Imperial Tomb Raiders (1973)

The late 19th Century. The bandit gang – small army, really – of Chin Da-Kui (Tso Yen-Yung), the owner of the biggest damn fur hat you’ve ever seen, is hanging around a village, making it impossible for Liu (Yuan Shen), the official in the next big town, to collect taxes (the subtitles speak of “collecting rent”, but I’m doubtful). Liu has hired famed bandit killer Luo Qi (Wang Yong) to get rid of the problem, but the gentleman appears to have not survived a fight with the bandit leaders.

Even worse, the bandits have bigger plans. Turns out the Liu family’s old Nanny Wang (Chang Ping-Yu) was once an Imperial maid, buried alive together with some of her colleagues to accompany the Emperor’s favourite concubine into death in the lavish, secret tomb hidden in the mountainous country where the village is situated. Apart from dead maids and a dead concubine, the tomb also holds an incredibly valuable pearl – and Nanny, who managed to escape from the tomb, is the only living soul who knows where exactly this tomb is hidden. Somehow, the bandits have gotten wind of her knowledge, and are willing to do rather a lot to get at the old woman carrying it.

While Liu has no clue what to do about the problem, his rather more proactive, if perhaps not terribly sensible, daughter Qiao-Er (Tso Yen-Yung) and her four maids – all excellent fighters with guns, bows and martial arts – grab Nanny Wang and go off to get rid of the bandits.

It’s good that they are capable fighters, for while Luo Qi turns out to be alive and of great help, there are fights, dirty tricks, betrayal and an instable tomb for them to cope with.

I have always assumed that media about Imperial tomb raiding were a Chinese pop-cultural obsession of this millennium (before the censors started complaining, of course). At least, I hadn’t encountered any Chinese or Hong Kong movies featuring tomb raiding action of this style before Taiwanese director Ting Shan-Hsi’s Shaw Brothers film Imperial Tomb Raiders. So apparently, I have been wrong again.

Though, to be fair, despite its title, the film isn’t as tomb-centric as one might expect – most of its short and sharp runtime is spent on a siege scenario, with Qiao-Er’s group and Luo Qi holed up in a farm, fighting the bandits and their dirty tricks. The tomb only really comes into play in a short flashback to Nanny Wang’s escape (including her surviving by eating snakes), and then for the film’s climax, and there’s little of the supernatural or the bizarre traps that would turn up in later tomb raiding films. The tomb, however, is a very nice set and makes a good backdrop for the climactic fight.

Speaking of fighting, even though the choreography is rougher than usual for a Shaw Brothers production, the mix of guns and martial arts does make for an interesting series of fights, fun by virtue of being atypical for the way the Shaws handled this sort of thing otherwise. But then, this was shot in Taiwan instead of Hongkong, so I suspect Ting (who also wrote script) had a bit more freedom here than directors working directly on the Shaw lot.

This film also features few of the usual Shaw stars and bit players – which is its biggest weakness, for while nobody here is unconvincing, nobody is excessively charismatic or puts much of a stamp on the very basic characters featured, either.

That doesn’t mean Imperial Tomb Raiders isn’t a fun film – it’s always interesting, atypical, and features elements – like the siege scenario, the tomb business – that weren’t typical for martial arts cinema of the time and place.

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Mojin: The Lost Legend aka 鬼吹燈之尋龍訣 (2015): A trio of traditional-official tomb raiders return from dubious retirement in America to China to rob a particularly mysterious tomb. This high on very digital looking effects adventure directed by Wuershan (and based on one part of a long and complicated sounding series of novels) is a whole lot of fun if you like this kind of blockbuster at all.

It’s like a Chinese Indiana Jones with more supernatural action, some surprisingly snarky remarks towards the Cultural Revolution (though it isn’t called by name), and quite a bit of the sense of anything goes that made Hong Kong cinema so enticing but not generally translated to mainland China cinema like this. This really has everything and the kitchen sink in it: romance, zombies, Shu Qi, Shu Qi cursing a lot, complicated mechanical traps, a weird cult, bizarre humour, Shu Qi, and more good and bad ideas than most film trilogies.

Mojin: The Worm Valley aka 雲南蟲谷 (2018): And three years later this happened: none of the actors nor the director of the original return, and with them also leaves the spirit of fun of the first film, as well as parts of the budget. There’s something rote and mechanical about the whole affair – this is pretty much the empty and lifeless spectacle too many people pretend all blockbuster style cinema is, lacking in fun, joy, and the ability to actually deliver the promised rollercoaster ride as a rollercoaster ride.

Deadful Melody aka 六指琴魔 (1994): Welcome to 90s wuxia land. Various martial world weirdoes attempt to steal a magical lute that also happens to be the most powerful weapon this side of your favourite magical sword, while a mysterious, sometimes cross-dressing woman played of course by Brigitte Lin Ching-Hsia takes bloody vengeance for the death of her family. Also featured are a not terribly young Yuen Biao as the young hero and Carina Lau Ka-Ling as his love interest and comic relief.

The rest of the film mostly consists of a breathless series of shots of people flying, making shit explode with their Qi, a lot of twirling and a good amount of flying body parts, blue fog, blue light, blue everything, all presented by director Ng Min-Kan with the manic energy of Joel Silver on a real coke binge. This is absolutely awe-inspiring if you enjoy this wuxia revival as much as I do, and aren’t afraid of headaches.

Brave Red Flower of the North (1970)

Original title: Nihon jokyo-den: makka na dokyo-bana 日本女侠伝 真赤な度胸花

Following the death of her estranged father in Hokkaido, Yuki (Junk Fuji) travels to the frontier he tried to tame by building a horse-breeding based economy where attempts at farming had not worked out too well. At least in his opinion.

The local horse-breeding association wants her to take her father’s place as their head to counter attempts of the yakuza-industrial complex – enemies in many a ninkyo eiga of the genre’s late stages – to take control of the area.

At first, Yuki isn’t too happy about that, but she’s played by Fuji at the heights of her star power, so she’s too morally upright not to decide to finish what her father started.

Obviously, the other side is not going to play fair, so quite a bit of violence and suffering lies ahead until our heroine is allowed to commit her own, final acts of violence against her enemies. Along the way, she befriends some ainu, breaks hearts, and has one of those longing with burning gazes and hot virtuous speeches relationships of the style we know and love with a somewhat mysterious stranger (Ken Takakura). Of course, the man has reasons to hate her family, yet oh! the honour! and oh! the barely repressed sexuality! It’s ninkyo eiga relationship perfection.

