without having to beg for favours from studios. Da 5 Bloods concerns a handful of black Vietnam veterans (Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr.) returning to he country decades later to find the body of the squad leader they loved (Chadwick Boseman) as well as a bunch of gold, and ending up in a pretty bad shape for it.

It’s a pretty great film to me, splitting the difference between a leisurely on-foot kind of road movie and a jungle action film in a way only a director with decades of experience like Lee would dare, and on the way talking about the complicated relationships between these characters, black Americans and their country, black Americans and the Vietnamese and black Americans and war in an appropriately complicated manner that usually doesn’t go for the quick, easy answer while always keeping its eye on injustice and what comes from it. Also making an appearance are the bizarre thing about the French Americans of all political colour seem to have, ironic versions of war movie greatest hits (including a brilliantly funny moment with Wagner’s “Ritt der Walküren”), and a handful of great performances – with Lindo being particularly brilliant – that feel like gifts from the cast to a director going out of his way to leave them space to breathe and work.

Apart from these performances, I’m particularly fond of how Lee’s more eccentric directorial decisions here – like not de-aging his cast in the flashbacks in any way – lead to the most clear-eyed and revelatory moments, daring to be strange when that’s what this particular story needs. And for a guy with my tastes, it’s certainly nice to see Johnny Nguyen in a larger role here, and Danny Bilson (a failed videogame executive to some, the screenwriter of some of my favourite Empire Pictures films to me) as a co-writer.

In short: Off Limits (1988)

Vietnam, 1968, during the Tet Offensive. CID Sergeant’s McGriff (Willem Dafoe) and Perkins (Gregory Hines) are the kind of racist, violent shitheels you’d expect in that role during this time. However, when the murder of a local prostitute leads them on the trail of a whole series of murders of prostitutes during the last year, all showing a lot of disturbing parallels, and their investigation begins to suggest the serial killer to be an American officer, they don’t back down but go out of their ways to catch him, risking life and career. Of course, they are still treating the Vietnamese as well as enlisted US soldiers like crap while they are doing it, and can’t spend five minutes without going on about how terrible a country they deem Vietnam to be, so it’s probably just another day at the office for these two.

At times, Christopher Crowe’s attempt to transfer 80s cop movie clichés to the more interesting background of the Vietnam War, actually does manage to make these clichés somewhat more interesting and lively; at other times, I couldn’t shake the feeling the director uses the background as an excuse to be more racist and have more unpleasant main characters than he could have gotten away with in a film set in the 80s. Crowe certainly knows how to stage a chase scene and other action movie core elements, giving them a grimy and dirty edge that fits the rest of a film whose Vietnam feels a lot like New York in action movies made at this time by people like James Glickenhaus.

The plot’s not terribly good at leading us from action scene to action scene, though. Crowe’s script never really manages to make the actual investigation terribly interesting – and honestly, if you don’t guess the whodunit very early on, I’d be very surprised. The thin characterisation of everyone involved here doesn’t make the plot any more interesting either. There’s a desperate attempt to humanise at least Dafoe’s character a little with a romance plot between him and a French novitiate sister played by the not terribly French (but lovely) Amanda Pays, but it’s so perfunctorily written, it doesn’t do much beyond adding scenes to the movie.


The characters are so bare-bones, even actors with as much heft as Dafoe, Hines or Fred Ward don’t manage to suggest much depth to these men; only house favourite Scott Glenn has an opportunity to actually do something of interest acting-wise, but he’s not in too many scenes.

The Heroes of Telemark (1965)

Nazi occupied Norway during World War II. Norwegian resistance fighter Knut Strand (Richard Harris) ropes scientist Rolf Pedersen (Kirk Douglas) into his attempts to destroy the German production of Heavy Water for their H-bomb projects. Pedersen would really rather spend the occupation tending his own garden and being a bit of a playboy, usually arguing that the Nazi repressions following an act of resistance aren’t actually worth what something like a destroyed Nazi truck wins. Obviously, this particular case is something different, so he at first reluctantly, then later somewhat heroically, helps in Strand’s struggle.

And wouldn’t you know it, turns out Pedersen’s ex-wife (Ulla Jacobsson) and ex-father-in-law are part of the resistance too.

