Black Tight Killers (1966)

Yasuharu Hasebe’s Black Tight Killers was released in 1966 and it’s one of those movies that is perfectly in tune with the zeitgeist. The Swinging 60s were underway. London wasn’t the only place that was swinging. Tokyo was definitely swinging as well. Black Tight Killers is a wild crazy Pop Art-infused thriller that includes everything you could possibly desire in a 60s movie.

Daisuke Hondo (Akira Kobayashi) is a globe-trotting photojournalist who always manages to be in the thick of the action and the danger. On his return flight to Tokyo he meets a very pretty stewardess, Yoriko Sawanouchi (Chieko Matsubara). They’re hitting it off really well until Yoriko is kidnapped. There’s a gang led by a hoodlum named Lopez after her but the beautiful girl ninjas are after her as well. Of course you can never be sure if girl ninjas will turn out to be evil girl ninjas or good girl ninjas.

It all seems to have something to do with Yoriko’s father and the disappearance of a huge stash of gold during the war.

From this point on there’s non-stop mayhem. Fortunately Hondo can handle himself pretty well and he’s spent time at the Momoko Ninja Research Station so he knows a few ninja tricks himself. Although the ninja chewing gum bullet trick does come as a surprise to him.

Yoriko keeps falling into the hands of assorted bad guys. Hondo is still trying to figure out which side the girl ninjas are on. They do seem inclined to offer him at least a temporary alliance.

Yasuharu Hasebe has been an assistant to Seijun Suzuki and that’s significant. This was the very year in which Suzuki made his crazed masterpiece Tokyo Drifter. It’s clear that Suzuki and Hasebe were working along very similar lines, with plot coherence taking a back seat to energy, very cool visuals, Pop Art style, wild use of colour and major flirtations with surrealism. Black Tight Killers, like Tokyo Drifter, takes place in its own universe. Realism pretty much goes out the window. And both films display an obsessive interest in the use of colour to undermine realism. There’s an obvious comic-book influence. And there are hints of the psychedelic freak-out elements which were becoming increasing a feature of late 60s movie.

There’s also go-go dancing.

I love the fact that some of the supposedly exterior shots were deliberately done in the studio and that in the frequent driving scenes the rear projection is obviously intended to look as artificial as possible.

The sets are cool but they’re made to look a lot cooler with very nifty lighting effects.

There are some odd tonal shifts. Mostly the emphasis is on super-charged hyper-kinetic action fun but then there are periodic dark tragic gut-punch moments.

There are also some cynical moments.

Akira Kobayashi is a serviceable action hero. Chieko Matsubara is cute and likeable.

The action scenes have plenty of energy.

The movie is as sexy as you could get away with in 1966, with some very brief glimpses of nudity.

Black Tight Killers was clearly much in tune with international trends in pop cinema. The Bond movies obviously, but it’s closer in feel to eurospy movies like the wonderful French Fantomas (1964) and the amazing Italian heist movie Seven Golden Men (1965), the thoroughly enjoyable Lightning Bolt (1966) and one of the best of all the eurospy films, Special Mission Lady Chaplin (1966). And the German Kommissar X series kicked off in 1966 as well, with Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill.

And let’s face it - you can’t make a bad movie with beautiful girl ninjas.

Black Tight Killers has so much energy, so much fun and so much style. This is pure pop cinema. Highly recommended.

The Radiance Blu-Ray looks lovely. There are some decent extras.

Yasuharu Hasebe went on to direct several of the wonderful Stray Cat Rock movies - Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss (1970), Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (1970) and Stray Cat Rock: Machine Animal (1970). These three movies are all quite different in tone but they’re all very enjoyable.

Naked Killer (1992)

Naked Killer is a 1992 Hong Kong action thriller. It’s a Category III movie. It’s not overly extreme but it does have some disturbing moments.

This is not a rip-off of Luc Besson’s highly influential La Femme Nikita but it clearly derives some inspiration from that source. Black Cat is another Hong Kong movie made about the same time that really is a La Femme Nikita rip-off albeit a very good one. The influence of Besson’s movie can also be seen in the superb 2001 anime TV series Noir.

What’s great about Hong Kong cinema is that even gritty urban crime thrillers contain elements that you normally expect in other types of Hong Kong movies. For example there’s a lot of kung fu in Naked Killer.