During my recent illness, I somehow stumbled into a Junko Fuji ninkyo eiga phase. Because fever is that way, quite a few of those films have by now dissolved in my mind into a mix of tears, blood and close-ups of Fuji’s face, so there will, alas, not be a series of write-ups of all eight Red Peony Gambler movies coming up this year.

In any case, this late period of ninkyo at Toei, centring around the incredible Fuji, the house troupe of character actors, romantic male leads like the triple threat of Takakura, Bunta Sugawara and Koji Tsuruta and great directors like Tai Kato, Kosaku Yamashita, Shigero Ozawa and this films Yasuo Furuhata is an incredible group of movies. Between 1968 and her too early retirement in 1972 (and her later reappearance as Sumiko Fuji), Fuji specifically does not appear to have starred in a single weak or even just middling film – everything she appeared in was good to golden.

Typically, the ninkyo eiga version of the yakuza film is treated as a rather limited genre, with too many strict beats to hold to, conservative and old-fashioned in its mores. But when you watch a lot of these films in close succession, you can actually see how different they are working inside their handful of rules. As long as your heroes and heroines are chivalric and everything ends in a ritualized bit of slaughter, there’s rather a lot of different things to be done in-between. It certainly helps that yakuza in the realm of the ninkyo does not need mean gambler or gangster, but also concerns all kinds of people that are part of the non-farming working class – coal-mining, transporting businesses and the entertainment world are all part of this world in one way or the other.

Or, in this case, horse-breeding. Stylistically, this is actually a successful attempt at mixing the ninkyo with the western (or, given the weather and geographical location, the northern), featuring the kind of musical score that mixes typical Toei style with Italian western trumpets, and features lots of horse-riding, and an emphasis on gunplay in the western style (though Fuji does get a couple of aikido moments, as is her right).

As many good ninkyo of this phase, this isn’t a film of quite as clear-cut morals than you’d expect. Yuki is as morally upright as any Fuji character – which only works because the actress is utterly convincing as the impossible ideal she is tasked to play again and again in these films – but the world around her isn’t quite as clear-cut. Her father certainly had good intentions, but we will learn he used methods not unlike those now utilized by Yuki’s enemies – the frontier business isn’t a clean one even with the best of intentions.

As always when Fuji and Takakura are together, there’s an impressive erotic tension for a genre whose loves are nearly always doomed and only seldom allowed to be expressed physically – there’s a reason these two were in so many movies together.

Three Films Make A Post: This summer, justice leaves its mark.

The Mask of Zorro (1998): Comparable to the French Musketeer movies of recent years, Martin Campbell’s version of Zorro drapes the old swashbuckler/pulp saw into the form of a then-contemporary kind of blockbuster. Campbell does so with aplomb: everything is big and pretty (or ugly in a big and pretty way), the jokes are silly, the characters broad and fun, everyone is impossibly hot, and the action has a slick sheen. The film sets out to entertain and puts every single cent of its not inconsiderable budget in service of that single goal.

Campbell is very good at this sort of thing, so there’s never a feeling of this being a mechanical exercise in audience wishfulfilment, but rather one of being sucked into the genuine enjoyment of living through a thrilling tale.

Carousel aka Karusell (2023): This Swedish slasher by Simon Sandquist, on the other hand, doesn’t have much of a budget; worse still, it also lacks in spirit and cleverness, and so goes through its version of the usual slasher shenanigans with the kind of boring professionalism that’s the enemy of all fun, at least to my mind.

Personal pet peeve in this sort of project: a film wasting way too much time and energy on a background story so simple and straightforward, filmmakers with more of an understanding of their genre and craft would have left well enough alone after one expository flashback. Also, plot twists are not actually a necessary part of each and every damn screenplay.

MadS (2024): Not flashbacks, and only the barest minimum of exposition, is to be found in David Moreau’s one-shot outbreak movie. The film propels an audience and its shifting protagonists through a night of violence that always teeters on the edge of the surreal with such vigour and energy, perfectly fair complaints about a lack of substance are also perfectly beside the point.

This is all about momentum and creating a very specific mood of ever-increasing insanity, like the most perfectly choregraphed St. Vitus’s Dance you’d never expect to actually encounter on screen.

The Primevals (2023)

After Sherpa kill a rampaging yeti in Tibet, a tiny, not quite official expedition, lead by Dr Claire Collier (Juliet Mills), goes on the look-out for more of them. Apart from Collier, the group consists of retired big game hunter – as well as owner of one of the best names imaginable – Rondo Montana (Leon Russom), long-time yeti-believer and male lead Matt Connor (Richard Joseph Paul), anthropology student Kathy (Walker Brandt) and yeti hater (and local guide) Siku (Tai Thai).

There’s more than a curious yeti rampage or two going on, though, and soon, the expedition lands in the middle of (Edgar Rice)Burroughs country.

Apparently mostly shot in 1994, this labour of love directed by special effects expert David Allen (who died in 1999), was left unfinished on the shelves of Full Moon pictures. Years after a crowd-funding campaign to finish the film, it has finally been released.

And it is very much a film made with someone exactly like me as its ideal audience in mind. There’s an immense sense of love on screen for a lot of the best things in life: Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion animation, pulp adventure in the spirit of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Doug McClure adventures, the 80s adventure movie boom, the Shaver Mystery (or similar fun Fortean matter), and Nigel Kneale read as pulp.

All of these things come to life again on screen here in a way that’s obviously pretty nostalgic, but also realized with the kind of enthusiasm and craft that transcends mere nostalgia to turn this not into a copy of the tradition but a genuine, breathing part of it.

Sure, one could nit-pick that the film’s portrayal of non-Western cultures isn’t great, the acting doesn’t always hit the mark completely – though Mills in the scientist role typically reserved for a man is great, as is Leon Russom talking about the eyes of dying giraffes – and that there’s a little too much monster-less slack between the incredible Sherpa vs yeti start of the movie. However, all of this is counteracted by the sheer joyfulness of the project, its lack of self-conscious irony and all the love and care that has been put into every second on screen. Not bad for a movie that nearly wouldn’t have existed in finished form at all.