The problem with the whole affair is that the Germans take their project as war-changingly serious as it is, so it is exceedingly difficult to destroy the heavy water production without getting a lot of innocent people killed.

Which, apart from being a World War II resistance adventure, is where the main interest of Anthony Mann’s Heroes of Telemark rests. In fact, much of the film’s running time does its best to work against the “hero” word in its title, talking about the decisions people in war time feel compelled to make, and exploring, horrified, fascinated and knowingly the kinds of inhuman equations these people believe they need to follow.

Again and again the film returns to this, showing its protagonists weighing up how many lives their mission is worth, whose lives it is worth, and how one can – and even if one should -compartmentalize the responsibility for the innocent lives destroyed in a good cause. It doesn’t come to any pat or simple answers here, never falling into the “The Cold Equations” style trap of embracing inhuman solutions wholeheartedly yet still finding itself as helpless as its characters not to use them. Though it is also clear that the film knows and understands but can’t fully approve; there’s a reason why the film’s most heroic act is in its final set piece when the protagonists risk their own lives to mitigate the cost in civilian lives their final desperate plan calls for. Inhumane decisions, the film argues, still need to be mitigated by actual humanity, if that humanity is costly, or not.

Mann practices a bit of humanity himself by not letting the characters fall into the obvious patterns you’d expect, so Pedersen may treat his life in his occupied country like a bit of a moral coward, and is often more careful in his approach, but the film does suggest that much of this is part of him looking at the cost more clearly than the more traditional man of action, Strand. And Strand for his part is actual softer and less ruthless than Pedersen when he has made a cruel decision he deems necessary. Nobody here’s just the asshole of the film, even though both men do act like one at times.

That Mann, pretty much at the end of his career here, is a rather sure hand at action sequences and their intelligent staging doesn’t exactly come as a surprise to anyone who knows his body of work. That he manages to integrate the action and the moral and ethical concerns of his script and his characters without weakening either side isn’t a surprise either. I found myself particularly impressed with the first, stealth, attack of the Norwegians on the Nazi production facility, a long sequence that is indeed shot only with the few natural noises the word “stealth” suggests, without dramatic music, only driven by tension, and all the more exciting for it.


And really, that’s The Heroes of Telemark for you, showing thought and care even in its big action set pieces.

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.

Three Films Make A Post: When 400,000 men couldn't get home, home came for them.

Dunkirk (2017): Of the couple of reviews that don’t heap praise on Christopher Nolan’s somewhat different war film – a genre that’s not generally about retreat even if it is set against war as such – the ones that don’t complain about its lack of diversity - which I understand but personally don’t find relevant as a criterion for the quality of a film as a film - criticize its sentimentality. That one, I really don’t get, for if the film has one stark and obvious virtue to me apart from an incredible realization on a technical level, it is how much it avoids sentimentality in its treatment of material that could all too easily fall into that trap. Instead, it explores the humanity of defeat and humanity in defeat in a manner I find deeply compassionate, using Nolan’s huge technical acumen to get to a very human core of emotions the characters don’t ever precisely state because they cannot be precisely stated but only demonstrated. Which the film does as well as any film I’d care to mention.

Alice in Earnestland (2014): Where I find the core of Nolan’s film pretty easy to grasp and understand, I have a bit more trouble with Ahn Gook-jin’s dark comedy. It does fit nicely into the large number of contemporary South Korean films about class divisions and the shittiness of being one of the working poor, but having watched it, I’m not terribly sure what it is trying to say about this. The quirky structure it shares with many a film from Korea doesn’t make an attempt to understand what this one’s actually about on more than a plot level more difficult too. Some of the film’s weirdness and humour is certainly attractive, and some of it unattractive in a highly entertaining way bordering on splatstick (not to be confused with slapstick); I’m just not confident it adds up to much beyond that.


The Shop Around the Corner (1940): And here’s the point where I unmask as a total barbarian, for I do not prefer Ernst Lubitsch’s original version of the “a couple who hate each other in real life are unknowingly in love in letters” set-up to its later versions. It’s not just because I would have preferred the later movies’ emphasis on the romantic parts of the tale (though I certainly would) in this first version, too, I also don’t find the depiction of the social aquarium of the titular shop it puts in the romance’s place all that riveting. Of course, there are moments where the film delights with precise insight and a good joke or three, but there’s also a lot of restating of things the film has said just a couple of scenes before, and some truly obnoxious character work by William Tracy. Add to that the tragic fact that I’m not actually very fond of James Stewart in this stage of his career, and you might understand why I don’t find this classic all that classic.