The movie opens with a killing. The killer is a naked woman.

There have been a number of killings with a similar MO. The Hong Kong cops do not believe a woman could have carried out such a killing but detective Tinam (Simon Yam) disagrees. He is certain that the killer was a woman.

Tinam has personal problems. He killed his brother. His brother was a cop. Tinam shot him accidentally. It was a complete accident and nobody blames Tinam, except that naturally he blames himself. Now he’s impotent and he also can’t even hold a gun steady much less shoot it. But he’s still a good cop.

Mayhem breaks out in the police station. Which is how Tinam meets Kitty (Chingmy Yau). He doesn’t know what she does for a living, which is just as well.

Kitty has met Sister Cindy (Wei Yao). She’s the top hitman (or hitwoman) in the Colony. Sister Cindy is going to teach Kitty to be a top assassin. Kitty is already a pretty dangerous killer.

Kitty will have to change her identity. She becomes Vivian Shang.

Sister Cindy and Kitty/Vivian develop a complex emotional mentor/pupil relationship (a bit along the lines of the 1972 hitman classic The Mechanic).

Sister Cindy’s previous pupil, Princess (Carrie Ng), is going to be a problem. Princess is the number two assassin in the business. She aims to be number one. That means that she has to dispose of Sister Cindy. Princess is a lesbian. She has a new girlfriend/protégé, Baby (Madoka Sugawara).

Tinam encounters Kitty again. At least he’s almost certain it’s Kitty but now she says she’s Vivian.

The cops, in a desultory kind of way, are hunting the female assassins. Sister Cindy has always been a hunter but now she’s finding out what it’s like to be the hunted. But those who are hunting her might also be about to find out how it feels to be the hunted.

All the cast members are good. Simon Yam is excellent as Tinam, a hero with some huge weaknesses but basically decent guy. But this movie belongs to Chingmy Yau. She’s amazing.

Although it’s a Category III movie there’s not a huge amount of gore. It’s more that it deals with gruesome ideas. There’s no graphic sex and not a great deal of nudity, but the lesbianism and the unhealthy nature of some of the sexual obsessions probably bumped it into Category III. And the eroticism does get a bit steamy.

There’s an abundance of action and relentless mayhem. There’s also comedy, some if it pretty broad and some it pretty dark.

You have to accept that this film adheres to some of the conventions of Hong Kong action cinema. The good guys carry automatic pistols that appear to be equipped with 200 round magazines. A few dozen goons with machine-guns are no match for a feisty heroine with a handgun. The good guys can leap through the air as if they’re in a kung fu movie because this is a kung fu movie as well as being lots of other things. Hong Kong filmmakers did not stress too much about genre.

Director Clarence Fok adopts a wildly flamboyant visual style and the movie is supercharged with energy. Jing Wong’s script (he also produced) isn’t especially coherent but he knows how to pack his story with audience-pleasing ingredients and if things get confusing then that to some extent reflects the fact that the protagonist, Tinam, has no clear idea what is going on most of the time.

Naked Killer powers along and it has as much style and panache as any reasonable person could ask for. This is a wild ride and it’s highly recommended.

Naked Killer has not had a Blu-Ray release which is scandalous. It is still available on DVD.

Black Cat (1991)

Black Cat is a 1991 Hong Kong action movie although it was actually a Hong Kong-Canada co-production. It was shot in Canada, Hong Kong and Japan. Stephen Shin directed.

This is very very obviously a rip-off of Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita (1990). The premise is identical. Besson’s is the better movie but Black Cat is not without its virtues.

In a roadside diner somewhere in the U.S. a Chinese girl named Catherine (Jade Leung) has a run-in with a trucker. Catherine explodes into extreme violence and mayhem ensues. The cops arrive but taking Catherine into custody involves more mayhem and leaves a cop dead.

A very big very butch female guard at the local lock-up decides to give Catherine a beating. Catherine beats the daylights out of her. Catherine makes a daring escape which involves the expenditure of hundreds of rounds of small-arms ammunition before she is finally gunned down.