King Kong vs Godzilla (1962)

Original title: Kingu Kongu tai Gojira キングコング対ゴジラ

While a reawakened Godzilla makes his way back to attack Japan, some ad men are sent on an expedition to a mysterious island. After some misadventures with the local natives, the guys manage to capture their god – King Kong. The ad-men’s boss decides it would be great ad copy if the pharmaceutical company they work for would officially sponsor Kong, and they’d get him to beat up Godzilla. Monster fighting ensues.

Some would argue that here, finally, Showa era Toho kaiju cinema has arrived at the overtly childlike and silly yet also often thematically rich tone it would keep to until the era’s end in the 70s.

I don’t exactly disagree, but would also suggest that Toho – as well as director Ishiro Honda – already had arrived at that tone much more successfully with the preceding, Godzilla-less Mothra. Where Mothra does a comparable thing a lot more effectively, here, the satire of capitalism, its expression through a modern media circus and consumerism turns at times gratingly unfunny and drags down the pacing of too much of the first two acts.

Because Honda was one of the great directors of his time, there are still moments of great joy in the first fifty minutes or so: the Japanese people in brown face pretending to be South Sea islanders dancing to a sleeping Kong is pretty incredible (also thanks to Ifukube’s wonderful theme) if “problematic”, and there’s even a bit of fun smashing going on when the film bothers to get away from ad-men and expositing scientists.

The final act, on the other hand, is flawless in its mixture of the silly, the outrageous (there’s for example an incredible bit of dialogue about an electrified Swiss postman only a giant ape wouldn’t love), and the utterly bizarre, wonderful and impactful fights the title promised.

It’s no wonder the US cut – for a long time the only version of the film you could see outside of Japan – decided to cut quite a bit of the material in the first acts. Unfortunately, the news reel style nonsense they replaced it with was even more grating and boring, while sanding away any attempt at depth.

Three Films Make A Post: Will you win, Godzilla? Will you win, Kong? The battle of the century!

Copycat (1995): There are two reasons why Jon Amiel’s serial killer thriller is anything more than a slick adaptation of an overconstructed script. And since these reasons are called Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter, and both are in their fullest screen presence modes, this silly concoction about a serial killer who is basically a serial killer cover band turns into a tour de force commanded by two actresses who drag every bit of possible substance out of very little. This sort of thing can absolutely elevate mediocrity into a greatly entertaining movie, as the film thoroughly proves.

Malasaña 32 (2020): Some of the set pieces in Alberto Pintó’s movie about a Spanish family in the 70s moving from the country into what turns out to be a haunted apartment are very well done and effective. However, this is the type of horror movie that can only ever treat and see its supernatural threat as a reason for set pieces and plot twists, and never manages to cohere the political troubles of the time it suggests, the family’s experience moving from the country to the city in hopes of a better life, and the backstory of the supernatural threat into any kind of thematically coherent argument.

The horror pieces themselves tend to the grab-bag approach where thematic coherence or coherence of mood never appear to be of interest to the filmmakers, either. All the easier to borrow heavily from all kinds of sources, be it Poltergeist – a much superior film – or creepypasta.

Embrace of the Serpent aka El abrazo de la serpiente (2023): There’s a certain kinship between Ciro Guerra’s film and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Cobra Verde and Fitzcarraldo in the way naturalism and sudden outbreaks of the surreal intertwine, as well as in its location.

However, this is a film made by someone from a very different time and place, so there are as many differences in approaches and world view as there are similarities – Guerra certainly isn’t a Herzog cover band. The film’s treatment of colonialism, Western scientific and Amazonian traditional culture comes from a very different direction, but Guerra generally doesn’t simplify and keeps certain differences unresolved, philosophical questions answered from two opposing directions at once.

As a film this is an act of deep worldbuilding, making ways of looking at and being in the world understandable by slowly drawing a viewer into them, full immersion in a style only a handful of directors use these days (Robert Eggers comes to mind).

Three Films Make A Post: A new depth of fear

Gods of the Deep (2023): British low budget one man movie making army Charlie Steeds returns to the Lovecraftian well, including a pretty fantastic God of the Deep/homemade Cthulhu effect.

Otherwise, this is at first dominated by the joys of cheap underwater sci fi sets that sometimes reminded me pleasantly of Juan Piquer Simón’s own cardboard underwater horror/sf affair The Rift, to then turn into a mix of cheap weird psychedelia with terrible action movie dialogue and some dollops from Aliens.

It’s all very 80s Italian in its approach to, ahem, creative borrowing, which, depending on one’s taste, is either a damning indictment of the film, or, if you’re me, a gateway to the kind of fun they don’t usually make this way anymore.

London Overground (2016): John Rogers’s documentary finds that most London of writers, Iain Sinclair, retracing the steps he took for his book of the same title, with the involvement of some of the usual suspects. Like a lot of later Sinclair, this is a mix of insightful observations on London and the changes in her, an old man ranting at clouds while walking, and a portrait of a man finding poetry in the sort of thing most people would just walk on by and ignore.

Thus are some of the typical problems of Sinclair’s work on display. Predominantly, the inability to separate the critique of the capitalist horrors inflicted on a place from one’s own nostalgia for the ideal version of the place that only ever existed in one’s mind – or in this case the books one wrote, which can lead to the impression that Sinclair is against any change whatsoever (which I don’t believe he actually is).

However, there’s much to think about and look at here that would be lost without Sinclair or this film.

Top Line (1988): A writer (Franco Nero) procrastinating and sleeping around in Colombia is put on the trail of a great conspiracy that hides the trail of alien influences on earth. Various forces – like a sadistic Nazi played by George Kennedy of all people – try to hinder or murder him. Among those forces is a wonderfully blatant – and pretty good looking, effects wise – Terminator rip-off, for we are back in the arms of the actual Italian rip-off machine in all its confused oddness. Here, James Cameron meets the UFO conspiracy and traces of the 80s jungle adventure movie, Nero goes shirtless a lot, and little happens that makes much sense.

On the plus side, little happens that makes much sense that isn’t also pretty awesome or entertaining. From time to time, director Nello Rossati even manages an actually suspenseful scene – the preposterous but great sequence of Kennedy hunting Nero through a cactus field comes to mind. If not that, he at least comes up with something memorably goofy. Why wasn’t the Arnie Terminator smashed by an angry bull?

The Black Castle (1952)

Sometime in the 18th (17th?) Century. Sir Ronald Burton (Richard Greene), just returned from the business of imperialism in Africa, learns that two of his closest friends have disappeared in the Black Forest.