In short: U-571 (2000)

World War II. The crew – including Matthew McConaughey in his “young star” phase, Harvey Keitel in his “Harvey Keitel” phase, and Jon Bon Jovi in his perpetual “can’t act” phase -  of the submarine of Lt. Cmdr. Mike Dahlgren (Bill Paxton) is sent on a top secret surprise mission to use a lucky opportunity to grab an Enigma Machine from a German U-Boot.

Things do of course become more complicated than that, and soon the US submarine is destroyed and most of its crew killed, with only a handful of men under the command of XO McConaughey alive on a German U-Boot that has seen better days. More tense complications do of course ensue during the attempt to get the Enigma Machine in allied hands.

This is the other diamond in the otherwise naff crown of director Jonathan Mostow, standing at eye level to his pretty damn great Breakdown. In fact, his two good films are so good, I can’t help but think the director must have been exceedingly unlucky with outside forces on his other projects, for the kind of talent for suspense and tense action his two excellent films demonstrate can’t have been a fluke. Obviously, the script Mostow’s working from is of dubious historical authenticity (if you want to know about the actual way Enigma was cracked, Wikipedia and a bunch of sources mentioning many people from exotic countries like Poland, France, and the UK this film has never heard about apart from a tiny mention once the plot is over beckon), and its characters are cut from very typical genre movie cloth.


However, the script does know how to make its shorthand characters just lively enough for an audience to care about their fate, and provides the damn great cast many a good opportunity to sweat and stare dramatically without the plot ever getting bogged down in melodramatics. Instead, things always feel tight, tense and teetering on the edge of catastrophe, Mostow using all tricks of the thriller-style war movie to do a very classic thing: dragging his audience to the edge of their seats. It does help here that the film, despite its historical inauthenticity, is the kind of war adventure that very well knows that war isn’t actually an adventure, so this isn’t only showing heroic pursuits, but men following these pursuits while in desperate fear for their lives, everybody quickly coming to the edge of their respective breaking points. Which, obviously, enhances the tension Mostow creates through masterful staging and editing of the suspense quite a bit.

Went the Day Well? (1942)

Presented as a flashback from a post-war time still in the hopeful future in 1942, the film presents the small village of Bramley End,  as sleepy as a town during World War II in the UK could have been.

Sleepy, that is, until a group of Royal Engineers arrive in town for some sort of official business that means they have to be billeted there for a couple of days. However, there’s something not quite right about these particular British soldiers. As a matter of fact, they turn out to be Nazi paratroopers working as the vanguard of a German invasion, tasked to sabotage radar equipment. Once the villagers cop to this, they do their best to come together and fight back against what quickly turns into an occupying force with all the charm and decency Nazi troops are known for (that is to say, none). However, not only seems fate to conspire against the villagers, squashing their first plans to get help in the sort of cruel and capricious manner you only ever encounter in real life or suspense movies, there is also a fifth columnist among them.

Directed by (Alberto) Cavalcanti – probably best known today and around here for directing the best episode in 1945’s fine horror anthology movie Dead of Night - and mostly unseen after his first run until ten years or so ago, this is a war propaganda film warning of the need to watch out for potential German spies, and embodying the fear of German invasion (which in reality was rather on the ebb by the time this was made). Said fear wasn’t really new to the British cultural mind, of course, and there had been a small literary sub-genre concerning German invasion attempts and occupation of the British Isles at leas since World War I (books like “When Wilhelm Came” come to mind). Went the Day Well? is an excellent entry into this sub-genre, and its direct propaganda ambitions are actually improving on parts of the form, because it emphasises the need for the British of all classes (it’s not quite so advanced as to do all races, too) to come together to fight off the Nazis, not something that is a given in a highly classist society and its popular culture.

As quite a few British propaganda films, Went the Day seems to be surprisingly honest about the price of war, emphasising sacrifices and deaths quite a bit more than any eventual glory. But then, by 1942, a simple tale of pretty, glorious war could hardly have convinced a population that had survived the first years of World War II.