But Catherine isn’t dead. She’s been rescued. By the C.I.A.. They have a use for her. She’s an ultra-violent uncontrollable vicious sociopath but she’s a formidable killing machine. All they have to do is put a chip in her head so they can control her and they’ll have a super-assassin.

C.I.A. agent Brian (Simon Yam) will train her and be her controller. Her name is now Erica. Her code-name is Black Cat.

So yes, so far it’s a direct copy of La Femme Nikita.

Erica has been saved from what would have been about 80 years in prison but she is now a puppet. She’s an efficient assassin but in the past she has aways killed in the heat of the moment. In the heat of battle so to speak. Killing in cold blood isn’t quite so easy. But she learns how to do it.

The C.I.A. are very much the bad guys. As in real life most of their activities are in fact criminal. They’re like an organised crime syndicate but with fewer ethical scruples.

Then Erica falls in love. She had almost forgotten that she was a woman. But having a relationship is awkward when you’re a professional killer, especially for an outfit as sinister as the C.I.A.

Her early missions go smoothly. Then something goes wrong. Maybe it was bad luck. Maybe there was a leak. Maybe she was set up. Maybe it’s all part of a hopelessly complicated C.I.A. operation. In this world of paranoia you can never tell if you’re betrayed or not.

And while Erica gets lied to she does her share of lying as well.

There are some rough edges. The early scenes are supposed to be in America and everyone speaks English but the English dialogue was clearly written by someone who was not a native English speaker. It all just sounds bizarrely wrong.

The uneasy relationship between Erica and Brian lacks some of the subtlety and complexity of the equivalent relationship in La Femme Nikita.

The action scenes are superb. They’re wildly unrealistic. On her first mission Erica is up against about 140 bodyguards armed with machineguns. Naturally they don’t have a chance against one girl with a handgun. When she is pursued by the cops early on the cops are just wildly spraying gunfire in her general direction with no concern at all that dozens of innocent bystanders could get hit. But this is Hong Kong action cinema so you just accept it.

What matters is that the action scenes have hyper-kinetic energy and a real sense of urgency. Overall the visuals are impressive, creating the right mood of twistedness and paranoia.

Jade Leung does a fine job. Erica is a strange girl and she gets that across.

Simon Yam is very good also. From the start he’s a bit sinister but we’re not quite sure just how sinister he might turn out to be.

Compared to La Femme Nikita this movie is much more cyberpunk. It’s not the high-tech stuff (we never find out what the chip in her head actually does) but it’s more of a cyberpunk feel.

Black Cat isn’t as good as La Femme Nikita but it’s exciting and action-packed and it’s highly recommended.

The 88 Films Blu-Ray looks great and includes a bunch of extras.

Here's the review I did of La Femme Nikita a while back.

Naked Vengeance (1985)

Naked Vengeance is a 1985 erotic thriller and we’re clearly in direct-to-video territory here. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of 80s/90s direct-to-video movies are get fun. But then you see the dreaded words “directed by Cirio H. Santiago” in the credits and you know that this is going to be total schlock.

This is one of those movies that reeks of middle-class urbanites’ fear and loathing for working-class and rural Americans. It reflects their firm conviction that once you pass the city limits of a major burg such as L.A. everyone is an inbred low-life redneck thug. In this case it’s done in such a clumsy heavy-handed obvious way that it’s almost comical. But given that the director was a Filipino and the co-writer and producer was Indian maybe it just reflects an intense dislike for Americans.

Carla Harris (Deborah Tranelli) is a former actress married to a rich L.A. businessman. He is killed trying to save a young woman who was being attacked in a parking lot.

Carla flees back to her rural home town to live with her parents. Maybe she’s seeking security but as soon as she arrives it’s obvious that she regards the town and everyone in it with a wealthy city-dweller’s contempt for small-town America, and they hate her for being from the city.

Within a day half the men in the town in the town have tried to rape her.

The sheriff is unsympathetic. He thinks she’s a snooty stuck-up city rich bitch.

Of course the men in the town get together to go to her house (or rather her parents’ house) to teach her a lesson while her parents are away for the weekend and it ends in horror and mayhem.

Carla ends up in a mental hospital in a catatonic state. Or so it appears. But maybe she’s not so catatonic. And maybe she’s out for revenge. Maybe she even has plans for getting her revenge.

Lots of mayhem ensues.