The place they were last seen is suspiciously close to the estate of one Count Karl von Bruno (Stephen McNally). Von Bruno is an enemy of Burton and his friends from their colonial adventures, and would have good reason to want to take vengeance on them; he certainly has the lack of scruples to make any such vengeance very cruel indeed. He has, however, never laid eyes on Burton, so Burton decides to pull political strings to go undercover as a hunting guest at the Count’s castle, in the hopes of finding out what happened to his friends, and to hopefully save them from a dire fate.

He gets into rather more trouble than he initially expected, but is helped by his rather egalitarian ways with the lower classes as well as his quick fencing arm. Burton will need all the help he can get, for his motivations are quickly shifting from those of the investigator and possible revenger to a man very much in love with von Bruno’s wife, Elga (Paula Corday). Elga reciprocates very much, for she was married off to her hated husband for political reasons – one can’t help but assume blackmail to have been involved given how much of a villain the guy is. Other complications involve a mute strongman who hates all Englishmen (Lon Chaney Jr.), the mysterious and somewhat sinister Dr Meissen (Boris Karloff), as well as a (non-metaphorical) pit full of crocodiles.

Nathan Juran’s mix of swashbuckling adventure and gothic non-supernatural horror tropes The Black Castle is rather a lot of fun even eighty years later. The script by Jerry Sackheim builds a highly enjoyable castle of tropes that provides opportunity for physical derring-do as well as for gothic melodrama (there’s even some Romeo and Juliet style coma draught business) while Juran – not always the most exciting director – puts a lot of effort into finding the point where the lighter style of the historical adventure movie and gothic horror in the Universal manner meet visually. His use of light and shadow certainly often creates a pleasantly creepy mood that’s very effectively intercut with the handful of scenes where Burton demonstrates his physical abilities. Some very fine sets add to the effect.

The cast is in fine fettle, as well. Greene makes for a believable, rather human, hero, while McNally, Michael Pate as his main henchman and Chaney Jr. milk the possibilities of the gothic swashbuckler villain for all it is worth.

Another of the film’s strengths is its willingness to give its character a second dimension, so von Bruno’s hatred of Burton isn’t completely without reason, and some characters who would usually just do what their evil boss says are allowed to have agency and moral complexity of their own. I was particularly taken with Karloff’s first sinister but increasingly troubled Dr Meissen. Karloff was always able to do sympathetic villains particularly well, and does wonders when he is allowed to play an actual human being like here.

So The Black Castle ends up being a rather wonderful mix of two related but seldom mixed genres that turn out to be as close to my heart in blended form as they are separated.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

A pretty fantastic intro sequence introduces us to a CGI young Indy (Harrison Ford) doing his thing in 1944, Basil Shaw, a British archaeologist friend of Indy’s (house favourite Toby Jones), a Nazi scientist (Mads Mikkelsen), and the titular dial, or rather, one half of the dial. After an appropriate number of Nazis have been punched (poor Thomas Kretschmann), our hero waltzing from one bit of trouble to the next, we pop into the film’s main timeline in July/August 1969.

Indiana Jones is now a grumpy old man on the day of his retirement from a boring teaching job. Marion (Karen Allen) has left him in the course of grieving for their son (Shia LaBeouf is not appearing in this movie, thankfully, so his character can be more useful in death than he ever was in his fictional life) who died in Vietnam. The rest of his life really doesn’t look too sunny for our hero.

Then appears Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), the daughter of the long deceased Shaw and Indy’s goddaughter. Helena tries to talk Indy into one last jaunt with the hat and the whip to help her find the second half of the Dial. Well, actually, it turns out she’s trying to steal the first half of the Dial from our hero to sell it - on the black market, no less. Also on the trail of both halves of the Dial as well as Helena is our old Nazi scientist acquaintance, now going by the name of Dr Schmidt. After being the architect of the US space program, he’s now planning on conquering time – for Nazidom.

What follows is the somewhat expected race around the world, during which Helena and Indy slowly grow closer to one another, Helena gets back into contact with that moral core she must have read so much about, and Indy reacquaints himself with his very special kind of luck. A good time is had by all, well except Nazis and innocent bystanders, but the former really asked for it, and are usually directly responsible for the demise of the latter.

I’m not sure which James Mangold Indiana Jones movie a lot of other people seem to have seen, but the one I watched turned out to be rather wonderful. Mangold and the horde of writers credited really seem to get the proper tone and style for the series again (ironically unlike the people involved in the fourth Indy movie, who must have forgotten when they made that one), so action sequences may be big and partially digital, but are keeping well in the spirit of the serials and old pulp adventure, where the heroes mostly win out by sheer courage and luck than the sort of competence later decades started insisting on heroes showing. Which actually makes a quite a contrast to the way superheroes not called the (Legendary) Starlord or Ant-Man typically operate, and really makes it difficult to confuse this style of action adventure with a superhero movie (unlike you’re a mainstream critic, therefore quite dense or just too mid-brow to care). Though, to be honest, one late, rather, ahem, implausible plot development in third act is certainly only thinkable because superhero movies exist. It’s also one perfectly fitting to a film that is as focussed on legacies and shadows of the past as this one is, so I’m not going to complain, particularly when it gifts us with the wonderful villain line of “Yesterday belongs to us, Doctor Jones!”.

In between a series of rather wonderful set pieces in just the right spirit of adventure and derring-do, and the kind of quietly confident and elegant filmmaking Mangold gets up to in this sort of stylistically very mainstream production, there are also a series of small and big scenes not just meant to propel our heroes (such as they are) from one place to the next, but also to comment on and mirror some of the elements of the older movies in the series. Waller-Bridge’s may at first look like a more modern by simply being more cynical version of Indy, but later developments suggest she’s just more honest about the worst parts of her character to herself than Indy is, and – in the sort of irony this particular film genuinely seems to enjoy – also less honest about the best parts of it, which makes for a nice reversal. Indy, for his part, is allowed to express all the frustrations and horrors of growing old and lonely, but, the film argues, that’s because he’s going out of his way to push away the people he means a lot to, and underplaying some of what makes him more than a graverobber to himself as much as Helena underplays her own better nature.

Which sets up one of the most traditional happy endings I’ve seen in quite some time. For once, the old hero is actually allowed to retire to the peaceful, happy life he deserves instead of dying heroically so that the younger generation must go on without him. to probably repeat that cycle again. That’s fitting to the genre Indy is working in as well, of course, because serials were eventually resolved through happy ends, instead of the old guard dying with their dreams burning down around them (hi, Star Wars).