Why the film still works as well as it does today (apart from the fact that Nazis are still around, despite all suggestions of humanity’s ability to learn from mistakes) isn’t of course so much its propaganda effect (which is of course historically absolutely fascinating) but because Cavalcanti’s execution of it as a suspense movie is brilliant – and I’m talking early Hitchcock brilliant here, with particularly the scenes around the various failing attempts at getting help just being great, all-around filmmaking coming from a rather sardonic mind set. But even before things get going, Cavalcanti does great work: the film’s gentle and mildly comical introduction of the village and its population is sure-handed and funny without being condescending, and sets up characters and place wonderfully, so much so that the slow, insidious drifting in of treason and violence feels like an actual violation. Once the violence comes around completely, there are some moments of astonishing brutality (particularly keeping in mind how prissy British censors were before and after the war when it came to violence in movies) – the obvious scene is something concerning a pepper shaker, an axe, and a Nazi skull, but that’s not the only moment of this kind in the film. Violence, even when committed for the right reasons, is clearly nothing to be taken lightly here, and the direct and unpleasant way the film portrays it is nothing you’d be hard pressed to find again in British cinema until the second half of the 60s.

Three Films Make A Post: They dare to climb a terrifying new peak in suspense... all the way up to hell!

Where Eagles Dare (1968): For quite a few people, this war adventure directed by Brian G. Hutton and written by Alistair MacLean is a bit of a classic of men’s adventure cinema. I’ve never seen that in the film, and a recent re-watch unfortunately did not improve my impression. Mostly, the film feels bloated beyond all comprehension, taking up two and a half hours of one’s time for a series of plot twists and improbable plans that makes the most of our contemporary blockbusters look downright sane. Brian G. Hutton’s direction is bland, wasting many a theoretically cool set piece through tedious pacing, the script just goes on and on about everything, and the cast, well…This is as bland a performance as you’ll encounter by Clint Eastwood, and Richard Burton does his usual Richard Burton slumming thing that just doesn’t do it for me, just longer, in this case.

Falcon’s Gold aka Robbers of the Sacred Mountain (1982): I have a lot of room in my heart for Indiana Jones knock-offs (particularly of the Italian persuasion) but this cable TV movie – ergo, breasts – which is the understandably only directing credit for one Bob Schulz, really doesn’t even seem to try to grasp for an adventuring crown forever out of its reach. Instead of cheap thrills and silly ideas, we get Simon MacCorkindale making rubber faces that must go for human expressions on his planet, atrocious editing that ruins the few moments of theoretical excitement the film has on offer, and a script that doesn’t actually manage to hit even the simplest adventure movie tropes decently but does find space to include a pretty problematic “romance” between MacCorkindale and a character we first meet wearing her school uniform. Though, to be fair to the nudity does come not from her.

Romancing the Stone (1984): It is of course a bit unfair to compare a cheap TV movie to a decently budgeted studio production like Robert Zemeckis’s adventure romance with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, but still, this one shows how to trot classical adventure movie paths well. And thanks to its organic mix of slightly updated romance tropes and a lot of very well done adventure stuff, it doesn’t feel like much of an attempt to catch that Indiana Jones money at all, but rather like what it is: a film inspired by many of the same sources as Lucas and Spielberg that goes its own, frequently funny, always crowd-pleasing and very fun way from there. Diane Thomas’s script mostly manages the difficult task of having her heroine grow and finding that big roguish love without the latter destroying the former fantastically well; that Turner and Douglas where both in a phase where they could do little wrong certainly helps here too.


The film is also perfectly paced, looks and just feels fantastic thanks to Zemeckis and photography by the great Dean Cundey. Sure, one might complain this is film as candy, but when it’s as good as any candy you’ll get your hands on, who’s going to?