This is in many ways a very bad movie. It’s technically a bit slapdash. Santiago’s direction is fairly uninspired. Don’t expect any visual flourishes. It’s all done by the numbers.

You could drive an 18-wheeler through the plot holes. After the night of mayhem at Carla’s parents’ house we’re expected to believe that the cops could not find a single piece of forensic evidence even after half a dozen guys had run amok. And apparently it never occurred to the cops to have Carla physically examined.

When Carla starts wreaking vengeance her victims take no precautions even though they know that she intends to kill them one by one.

Deborah Tranelli isn’t too bad but apart from her the acting is breathtakingly awful. It doesn’t help that every character is no more than a standard type, with zero depth.

On the other hand the murder scenes as Carla stalks her victims are done reasonably well. Santiago wasn’t much of a director but violent action scenes were something he could do. There’s plenty of carnage and gallons of blood but there’s also some real energy here and even a certain amount of imagination. The speedboat scene and scene at the car repair shop are grisly but rather good.

There’s some nudity and the scene in which Carla is violated by the bad guys would require a whole raft of trigger warnings today. It is a confronting scene but it is necessary. We have to feel that Carla has some justification for her bloody campaign of revenge.

There’s an amusing homage to the 1931 Frankenstein movie but I won’t spoil things by saying any more.

Naked Vengeance is sleazy and grimy but sleazy and grimy are not necessarily bad things. It’s a badly made movie with a very very thin script but with enough beer and popcorn you might get some fun out of it.

Shout! Factory’s Blu-Ray transfer looks pretty good.

Santiago did manage to make one genuinely entertaining movie, the pleasingly crazed Firecracker (AKA Naked Fist, 1981).

Blind Date (1984)

The first thing to be noted here is that this review concerns the 1984 Nico Mastorakis-directed Blind Date, not the 1987 Blake Edwards movie with the same title.

Mastorakis has made movies in both his native country, Greece, and in the United States. Blind Date was shot in Greece.

Mastorakis was one of those guys who figured out early on that the secret to making money out of modestly-budgeted movies was to get involved in the production side so he set up his own production company. On most of his movies he’s the producer, director and screenwriter.

In Blind Date we are introduced to Jonathon Ratcliff (Joseph Bottoms), a young American now working for an advertising agency in Athens. At the office he meets Claire (Kirstie Alley). They sleep together. Everything seeks to go fine in the bedroom. Jonathon seems like a fairly regular guy with no particular hang-ups.

Except that there was that girl at the photo shoot. He thought he knew her. Or at least he thought she was a girl he knew in the past.

Something terrible happened to that girl in his past. But it wasn’t his fault. That’s what he was told.

And then we see Jonathon with a pair of binoculars, watching people through their windows. He appears to be a Peeping Tom. Which is a bit odd. He has a hot girlfriend. And she apparently has no complaints about his performance in bed. Guys with hot girlfriends and normal sex lives are not usually peepers.

Then we find him watching a young couple making out in a car. The guy spots him and chases him. That’s when the accident happens. The bizarre and unlikely accident that leaves him blind. So we have a Peeping Tom who is now blind. I think they call that irony.

And there has been a brutal murder, of a woman.

There are some hints that things may not be as straightforward as they appear. We’re not sure what is really going on with Jonathon. Maybe it’s not simple voyeurism but something to do with his obsession with the woman from his past. We have no idea if Jonathon is actually involved in anything genuinely disturbing or violent. Or if he ever has been. All we have are hints that could point in those directions but we’re aware that perhaps we’re being led up the garden path.

Another murder takes place. We still have no clear indication that this has any connection whatsoever with Jonathon.

What we have here is a setup for an erotic thriller, or perhaps a slasher movie. And then the cyberpunk elements kick in. Jonathon is given bionic vision. It’s like very crude 80s video game graphics. He cannot see any details at all. He cannot identify individual people. But he can now get around. The problem is that he will find himself in dangerous situations where he needs to see details. He needs to be able to identify people’s faces. It’s a nifty thriller plot mechanic.