I, for one, like to see a bit of hope in my movies from time to time.

Three Films Make A Post: Those which change. Those which never change. And those that don't want to change.

Shin Kamen Raider (2023): Hideaki Anno’s version of good old Kamen Raider is the most bonkers entry into what we’ll probably just call the Shin Trilogy around here (even though New Trilogy isn’t exactly specific or sexy). It condenses a whole fifty episode plus season of the first Kamen Rider series into an updated thing of crazy beauty, taking place in a world populated with weirdoes only able to speak in a very Japanese version of High Pop Philosophizing, transforming weirdly.

The production design manages to evoke the cheapness of the early Kamen Rider without falling into the trap of pure nostalgia, and Anno’s direction pays homage, deconstructs and wallows in the hallmarks of early tokusatsu TV, all the while condensing what Anno clearly loves about the genre into a two hour package. It’s absolutely brilliant in its earnest weirdness, but also so specific to early Kamen Rider mirrored in the now I’m hard pressed to imagine an audience outside of core nerds and otaku. Which isn’t a bad thing for me, of course.

Older Gods (2023): Tubi originals don’t exactly have a high betting average, but David A. Roberts’ cosmic horror movie about a man’s encounter with the cult that killed his friend is rather an exception to the rule. It’s certainly a very indie and very cheap movie, but also one that uses that as an opening to do things - in tone, rhythm and style - nobody’d throw a couple million dollars at you to put into a film. The whole affair feels personal and individual, at times perhaps a bit too earnest in tone for contemporary tastes (not for mine, mind you), features some genuinely creepy cosmicist imagery and does its best to add some idea of redemption and freedom to a philosophical outlook on horror that's generally not made for these feelings.

I’m not quite sure Older Gods is completely successful at convincing me of its redemptive moments, but I certainly found myself respecting it rather a lot for trying.

Sky Pirates aka Dakota Harris (1986): Trying certainly isn’t something Colin Eggleston’s dire Indiana Jones rip-off with John Hargreaves as its Indy stand-in does. In fact, I have seldom seen a film that seems quite so disinterested in even trying to make a basically Italian rip-off league of “borrowings” from other movies interesting or fun in any way, shape or form. A film with this wild a plot of adventure, adventure fantasy and pulp tropes and ideas really couldn’t or shouldn’t be what Sky Pirates manages quite effortlessly to be: boring as heck.

In short: City Beneath the Sea (1953)

Two salvage divers – straight arrow Brad Carlton (Robert Ryan) and his friend and partner, the morally more flexible Tony Bartlett (Anthony Quinn) – travel to Jamaica for a rather delicate operation. They are tasked to salvage one million dollars in gold bouillon from a sunken ship. At first, they find nothing at the coordinates provided them by the local contact (Karel Stepanek) of their employer.

Instead of going home again, both men decide to stay on Jamaica and romance some ladies in that horrifying 50s style you don’t have to be particularly woke to raise all available eyebrows at. Brad takes time getting to know boat captain Terry McBride (Mala Powers), while Tony sets his eyes on a night club singer working under the nom de plume of Venita (Suzan Ball). Eventually, their dithering and many a scene of “romance” will lead our protagonists on the trail of the gold again. Turns out, that local contact is involved in a rather huge insurance fraud.

But what, one might ask, about the titular “City Beneath the Sea”? Well, our heroes use the awkward looking ruin to locate the gold, that’s all.

It is not only the title of Budd Boetticher’s City Beneath the Sea that emphasises the wrong things – unfortunately, what is sold as an adventure movie in the classic style really isn’t much of that. The search for the gold takes a back seat for most of the movie. Instead we have to endure Ryan’s and Quinn’s characters acting like traditional male chauvinists for what feels like hours, some unfunny comedy, a musical number and other distractions in a film that seems to have no interest at all in its purported plot. Which wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the distractions were actually interesting and fun, or would make use of Boetticher’s considerable talent for complex characterisation and explorations of human relationships. Alas, even with the considerable charm of Ryan and Quinn, the distractions never feel like anything but dithering, or desperate attempts at getting the film to feature length. From time to time there’s an interesting detail – like the way Tony very emphatically greets the black Dijon (house favourite Woody Strode) as a peer after having been introduced to him as their contact’s “boy” – but this is not a film where those details add up to very much, as much as I’d like them to.

Even the adventure scenes that are in the movie aren’t terribly great – the focus on slow, slow, oh so very slow diving sequences doesn’t play to Boetticher’s strengths as a director at all, what with it mostly showing our heroes bobbing up and down in their – now old-timey – diving gear.

All of which leaves City Beneath the Sea as a film only of minor interest even for Boetticher (or Ryan, or Quinn, etc) completists.

In short: When Eight Bells Toll (1971)

British attempts at creating a new franchise in the spirit of James Bond have historically never fared too well. A nice example for this tradition is this attempt at bringing in French director Etienne Périer and turn to the ever popular Alistair MacLean for scripting duties to make a young Anthony Hopkins playing a permanently disgruntled treasury agent into “The New James Bond”.

Apparently, nobody involved in the production bothered to understand why the Bond movies were the smashes they were, so that series’ sense for POP and the popping eye candy is replaced by the more realistic and workaday charms of your typical Alistair MacLean hero and his world. Hopkins’s Calvert is still supremely competent, mind you, but like all MacLean heroes, he’s rather too down to Earth and focussed on solving the problems at hand to ever feel charismatic or cool like even the Roger Moore version of Bond does.

There is quite a bit of geographical hopping around here too, but where the Bond films show what tourists like to see – and typically set an outrageous action set piece there – When Eight Bells Toll prefers various, dramatically grey, coast lines, and lots of ships and boats (and helicopters, to be fair). There’s nothing wrong with that at all of course, but if you’re trying to beat the contemporary Bond movies at their own game, you might at least look as if you’re trying.

There are at least some direct if tepid attempts at copying the sexy/sleazy bits of the Bonds, but the film – after all written by the rather notoriously couth MacLean - feels faintly embarrassed by that instead of convinced, which obviously also turns it unconvincing.

All of this doesn’t mean there’s no fun to be had here. If you go into the film not asking for the Bond it doesn’t know how to deliver but for a more on-brand action/adventure Alistair MacLean style affair, there’s a lot to like here, particularly if you enjoy your action and adventure taking place on coastlines and boats (there is, thankfully, not too much interest in diving here), and featuring ultra-competent, slightly boring protagonists.

