Three Films Make A Post: WARNING: If you've ever been hypnotized, do not come alone!

Devil in the Dark (2017): Tim Brown’s film concerns two estranged brothers trying to rebuild bridges by going on a camping trip in an area that has a dark connection to something strange that happened to the younger brother when they were children. Something monstrous has been calling to them.

This is one of these perfectly decent, competently realized horror films that just never manage to truly capture anything dark, interesting, or insightful, plodding along well enough through its running time without ever hitting the right spot that would turn the film exciting in any way, shape or form. In this particular case, I’d argue this would have been a better film if it had started from where it stops and went onwards from there (probably with strategic flashbacks), because the last minute or so actually does manage to capture the imagination.

The Creature Below (2016): This British Lovecraftian indie is not as slick as Devil in the Dark but felt much more interesting than the US film. While the story isn’t particularly original when you know your Lovecraft pastiches, there aren’t terribly many long-form films going that way. Director Stewart Sparke manages to tell a tale of cosmic horror on a personal scale, trusting in a good performance of lead Anna Dawson to portray her character’s slow descent into properly Lovecraftian madness. There’s some awkwardness with a not exactly ideal sound mix, the special effects aren’t always great (unless in those moments when they absolutely are), and the verbatim quotes from HPL in the dialogue don’t really work, but these aren’t exactly show stoppers in indie horror of the really independent sort. Otherwise, the film is atmospheric and flows well and even ends on a high note in one of its best shot scenes. Okay, and on iffy CGI, but I didn’t find myself caring about that at all.

House of Wax (1953): André de Toth’s film is probably the best wax figure cabinet horror movie ever made (which is actually a surprisingly strong field as sub-sub-genres go), featuring as it does silly 3D gimmicks, what is one of the founding – and thoroughly great - performances of Vincent Price’s career as a horror actor (I do count his radio performances, nit pickers), an early larger – and pleasantly creepy - outing for Charles Bronson before he took that name, comic relief that is often not terribly odious, a wrily presented sense of the macabre, and a use of colour in a period set horror film that to me seems to prefigure things like Corman’s Poe cycle or the part of the Italian gothics that were shot in colour.

De Toth being de Toth, there’s also quite a bit of barely suppressed subtext concerning eroticism and male obsession with an imaginary ideal (potentially sublimated into art) that really shouldn’t work with the gimmicky nature of the kind of cinema that uses ping pong balls swirling at the camera to really prove its 3D merits but does.

In short: Springfield Rifle (1952)

For a Western directed by the great André de Toth, I was actually a pretty disappointed by this espionage piece taking place during the US Civil War. There’s a surprising lack of complexity to the film’s characters, and even protagonist Gary Cooper’s central moral dilemma (you can’t have a 50s Western without one) is rather clear-cut to me, with the film’s script underplaying and undervaluing copious opportunities to give more depth to the proceedings. The films seems to see no place for an actual character arc for Cooper’s Major Kearney, leaving us with a story about a man who starts the tale it tells just as he begins, with no changes to him at all in between.

Then there’s the Gary Cooper factor, the man’s very personal type of blandness that, as always, sees him saying his lines, scrunching his face up from time to time, but never developing much of a personality. Who is his Major Lex Kearney? Neither Cooper’s performance nor the script seem willing (or able?) to tell, which leaves quite the hole where the film’s emotional and intellectual heart should be.

Still, while this is a minor de Toth film, even working from a bland script that ends in pretty unendurable fawning about the (oh so wonderful, so buy one) Springfield Rifle (capital letters totally necessary), the director knew how to make an entertaining movie, even if there was no room for depth, so Springfield Rifle’s big set pieces really deserve the descriptor of “rousing”, with beautiful photography, excellent staging and the kind of visual imagination that should have been served by a better script. Plus, the film features one of Beloved Horror Icon Lon Chaney Jr.’s Western appearances as a rather dumb main henchman.

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Three Films Make A Post: IF YOU HAVE THE GUTS, HE WANTS THEM!

Body Count (1995): Despite a promising beginning, this (kinda) action movie about Sonny Chiba and his girlfriend Brigitte Nielsen murdering themselves through a "special" police department with members like Robert Davi, Steven Bauer and Jan-Michael Vincent to find out who of them first hired Sonny to kill a gangster boss and then set him up to be arrested, soon turns into a bit of a slog. It's the kind of action movie where the sporadic action scenes are actually decently done, but in between, there's a bunch of boring and irrelevant dialogue and disinterested acting by people who could do better. The only thing that kept me awake enough to not miss the curious finale in which Chiba steals streetcar as most inappropriate escape vehicle imaginable were the horrors the film's costume department inflicted on him and Nielsen. Is that a glittering baseball cap on your head, Chiba-sensei?

Crawlspace (2012): This Australian low budget movie has nothing to do with the other movies called Crawlspace (in case you're like me and always fear an unnecessary remake). It's about some soldiers with crappy call signs crawling through the mad science base of the Australian/US governments - which incidentally only consists of various sizes of crawlspaces - and having trouble with the mad science experiments running loose. This is one of those SF/horror films that would have only needed a script that's a little sharper, and acting that's a little less clichéd to become actually good. As it stands, the movie is competently done and entertaining enough as long as you don't think too much (or at all) about it, but too often falls needlessly back on clichés and underdeveloped ideas.