It’s incredibly interesting that Mastorakis was playing around with cyberpunk concepts in 1984, at a time when cyberpunk was in its infancy. The movie Blade Runner had established the cyberpunk aesthetic but content-wise it was not full-blown cyberpunk. Wililam Gibson’s short story Burning Chrome had been published in 1982 but it was not until 1984 that his novel Neuromancer put cyberpunk on the map. But here we have Mastorakis dealing with at least some of the themes of full-blown cyberpunk in a movie released early in 1984, a movie that was presumably already in production before Mastorakis could have had any opportunity to read Neuromancer.

Mastorakis did something similar a few years later, in his excellent In the Cold of the Night (1990). That movie starts out as an erotic thriller with neo-noir overtones and then veers into cyberpunk territory.

Mastorakis was very good at choosing locations that provided production value without spending much money. He uses Athens rather well. This is not tourist Athens. There are no shots of the Parthenon. This is the Athens of the wealthy middle class but it’s still clear that this is a movie that is not set in LA or London or Rome or any other familiar thriller locations. There’s just that very subtle hint of the exotic.

Joseph Bottoms is an adequate lead. He is ambiguous, which is what was needed. It’s not a demanding role for Kirstie Alley but she is very good.

There’s decent suspense and the action scenes are made interesting by the fact that at times we’re seeing things through Jonathon’s primitive video game graphic vision.

Blind Date is an enjoyable thriller made much more interesting by the proto-cyberpunk touches. Highly recommended.

The Shadow (1994)

The Shadow, released in 1994, was one of several 1990s attempts to kickstart superhero franchises. Other notable attempts were The Rocketeer, Dick Tracy and The Phantom. All these attempts failed which is a pity because they’re pretty good movies.

The Shadow began as a pulp magazine hero was was featured in several movies in the late 1930s.

The 1994 movie wisely adopts for a period setting although it looks more 1940s than 1930s.

The movie gives us a backstory. Lamont Cranston (Alec Baldwin) is a very nasty American bandit operating somewhere in central Asia. He ends up as a prisoner in a monastery where he learns to deal with his inner demons. 

He returns to America to become a force for good as a masked crime-fighter.

He has one super-power. He can cloud men’s minds. This gives him virtual invisibility - others are hypnotised into not seeing him.

Now he’s up against Shiwan Khan (John Lone), a descendant of Genghis Khan who has some similar hypnotic powers. Shiwan aims at world conquest. He plans to get hold of an atomic bomb. Such things do not yet exist (we assume the setting is the United States just before the Second World War) but Shiwan knows of a couple of eccentric genius scientists who may be able to invent one.

Lamont Cranston has one possibly useful ally. Margo Lane (Penelope Ann Miller) is the daughter of one of the crazy scientists but she appears to have telepathic powers. Or at least she has the ability to make telepathic contact with Lamont Cranston.

I have a few reservations about this movie but they’re more matters of personal taste than actual criticisms.

Alec Baldwin is seriously lacking in charisma and charm. But given that it was decided to make Lamont Cranston a very dark tortured character constantly battling the darkness within him his casting works reasonably well. He does the tragic brooding ominous thing very well and overall his casting works.

I’m not sure that Penelope Ann Miller has the necessary star power. Margo Lane is more than just the hero’s love interest. She becomes his active ally. This movie needs a really strong female lead, especially with such a taciturn leading man. Compared to Jennifer Connelly in The Rocketeer, Catherine Zeta-Jones in The Phantom or even Madonna in Dick Tracy she’s a little bland. I can’t help thinking of several other major female stars of the period who might have injected bit more life into the character. Nicole Kidman perhaps. Or Sharon Stone (who had demonstrated in King Solomon’s Mines that she could be a delightful adventure heroine). On the other hand Penelope Ann Miller is pretty, she’s likeable, she looks very good in period costumes and hairstyles and there’s nothing actually wrong about her performance.

At times the visuals are just slightly too reminiscent of Tim Burton’s Batman, but I must admit that The Shadow does the 1940s urban gothic thing very effectively.

Viewers unaware of The Shadow’s long pop culture history were likely to dismiss this movie as a mere Batman rip-off. In fact The Shadow as a character pre-dates Batman by a decade.

The biggest problem with these 90s attempts to launch new franchises was that these movies were horrendously expensive. It was not enough for them to do well at the box office. To justify a franchise they needed to be gigantic hits, which they weren’t.