Three Films Make A Post: Long live adventure… and adventurers!

The Tank (2023): I’m not really sure why this movie from New Zealand directed by Scott Walker is trying to pretend it’s American, even though there’s no reason at all for this to be taking place anywhere specific. But then, I’m equally unsure why this has to be a period piece, either. Or, come to think of it, why the film has to drag its feet for nearly an hour until anything of interest happens in it – the character work certainly isn’t so deep it needs the time.

What the film has going from it – apart from a perfectly capable cast – is a really great monster design; the monster just comes in much too late.

Sideworld: Haunted Forests of England (2022): If I were a cynical man, I’d look down on George Popov’s documentary for being quite as cost-consciously produced as it obviously was: the film’s tales of dark folklore, myths and rural legend are told from the off, accompanied by creepy low angle shots of British forests and art from the public domain, and everything is accompanied by dark ambient – and that’s really all there is to it, formally.

However, the script by Jonathan Russell puts the well-worn and not not so well-worn tales the film tells into efficient little packages, and Popov applies his background in indie folk horror filmmaking of the more directly fictional variety nicely to the material, shaping the minimalist set-up into something effective and interesting.

The Man Who Would Be King (1975): John Huston’s adaptation of the Kipling tale is a well-loved classic, and that’s no wonder at all: not only is this one hell of a traditional colonialist adventure movie full of invention, charm, and one great damn thing after another; it is also a film that has a lot to say about what’s wrong about colonialist adventures and the mind-set they are born from, as well as the kind of men they tend to champion. Still, it never feels schizophrenic in its approach, but manages to be a film about the joys and the horrors of the same ideas at the same time.

That it also contains wonderfully larger-than-life performances by Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Christopher Plummer only adds to the film’s specific magic.

Three Films Make A Post: On the other side of death, on the other side of regret, on the edge of mystery…

Children of the Mist aka They aka They Watch (1993): This Showtime TV movie by John Korty turns Rudyard Kipling’s delicate story “They” about the loss of a child and grief into melodramatic pap, and also features the least frightening child ghost I can remember seeing; it doesn’t help that it makes overdubbed owl noises.

Nobody involved really seems to want to bother putting effort in: Edithe Swensen’s script turns everything into a cliché, Korty mishandles melodrama and ghosts alike, and the actors mostly seemed to have checked out mentally. Vanessa Redgrave gives a non-performance quite below her usual level, and I’m not even sure what Patrick Bergin thinks he’s doing at all. He’s certainly not acting like anyone who has encountered a grieving human being before.

The Other Side of Hope aka Toivon tuolla puolen (2017): This Aki Kaurismäki movie about a Syrian refugee looking for his sister and a place to be, and a former salesman’s increasingly absurd attempts at running a restaurant does cover similar ground to Le Havre, made six years earlier. This one isn’t quite as optimistic about the kindness of the working classes anymore (shitty racist Nazi types have arrived in Kaurismäki’s world, though never unopposed), but it is also not as hopeless about it as it could be. There’s still solidarity, compassion and kindness to be found, as well as the small happinesses that keep us alive. Formally, this breaks up the heart-breaking story of the Syrian Khaled (Sherwan Haji) with Kaurismäki-style shenanigans, which never feels like the cop-out it could be, but like the statement of a guy who doesn’t really want to put a divide between tragedy and farce. Which sometimes means that the farce helps the character from the tragedy survive (see also, curiously enough, Ladyhawke).

The Scythian aka Skif (2018): Rustam Mosafir’s sort of historical adventure movie is quite the thing. Always willing to turn everything – non-plausibility, fights and men’s friendship, betrayal, and general craziness – up to eleven, this often feels like the grandchild of cheap Italian sword and sorcery movies in its wild abandon, just made with more money, and most probably talent. There’s little scepticism towards warrior cultures and manly men doing manly stuff on display, of course, so if you can’t or won’t cope with these things, this is just going to make you angry. On the other hand, the film also has an anti-imperialist streak a mile wide, clearly coming down on the Barbarism side on the Howard Barbarian versus Civilisation scale while it’s at it.

It’s also simply a great, riveting piece of adventure filmmaking full of clever and fun set pieces, craziness and awesome manly bullshit.

Magnificent Warriors (1987)

aka Yes, Madam 3 (though there are other movies going by that title as well, because what Zombis are to Italy, the Yes, Madam films are to Hongkong)

Original title: 中華戰士

During the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. Chinese secret agent/whip-wielding adventurer and pilot Ming (Michelle Yeoh) is sent to a town in Bhutan to make contact with one Secret Agent 001 (Derek Yee Tung-Sing) who has been stationed there running the local “town lord” (that’s what the subtitles call him) named Youda (Lowell Lo Koon-Ting). Youda is trying to stem the tide of Japanese activity there by the power of cringing and delays, also cringing delays. Up until a couple of days ago, this has worked out well enough but now the Japanese commander General Toga (Matsui Tetsuya) is putting on a bit of a reign of terror to soften up the population for the building of a poison gas factory. Ming’s job is it to evacuate 001 and Youda. Obviously, various complications ensue, just starting with the fact that our heroine’s aircraft lost all its fuel during an unlucky hit in an air battle just before she landed.

It takes a bit of time for Ming to actually make contact with Secret Agent 001, for a pigeon related incident means she believes a Wandering Conman (Richard Ng Yiu-Hon) to be him, at least for two or three scenes. The Conman, if he starts following the better nature he repeatedly seems to have, might come in handy as an additional partner, at least. 001 for his part doesn’t actually want to be evacuated but plans sabotaging the Japanese factory for good; the more pliable Youda only wants to bring his girlfriend, the particularly dubiously named Chin Chin (Lau Chin-Dai).

Of course, this is not going to be a movie about a group of people running away, but one about a group of very different people coming together (One China-style, because, well…) kicking the invaders’ ass. And getting a lot of people killed in the process, but that’s par for the patriotic course, whatever patria it is you’re sending people to their deaths for.

In its final third, David Chung Chi-Man’s Magnificent Warriors does lay its patriotism on a bit thick for my taste, though it has to be said that Imperial Japan’s as good an enemy as you get when you want to get patriotic without turning unpleasantly nationalistic, particularly from a Chinese perspective. Thematically, the patriotism is also well connected with some unexpected character growth, where cowardly as well as courageous Youda grows thanks to his patriotism, and the Conman connects it to his unexpected to himself growing wish of making the lives of people in general better. Which is more complex character work than you usually get or expect from these films. I certainly appreciated it.