Play Dirty (1969): House favourite Andre de Toth directs a war movie following a britizized (it's a real word, I'm sure) Dirty Dozen formula starring Michael Caine and Nigel Davenport. The film contains an astonishing amount of cynicism and bitterness towards war, humanity, and the British class system. Play Dirty features its share of tight action, but below the very slight veneer of "war is an adventure" lies a deep undercurrent of loathing the film likes to express with a sarcastic sneer one can hardly ignore. It's an impressively effective movie at that, and as far from any propaganda bullshit as I can imagine.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,australian movies,british movies,in short,action,sf,horror,war,sonny chiba,robert davi,brigitte nielsen,jonathan dix,andre de toth,michael caine,nigel davenport

Bride of Three Films Make A Post

House of Bugs (2005): Part of a series of short movies based on horror manga by the glorious Kazuo Umezu. This one was directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (whose tone is usually quite the opposite of Umezu's) and tells the story of a broken marriage that climaxes in a metaphorical or not so metaphorical bug transformation by way of Kafka and Rashomon. It is very much a Kurosawa film with his typical subtle aesthetic and the director's usual themes (alienation, the inability to empathize, broken families etc) and therefore quite excellent.

The Bounty Hunter (1954): The story of an infamous bounty hunter played by Randolph Scott coming to a small town to catch three robbers about whom he knows next to nothing and making the whole town more than a little nervous in the process feels a little slight, even though it has its share of darker flourishes. The plot just works out a little too pat, making this most certainly not the best cooperation between director Andre de Toth and actor Randolph Scott. Not that it would be a bad Western, it's just that de Toth and Scott seem to be coasting on their talents instead of straining them.

Dead & Breakfast (2004): A bunch of dweebs on the way to a wedding strand somewhere in Texas. "Comedy" ensues, until the locals get possessed by demons and zombified, which leads to the sort of gory "comedy" that would very much like to see itself standing in the tradition of early Peter Jackson or Sam Raimi, just with the minor drawback that it is about as funny as Bela Lugosi meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. At least I have a new example now when trying to explain the phrase "painfully unfunny". Oh, and the people who compare this to Shaun of the Dead will be taken care of soon, a dark and ancient power promised me.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,japanese movies,horror,comedy,western,in short,randolph scott,andre de toth,kazuo umezu,kiyoshi kurosawa

Day of the Outlaw (1959)

The film takes place at the beginning of winter in the Old West, in a very small frontier town in Wyoming, right at the End of Trails (I think the mythical qualities of the snowy landscape warrant the use of a mythical term the film itself also uses, although probably without the capitalization). For years, the place has been dominated by the rancher Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan, mixing the mythical dimensions of his character and the way it feels being an actual human being in an incredible performance), who is mainly responsible for the relative peace and stability in the region - he "cleaned" the place with his own gun, more or less.

But in the last year or two, farmers have begun to settle in the place, bringing with them a different notion of civilization and law as well as fences that make Starrett's life more difficult (and in his worldview presumably less free) than it used to be.

Matters aren't helped by the fact Starrett had an affair with Helen Crane (Tina Louise), the wife of the farmers' spokesman Hal Crane (Alan Marshall). She ended the affair and decided to stay with her husband, but seems to love both men, if in different ways. Starrett definitely still loves her and knows he can't have her as long as her husband is alive, giving him one more reason to want to see Crane dead, even if he never would admit this to himself.

Everybody knows that Crane hasn't got a chance in hell in a gunfight against Starrett. The showdown between the rivals comes unexpectedly fast. Or would come, if a gang of bandits wouldn't ride into town right when the shooting is about to start and turn the film into something quite different from what the beginning made me expect.

The bandits have no trouble in disarming the surprised townies - after all, the few armed men around (and the town is so small one has trouble calling it one) were lining up in the saloon to kill each other.

These bandits are of the unpleasant type that would later become dominant in the Spaghetti Western, sadistic maniacs who are more interested in the maiming and raping, but less in the pillaging part of their jobs. Still, they only plan on staying for a day to rest and find treatment for their leader "Captain" Bruhn (Burl Ives, in another great performance, seeming at once sympathetic and the cruel bastard who can keep the kind of men he employs in check), who was wounded in their last business excursion.

Bruhn knows very well that his men are maniacs and keeps them in line by pure force of will. Unfortunately he's so badly wounded the town's only doctor - a veterinarian - doesn't give him much time anymore.

What follows are some of the things you might expect, yet played out with the emphasis not on the moments and concepts you might expect. Starrett and Crane, for example, are not slowly growing to be friends, instead some very subtly done scenes between Starrett and Helen let him take a look at his motives for hating her husband so much and, as the film puts it "not liking what I see".

As already mentioned, much praise has to go to the actors who, while Ryan and Ives are especially impressive, all do some excellent work in showing their inner life more through small gestures than through dialogue.

It is of course quite possible that none of those gestures had made it into the film without director Andre De Toth, whose Western are products of a technically very proficient director without the kind of showoffishness that puts itself before the movie. Day of the Outlaw is a very strictly composed film, full of quiet and slow beauty and a passion that shows itself especially when not much seems to be happening on screen. There is a method to show the psychological dimension of occurrences through the rhythms of editing and the way the camera moves or sometimes doesn't move and De Toth seems to me to be one of this method's main protagonists in the Western movie, showing a confidence in his approach that leaves me in something like awe.

Over the whole running time, I didn't see anything on screen that wasn't supposed to be as I saw it. I don't use the word "perfection", unless I describe something as "perfectly awful", but Day of the Outlaw puts me on the brink of using it.

 

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