Australian-born Russell Mulcahy was a solid choice to direct. One of this movie’s great strengths is that it doesn’t suffer from the problems that afflict so many movies of recent decades - bloat and poor pacing. It keeps powering along and there’s always something happening.

The Shadow is heavy on the urban gothic noir vibe but with moments influenced by old Hollywood musicals and even (as Penelope Ann Miller quite correctly points out in her interview) some nice screwball comedy touches. The dynamics of the Lamont Cranston-Margo Lane relationship are structured in a very screwball comedy way.

It’s very special effects-heavy but they are done extremely well. There’s some CGI (CIG was around but still in its infancy) but Mulcahy preferred practical effects and that’s mostly what we get. It really is a great-looking movie.

The Shadow delivers dazzling visuals, thrills and adventure. That’s more than enough to keep me happy. Highly recommended.

Sex and Fury (1973)

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A Kite (1998)

A Kite is a 1998 anime and its release history is rather interesting. It’s a two-episode OVA (intended for direct-to-video release). Given the subject matter this could never have been screened on television, either in the U.S. or Japan.

Releasing it in the U.S. raised some tricky problems. This is not an adult anime. It is not hentai. It does however contain hardcore sex senes. Yasuomi Umetsu conceived the idea of an anime about a girl assassin and he was also approached to do an X-rated anime. He decided to combine the two ideas. It was made as an X-rated OVA. The American distributors did not want to release it as hentai - there’s not enough sex for that market and it was clearly a very high-quality production that deserved a regular release as a violent action crime thriller. It’s not an adult anime but it is very much an anime aimed at a grown-up audience.

The answer to the U.S. distribution problem was to censor it. It was released and was successful. That censored version was later released in Japan as well. Then it was decided that it should get an uncut release. In fact this new version was not completely uncut. Then a few years later a totally uncut version was released on Blu-Ray.

As a result of all this there are about five different versions of A Kite. The most recent Discotek Blu-Ray includes three versions - the heavily cut version, a fairly uncut version and the totally uncut version.

The version reviewed here is the totally uncut one.

A Kite was clearly influenced to some extent by Luc Besson’s two 90s masterpieces, La Femme Nikita and Leon The Professional.

Sawa is a cute young woman. She’s a hitwoman. She’s deadly and she’s ruthless. She is given assignments by two men, Kanie and Akai. Akai is a cop. They also employ a young male assassin, Oburi.

How Sawa came to be a professional killer is connected to events in her past, and those events explain her complicated relationships to both Kanie and Akai.

Sawa and Oburi are attracted to each other, which is likely to have repercussions.

The emotional attraction between Sawa and Oburi is important in plot terms but the focus is very much on Sawa. Her responses to situations as they develop drive the plot.

A contract on a movie star causes major problems. The hit does not go smoothly.

And Sawa has confirmation of some suspicions about her past.

The violence is frequent, very brutal and very graphic. It’s both the extreme violence and the sex that make this an anime for grown-ups.

If you don’t mind the hardcore sex I recommend the uncut “International” version. The very complex power dynamics played out between Kanie, Akai, Oburi and Sawa are fuelled to a large extent by the sexual relationships Sawa has with both Kanie and Akai. They might not be healthy relationships but they’re very intense and the fact that Sawa may be a willing participant (although her feelings and motivations are very tangled and contradictory and complex) is important. It’s also important to realise that despite these tangled motivations she gets physical pleasure from the sex.

We also need to take account of the fact that Sawa has an agenda. She has a reason for being willing to engage in the sexual encounters. There is something she knows, something she has known in her heart for a long time, and for that reason she has to remain close to Kanie and Akai, and that means agreeing to be used as a sexual plaything.

This makes Sawa a much more interesting character and without the sex scenes her actions would be less comprehensible. Apart from being an action thriller this is an erotic thriller. My impression is that Mr Umetsu decided that if he had to include sexual content he might as well make it a pivotal ingredient in both plot and character terms.

Most reviewers just cannot cope with the idea that explicit sex might serve a purpose, that maybe the sex scenes needed to be raw and confronting and intense to get across to the viewer the extent to which Sawa has been drawn into this world of dangerous unhealthy twisted sex. Those scenes are supposed to be a kick in the guts.