At the very least, Chung doesn’t really let that patriotism get in the way of the typical maximalist joys of this phase of Hong Kong action cinema. There are quotes and little nods towards Hong Kong and Western cinema aplenty here, but every borrowed bit is twisted and turned in ways you only get from this particular part of cinema, at this specific time. So there’s some joyful hinting and nodding towards Indiana Jones in Michelle Yeoh’s character, but she’s wielding her whip a lot more artistically, keeping off a whole horde of men; while also kicking them in the face, of course. And as anyone going into a Michelle Yeoh movie from this phase of her career knows, there’s little more joyful than watching her kick guys in their faces.

Joyfulness is the watch word for Yeoh’s work this early in her movie career as a whole. While she’s sometimes still a little rough around the edges when she’s emoting melodramatically, she is such a joyful presence throughout, always looking as if she were born to kick faces, shoot machineguns (grinning gleefully), save orphans and fly planes. Like a woman doing exactly what she wants to do in a way nobody else could, and loving every second of it.

And even though Chung isn’t one of the great stylists of his era and place, his straightforward filmmaking style never gets in the way of letting his actors and stunt people do what they do best. He seems to interpret his job as a responsibility to not let a moment of insane stunt work – just look at the prologue, the dogfight, the climax or every damn minute of the film – or joyful abandon they deliver go to waste, and he fulfils this responsibility perfectly.

In short: Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956)

Warning: spoilers for a movie older than most people who will read this!

Colonialist stud Rock Dean (John Bromfield), a guy so 50s macho, he’s having a smoke while he gets vaccinated, runs a plantation in Brazil. After a series of killings the locals believe to have been committed by a monster known as the Curucu, his workers flee the plantation deeper into the jungle. Our porn-star named hero doesn’t believe in monsters, but he still mounts an expedition to its supposed hunting grounds to regain the trust of his (former) wage slaves.

Apart from the colonial stand-by of the native carriers, he is accompanied by chieftain’s son turned “civilised” Tupanico (Tom Payne) and Dr Andrea Romar (Beverly Garland), looking for a head-shrinking drug that just might help shrink cancer as well (seriously). The good doctor is one of them thar independent wimmen, but this being a 50s adventure movie, you know how that’ll turn out.

I call Curt Siodmak's Curucu an adventure movie and not a monster movie for a reason, for while there are a couple of scenes concerning the titular monster, the film spends most of its time not on the tropes of bad monster movies but rather those of bad adventure movies. The monster will turn out to actually be a man in costume, anyway, which at least excuses how bad that thing looks, but even if it didn’t, this would still be much more of a film about actors reacting to archive footage of animals than one about monsters. And certainly more than about actual adventure, as well, for even though this was actually shot in Brazil, Siodmak seems to go out of his way to not use this opportunity for anything but two or three scenes that really make use of the landscape. Otherwise, this might as well have been shot on a soundstage in California; in fact, Siodmak (who really could do much better) shoots the whole affair as if it were.

On the narrative level, this is a talky mess in which very little of interest happens, and the best bits – like an actual dramatic climax – seem to happen off-screen. The film’s racial and social politics are dubious, though not interesting enough to go into them in detail, its plot plods along slowly, and there’s only a sense of adventure if you’re deeply into scenes of actors being threatened by small animals that are never on screen with them at the same time.

So there’s very little at all to recommend Curucu to anyone but the colonialist adventure movie or Beverly Garland completists among us.

The Seven Magnificent Gladiators (1983)

Original title: I sette magnifici gladiatori

The narrative takes place in what I believe is supposed to be a fantasy version of Ancient Rome, though it could of course also be a very low effort secondary world. Evil bandit leader Nicerote (Dan Vadis) is making regularly raids on a small village, using the physical invulnerability somehow bestowed on him by his mother (whom he blinded as a thanks) with astonishingly little ambition and imagination. By now, the village is only populated by women, children, and the elderly. Fortunately, there’s a helpful prophecy concerning the village’s favourite relic, a magic sword only the true hero meant to save the place will be able to hold going around. So the rest populace put the sword in keeping of their most attractive women. They go to Rome and proceed to ask every random passers-by they meet to grab that sword. They do eschew any warnings that the weapons rather likes to burn the hands of the unworthy, because that’s village morality for you. Still, eventually, the blade ends up in the hands of gladiator-on-the run Han (Lou Ferrigno) who is apparently a proper hero and not burnable by sword. After some business with the crazy bug-eyes making emperor (Yehuda Efroni) I only mention because his performance is so spectacularly hammy, Han goes off to do some village rescuing, picking up enough gladiators, Sybil Dannings and rogues to make for the full titular complement of seven.

You really know the rest.

If you’re like me, you probably expect something mind-blowing and weird when going into an Italian 80s sword and sorcery movie that also wants to be a gladiator movie and Magnificent Seven rip-off, particularly one made by the terrifying/awe-inspiring duo of Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso. Even better, one made on Cannon money, which must have felt like Marvel money to an indie filmmaker of today.

Alas, this is by far not as crack-brained as one would hope it to be. Sure, Fragasso’s script is as awkwardly structured as was his wont, and a lot of what happens is somewhat nonsensical, but there are only a few moments in the script that don’t feel comparatively competent and sane, at least for the kind of movie this is.

Mattei for his part even manages to create a series of perfectly okay looking scenes, though he is of course completely incapable of giving any of the copious character deaths any emotional weight, something certainly not helped by Fragasso’s messing up of the Magnificent formula by simply not spending enough time on creating characters with at least one discernible character trait. These Seven seem to consists of Sybil Danning, four beefcakes and three rogues, and that’s it. In general, one can’t help but think that Fragasso didn’t quite get why certain scenes like the training of the villagers are in practically all movies of this sort, including them just in case but trying to get through them as quickly as possible. This does rob the film of any of the emotional resonance it should have.

From time to time, the old, loveable, idiocy of the Mattei/Fragasso pairing does come through. I’m particularly fond of the fact that the magic sword isn’t actually, as you would think, magically able to get through Nicerote’s invulnerability the normal way when wielded by the proper hero, but really only kills him when he grips it himself. Which rather suggests that the whole rigmarole with finding the proper hero could have been avoided by simply presenting the sword to the guy as a treasure. But hey, what do I understand of these things?