In short: Overlord (2018)

D-Day. The film follows a small group of soldiers who are parachuted in behind enemy lines to destroy a highly important German radar antenna at a church in a small French village. Hardly anyone survives the drop, and the handful of survivors don’t really seem to be enough to get through all of the Nazis between them and the goal of their mission. Our viewpoint character is Boyce (Jovan Adepo), somewhat looked down upon by most of his peers for being “too soft” (and one, imagines, for the colour of his skin, though the film doesn’t really go there) but who will, not surprisingly, be the film’s moral backbone. Also involved are the cynical and probably PTSD-haunted veteran of the Italian front Ford (Wyatt Russell), the group’s de facto leader after everyone else is dead (Bokeem Woodbine, we hardly knew ye), posturing sniper Tibbet (John Magaro), war photographer Chase (Iain De Caestecker), and dude with a Jewish name – that’s all the character he gets - Rosenfeld (Dominic Applewhite).

At least, they quickly meet the mandatory helpful hot French woman (Mathilde Ollivier). On the negative side, the Nazis don’t just have a radar operation going on in the village church but are also experimenting on the villagers and everyone else they can get their fingers on. Nazi zombie super soldier’s the watch word.

Julius Avery’s Overlord is a pretty peculiar movie. Going in, the film suggests some kind of pulped-up version of The Dirty Dozen with zombies, but the film’s first half turns out to be more of a harsh and ruthless war movie, with moments that feel authentically horrible, and little on screen that suggests any of the kind of brutal heroism you generally get from the more pulpy end of the war movie genre. I’m not complaining, mind you, for Avery is a rather decent hand at this sort of thing, turning out a first third that’s exciting but also not pulling any punches for the audience.

For the film’s middle part, things shift into increasingly less believable directions that feel rather more than the sort of war action movie with horror bits I had expected from Overlord going in, until the film’s final third suddenly turns its horror pulpiness up to eleven (starting with something unpleasant yet utterly silly happening to De Caestecker’s character), pumps its fist at absurd last stands, and goes all-out bonkers pulp war horror on us. The way the film handles this, this doesn’t feel like dramatic escalation but rather like someone taking the script, ripping out the second half (probably while roaring something about Nazis) and just ramming the second half of a completely different film into the director’s face. Fortunately, Avery mostly handles the last third with the right energy for the bizarre nonsense the script cooks up for him, so, even though the film doesn’t manage to be to anything like a coherent whole, what’s there is well-directed, performed by an ensemble that keep their dignity even under greatest duress, and highly entertaining.


Still, I wish I had gotten to see the second half of that ruthless war movie called Overlord, or the first one of the crazy pulp concoction of the same title instead of half of each of them.

In short: One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942)

World War II. The crew of a British bomber damaged while bombing the Daimler factory in Stuttgart has to bail over Holland. They have to make their way through the occupied country to reach the North Sea. Fortunately, the Dutch – at least in the movie, I don’t know enough about resistance against the Nazis in the Netherlands to comment on how truthful the film is – have developed various ways to sabotage the works of the Nazis, and are happy to help the British along. Once they’ve found proof the protagonists are indeed British and not a Nazi plan to find resistance cells.

Leave it to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (here both credited as directors and writers) to make a propaganda movie that still holds up decades later – and it’s not even their only one.

One of the things that distinguishes all of the Archers’ wartime films is their lack of hatred. It’s not that you could ever confuse them with fascist sympathizers, but the Germans in their films are usually recognizable as people, if people fighting for the worst of causes. In this particular case, there really aren’t any Germans on screen as characters, the film focuses on the bomber crew and the Dutch resistance, as mostly embodied in women (all played by British actresses, by the way). That these women are portrayed as eminently capable, intelligent and morally upright – the couple of big patriotic speeches here are given to them – is a particularly fascinating aspect of the film when looked upon from a time 75 years later when there are  still men so frightened of women doing important things in their entertainment they feel the pressing need to make cuts of popular space operas devoid of women. Powell and Pressburger obviously met actual women.


In general, One of Our Aircraft has a consciously mundane tone that makes the moments of pathos and the eminently effective suspense sequences all the more believable. This isn’t just a film about people being resistant to evil, but one about people being resistant to evil while still living their lives as much as it is possible as part of their resistance, as disturbed as these lives may be through war. This adds up wonderfully with the film’s general interest in small gestures, actors suggesting swathes of emotion mostly through looks, and does of course fit nicely with the mythical stiff upper lip the film not so much preaches for as shows practiced. Most heroism here is of the quiet sort; that doesn’t mean it isn’t still heroism.