Everything in this OVA was intended to be a kick in the guts. This is not a feelgood story.

A Kite is very disturbing. But in its own way it manages to be quite powerful. The power of a movie does not necessarily come from the plot (which in this case is fairly straightforward). Often the power comes from the atmosphere, the tone and the sheer intensity and shock value of the imagery. That’s where A Kite scores highly. If you’re too timid to watch the uncut version then you’ll be seeing a routine violent action thriller. If you’re prepared to brave the uncut version you’ll be seeing something a lot more disturbing and a lot more hard-hitting.

A Kite is highly recommended, but it’s not for the faint-hearted.

Someone’s Watching Me (1978)

Someone’s Watching Me is an early John Carpenter film (he wrote and directed it). It’s a made-for-TV movie and it’s a suspense thriller.

This is obviously Carpenter doing a riff on Hitchcock’s Rear Window. This is Carpenter’s voyeurism film.

Leigh Michaels (Lauren Hutton) has just arrived in LA to start a job as a live TV director. Using a generous bonus from her previous job she takes a luxury apartment in the swanky Arkham Towers (and yes I’m sure the Lovecraft reference is deliberate). This is an enormous high rise apartment building and it’s very high-tech. It has elaborate security.

But as Leigh finds out she is not safe there at all.

She gets creepy nuisance phone calls. Not threatening or obscene, but subtly creepy. She gets mysterious notes delivered to her. She receives expensive gifts, supposedly from a travel company. She starts to suspect that this guy knows all about her. He knows everything that she does.

The scary part is that he makes no direct threats. She has no idea what he actually wants. He might be a relatively harmless weirdo. He might be very dangerous. There’s no way of knowing.

It takes her a while but eventually she figures out that the guy is watching her from another apartment building. But it’s a high-rise building as well. This guy could be in any one of hundreds of apartments.

The police can’t help because she doesn’t know who the guy is and he has not yet broken any actual laws.

Her new boyfriend Paul (David Birney) is sympathetic but he’s a philosophy professor not an action hero.

Her best friend Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau) is very supportive but it’s difficult for any of them to do anything really useful.

Of course everybody who has ever discussed the subject of movies about voyeurism has made the very obvious point that all movies are voyeuristic - we are watching other people’s lives. And of course a film director is not just watching the lives of the characters but also manipulating them. An interesting twist that Carpenter adds here is that Leigh is a television director, so she herself is a kind of voyeur and a kind of manipulator.

Technically this movie is impressive. Carpenter does a more than competent job as director. He understands pacing and he understands the basic techniques of suspense. The suspense scenes work. The basic setup is very promising.

There are however major flaws. There is not a single interesting characters in the movie, and not one of the characters really comes to life. By the end of the movie we do not know a single thing about Leigh. She’s a complete blank. Her apartment looks like a hotel room. It does not look like someone actually lives there. There are no personal touches.

Her friend Sophie is pleasant but she really just functions as a plot device.

Leigh’s boyfriend Paul is a harmless nonentity. We learn nothing about him. There is no erotic or romantic heat between Leigh and Paul. Even after they begin an affair they behave more like casual acquaintances.

This is an extraordinarily lifeless sexless movie. Maybe Carpenter wanted to avoid making an exploitation movie but the problem is that as a result the stalker’s motivation remains inexplicable. There is not the slightest indication that he has even the mildest sexual interest in her. So what is his motivation? OK, he wants to control her, but why? His notes to her are polite but impersonal. Maybe he hates women, but we get no indications that this is so. Maybe he has a romantic obsession with her, but we also get no indications that this might be the case. Maybe he feels powerless? Maybe, but we’re offered no evidence.

The idea that the stalker wants to stalk Leigh from a safe distance and is afraid to get close to her is a good one. Unfortunately it isn’t developed.

The vagueness of his motivation somehow makes the threat less scary.

It’s difficult to judge the acting since the characters are so underwritten.

I’m a huge admirer of Carpenter’s work but I’m inclined to think that realistic thrillers about real people were definitely not his forte. It’s easy to see why he moved rapidly away from this type of movie.

Someone’s Watching Me is well-crafted and reasonably entertaining but there’s something missing. Carpenter completists will want to seek it out and it is interesting as a movie made before Carpenter really found his voice, but it is very much lesser Carpenter.