Because many of the actors here are rather experienced in fake-hitting stuntmen with swords, most of the fights look rather more competent than you’d expect of a Mattei joint; I wouldn’t go so far as to call them exciting but they are certainly surprisingly watchable in a straightforward movie matinee way. The wagon race looks a bit as if Michael Bay had fashioned his car chases after it, though.

All of this makes for the more than a little confusing experience of watching a Mattei/Fragasso film that feels mostly competent – by the standards of Italian sword and sorcery fare - instead of insane. If you know the body of work of this duo, you’ll realize how mind-blowing the concept of competence is when applied to these filmmakers. Which does bring up the question who or what might have been responsible for this particular kind of insanity never before or after beheld in these men’s works. I, for one, blame Golan and Globus.

Kidnapped (1971)

You know the Robert Louis Stevenson tale: Scotland, shortly after the Battle of Culloden. Young David Balfour (Lawrence Douglas), after the death of both of his parents now without a family, introduces himself to his miserly uncle Ebenezer (Donald Pleasence), only to get sold into slavery by the sad old man unwilling to share a fortune that belongs by rights completely to David. Before his way to the indentured farming life in the colonies can get on its way, David falls in with Alan Breck (Michael Caine), a Bonnie Prince Charlie loyalist (the film never really uses the term “Jacobite”) on the run. Apart from a bit of a murderous disposition and the inability to understand his cause as lost, Alan’s a stand-up guy. He also really needs to get out of Scotland and get to France, where he plans on regrouping with whoever still wants another round of getting smashed by the English. Obviously, complications lie on the way for both men. The younger one will find true love in the form of Alan’s cousin Catriona Stewart (Vivian Heilbron), while the older man will find his conscience.

There’s quite a bit to like about Delbert Mann’s combined adaptation of Stevenson’s “Kidnapped” and its sequel “David Balfour/Catriona”. For one, the landscape photography is often genuinely striking. It not just looks pretty, it actually manages to add to the emotional weight of quite a few scenes in a pleasantly subtle manner. Also rather a joy is the bunch of great actors and character actors on screen, from Donald Pleasence to Gordon Jackson to Freddie Jones to Trevor Howard; most of them make a muddle of their Scottish accents, obviously, but that’s part of the fun of traditional adventure movies like this one. Speaking of accents, Michael Caine barely bothers with one, which seems to be the right decision, since his handful of pathos-filled speeches about bonnie Scotland are already melodramatic enough, and would become absurd with too much bad accent work. Of course, Caine’s most convincing here when he is either brutal or companionable – the big speeches do tend to be a bit too much, in part because Jack Pulman’s script can’t quite hit the right tone for them, so that they sound pompous rather than dramatic and moving.

Which is a curious thing in a script whose main strength otherwise is tone. Not just in its ability to get the brightly colourful and imaginative tone of the film’s more action-heavy and adventurous first half just right but also in its willingness to be fair-minded to both sides of the political conflict here, avoiding to declare one side as the good guys and the other as the baddies, as would be rather more typical for an adventure movie. Kidnapped shows very little love for the oppression of the Scottish through the English, and demonstrates this in very 70s ways. Yet it is just as sceptical about the Jacobite side, who, after all, wasn’t simply fighting for Scottish independence but working hard to get yet another civil war on the British Isles going, with the end goal to exchange one inbred fool on a throne for another, with the population of the countries having to pay the price. Which is a rather 70s way of looking at the situation as well, come to think of it.

At the same time, the script shows a lot of respect for people like Alan who live so strongly by their principles and beliefs, even when it disagrees with them. Alas, this very interesting and complex view on questions of peace, war, independence and personal and political loyalty does suffer a bit from the film’s need to squeeze two novels into a running time of less than two hours, so that rather a lot of emotional and thematic work that would be better expressed via action has to be simply talked out. Particularly Alan’s final decision doesn’t quite work treated this way.

This talkiness results in Kidnapped being front-loaded with practically all of its – finely realized – action set pieces taking place in its first half, and most of its talky bits in the final one. It’s not a fatal flaw in this particular case because of the whole affair’s general interest, yet it is one that’s clear and obvious enough even the best will can’t ignore it.

In short: When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)

Escaping the grand opportunity of being sacrificed by her native tribe, stone age woman Sanna (Vicoria Vetri) finds shelter with a neighbouring tribe. There, she falls in love with the strapping young hunter Tara (Robin Hawdon). Alas, the jealousy of a rival and the local tendency to blame her for every sun storm, mild earth quake or dinosaur attack, drive her into exile, where she bonds with a single dinosaur mom and her somewhat adorable dinosaur kid.

Reading official plot synopses of this Hammer production, directed by Val Guest, in the old, undervalued People vs Dinosaurs genre is quite the revelation. So that’s what these people were babbling about in their badly made up stone age language! The sun god? Huh. There also seems to be some business about our heroine being thought a witch because of her blonde hair (with scenes of other blondes dying their hair black): the evil magic of peroxide! Let’s try and imagine what these crazy kids would have thought about Botox.

As it happens when people talk in a ridiculous language that never actually existed, and the filmmakers decide to leave us without subtitles, it’s difficult to keep up any interest in characters or the human drama bits (whatever they are actually about) of the film – most of the actors’ inability and/or unwillingness to actually emote in ways other than often quite hilarious scenery chewing doesn’t help – so it’s left to the dinosaur action to keep an audience interested. I’m happy to report that there’s a regular feed of said dinosaur action, most of it realized via decent to great stop motion (though there is one bit featuring one of those unfortunate real lizards with glued-on dinosaur bits that always make me a little angry). This is a film that promised us stone age people versus dinosaurs, and by gawd, it’s going to deliver early, often, and with a certain élan.

Guest does of course know the adventure movie biz, so things stay lively despite the dialogue and not giving a toss about the characters problems. When in doubt, he adds dinosaurs, a bit of nudity, as well as a completely inexplicable scene of a whole tribe of fake stone age people having some kind of religious freak-out. In a delicious turn of events, this is apparently based on a treatment by J.G. Ballard. Alas, most Ballardians speaking to that great author later on don’t seem to have wanted to get into his involvement with this particular masterpiece, so it’s anybody’s guess how involved this treatment was or what was actually in it. But hey, at least we’ll always have the dinosaurs, the bonus giant crabs and the man-eating mushroom plant thingie (?).