Three Films Make A Post: He's Six Feet Six Inches of Dynamite. She's Crazy. Absolutely Crazy.

La Funeraria aka The Funeral Home aka The Undertaker’s Home (2020): Mauro Iván Ojeda’s Argentinean horror film is about a mortuary business that’s haunted by ghosts the undertaker and his family just have to arrange themselves with as parts of their normal life, until they can’t anymore. It is an interesting mixture of Weird family drama, with relatively typical horror movie beats but also a handful of genuinely original ideas about the nature of life, death and love; a film that takes some very un-generic decisions on what to show and what not to; and a bleak film whose friendlier elements in the climax make it feel even bleaker.

La Tulipe noire aka The Black Tulip (1964): Based on Dumas in title only, Christian-Jaque’s French Revolution-set swashbuckler with Alain Delon playing two very different brothers manages to be a fun blast of a film as befits an entry into its genre on-screen, but also has undertones of surprising bleakness (one can argue, also perfectly in keeping with the genre as it should be) that seem to mirror the nature of its main characters, as well as that of the French Revolution itself. Of course, the old order as represented by the sadistic clowns ruling over the part of the French countryside the film takes place in is the main enemy here, and the film knows what its genre is for and what not too well to be too critical of the Revolution. But thanks to the bitter and cynical of the two twins, there’s also the shade of the bitter and cynical turn the revolution itself would take visible.

Special Delivery (1976): In this film by the often great Paul Wendkos, the plot about a war vet robber’s (Bo Svenson) attempt to get at the loot he had to deposit in a mailbox while on the run from the police, encountering a young divorcee looking for herself (Cybill Shepherd) and finding quite a talent for crime and love, really isn’t the point of the film. Instead, Wendkos uses the single street in LA and a couple of places outside of it to create a microcosm of the nightly side of the city and the encounters our leads have in it, with characters like the would-be motorcycle gang of rapist thugs of a young Jeff Goldblum(!), the local crime boss (Robert Ito), and so on and so forth. It’s rather a lot like a road movie that takes place in only one stop on the way.

Apart from Wendkos direction that makes a lot out of people watching other people from unexpected angles, the film also recommends itself by the great actors. Svenson – not always a favourite of mine – turns a character personable and interesting who could be a simple thug, and Shepherd creates a woman who is at once driven by doubt and insecurity and capable, courageous and determined, while also being charming as hell.

In short: Who Killed Santa Claus? (1941)

aka The Killing of Santa Claus

Original title: L'assassinat du Père Noël

I am usually pretty good coping with the idiosyncrasies of older films and their stylistic and tonal peculiarities (being rather peculiar and of my time myself), but Christian-Jaque’s film about a small, Christmas-related crime wave in a quaint French mountain village full of shitty, yet intensely melodramatic people has me beat. How ever much of a classic it may be in its native country, to me, it turns out to be the movie equivalent of Christmas shaped chalk on my mental blackboard.

However, before I start complaining, I do have to lead with the simple fact that the film is utterly beautiful to look at, full of moody, yet clear shots of the snowy village by night, spirited camera moves and many a picturesquely staged scene.

It is more than just a bit of a shame that all this beauty is only ever in service to most bad clichés about classic French movies come to life. Apart from the supposed perpetual horniness of French cinema, nearly every prejudice against the country’s cinema, like most prejudices usually not coming up at all in French films, is there and accounted for. So the film is full of strained, stilted and absurdly melodramatic acting by a horde of camera hogs, too enchanted by the bloviating, full of itself dialogue to show restraint when it is actually asked for. Every single character seems to be permanently teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown, only a bad morning away from breaking out into operatic “mad” behaviour on the slightest provocation. Everybody is also a total asshole, though the film itself really doesn’t seem to notice. Children are either insufferable brats or the source of the kind of mawkish sentimentality which makes the Lassie films look subtle. Why anybody should care for anyone here, the film never deigns to explain.

But then, the film itself does feel very much in love with its own intellect and importance, telling its simple and not terribly interesting nor well-constructed tale of crime and village life with grand gestures and in a tone that suggests we are indeed witnessing important insights concerning the human condition. What exactly there is to be so proud about, the film alas never deigns to explain to the lowly viewer.


Some of this is clearly meant as comedy but it’s really rather difficult to find anything of what’s going on here funny in anything else but the inadvertent way. Though, frankly, the only way to make this one funny to me would probably be a final scene that sees the damn village burned to the ground.