The Scream Factory Blu-Ray offers both 1.33:1 and widescreen aspect ratios. Both look terrific. 1.33:1 is how it was originally broadcast.

Léon: The Professional (1994)

Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional came out in 1994 and while it’s not a sequel to his La Femme Nikita it is a kind of spinoff and the two films have lots of thematic affinities.

Both movies deal with professional killers, and with people for whom killing is a vocation rather a job. Besson took that same central idea and came up with two different stories which complement each other. La Femme Nikita deals with a young woman, Nikita, who is a vicious killer and is recruited by the French Government as an assassin. She is totally emotionally disconnected in every way. Léon: The Professional deals with a middle-aged man, Léon, a hitman who is also totally emotionally disconnected in every way.

Léon is a very successful hitman. He refers to himself as a cleaner. He has made a lot of money but lives in a grotty apartment. 12-year-old Mathilda (Natalie Portman) lives in the same building. Her home life is miserable. Her father is a dope dealer. Her entire family is wiped out by DEA agents led by an agent named Stansfield (Gary Oldman). Even by the standards of murderous corrupt cops Stansfield is a nasty piece of work. His fellow DEA officers are brutal thugs.

The DEA officers had intended to murder the whole family but Léon saves Mathilda.

Now he doesn’t know what to do with her. He knows nothing about kids. He doesn’t want a kid. He is a loner. And Mathilda knows what he does for a living. He should kill her. It would be safer. But he can’t. He’s an ethical hitman. He only kills people who are criminals anyway and he never kills women or children.

So he’s stuck with her.

Mathilda wants to learn to be a cleaner. She thinks it would be a cool way to make a living. And she wants revenge against her family’s killers. She’d like Léon to kill them but if he won’t she’s prepared to do the job herself. She just needs Léon to teach her to be an efficient killer. Léon begins her training. She learns quickly.

An emotional bond develops between these two troubled loners.

And eventually there will be a showdown with Stansfield, which is likely to end in a bloodbath (and it does).

This is in a sense a coming-of-age movie but not in a sexual sense. Mathilda’s childhood came to an abrupt blood-soaked end and she was hurled into the grown-up world. Not the regular grown-up world but a grown-up world of outsiders and crime and corrupt cops. It’s a lot for a 12-year-old to cope with but she doesn’t have much choice.

It’s also in a way a coming-of-age story for Léon, who is emotionally stunted and now has to deal with the fact that he is now responsible for a kid. As Mathilda tells him, he saved her life so now he’s responsible for her. Their emotional connection is dealt with in a very sensitive and touching way.

The original cut ran for 135 minutes. After negative responses at previews in the U.S. it was cut by 25 minutes. The theatrical release was the cut version. Besson prefers to call the longer version the Extended Version rather than the Director’s Cut.

The Extended Version would have been too much for mainstream American audiences to cope with, partly because it clearly shows Mathilda as an accessory to a series of murders and partly because it explores the relationship between Léon and Mathilda in greater depth.

It’s difficult to see why anyone would object to the Extended Version. There is absolutely no sex and no nudity and not the slightest suggestion of a sexual relationship between Léon and Mathilda. It is obvious that Mathilda has developed a major crush on Léon. She does some very serious flirting. Léon makes it very clear that nothing is going to happen between them.

The problem of course is that in the U.S. there always has been and always will a knee-jerk reaction to any movie that deals with human relationships in a grown-up complex way. Besson was undoubtedly wise to agree to the savage cuts for the U.S. theatrical release. The original cut is subtle and nuanced but the subtlety and the nuance would not have been appreciated by mainstream American critics.

I think the Extended Version is clearly the superior version.

Jean Reno is excellent. Léon is a killer but he really does have ethical standards, which is more than can be said for the law-enforcement officers in this tale. Léon is a tragic figure, a basically decent guy who has never been able to come to terms with life.

Natalie Portman is superb.

As for Gary Oldman, his clownish absurd performance almost sinks the movie (as he almost sank Besson's The Fifth Element).

There are some memorable action scenes.

Léon: The Professional is a great movie with a definite neo-noir vibe. Very highly recommended and a fine companion piece to La Femme Nikita.