In short: The Omen (1976)

When the baby of ultra-rich American ambassador Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) and his wife Katherine (Lee Remick) is stillborn, Robert all too quickly accepts the offer of a shady priest (Martin Benson) to secretly adopt a child born orphaned. Without even telling his wife, obviously.

As we all know, that turns out to have been a very bad idea, because little Damien is the Anti-Christ, as evidenced by various bizarre deaths that begin to occur around him once he’s a couple of years older (and played by Harvey Stephens), deaths which he seems to cause by very vigorous and loud playing (now that’s what I call true horror). Eventually, thanks to the efforts of a doomed priest (Patrick Troughton, the Second Doctor himself) and an equally doomed but more long-lived photographer (David Warner), and because Satan’s really very unsubtle about his work, Thorn does find out what’s what, but alas, the forces of good in this one are just terrible at their jobs.

No, seriously, given how big a thing the Anti-Christ is, and how obvious the stuff going on in Richard Donner’s film, it’s pretty weird that there’s not a whole commando unit of exorcists sticking magic knives into the kid. But then, it’s also pretty weird that rich guy Thorn never bothers to acquire or simply hire some practical help when it comes to fighting off Satanists, evil doggies and so on. That’s really the film’s major problem: a script by David Seltzer that’s often painfully implausible even if a viewer is perfectly willing to accept its idiot version of pulp Christianity. Not that it’s terribly good at characterisation, either, for the Thorns, and even the gosh-darn anti-Christ stay half removed from the audience, or from much of what you’d want to interpret as believable impressions of actual human emotions. Don’t confuse this with the Italian approach to horror though, these people are deeply uninvolving and boring instead of strange and moody. While I’m bashing the script, it’s also sometimes dragging its heels painfully, coming in at twenty minutes or so longer than the material can carry.

However, there’s one saving grace to Seltzer’s script, namely the ability to come up with weird, often disquieting murder set pieces, which fits perfectly with director Donner’s ability to stage them. Indeed, it is Donner’s work at letting these weird elements come to life by using every camera trick, every skewed angle, every moody matte painting or creepy set he can come up with, throwing basically the whole visual history of horror cinema up to this point on screen that has turned this into a perennial classic. In fact, Donner’s so good at creating a mood of the Gothic in a contemporary guise, all the film’s weaknesses feel more like small problems than the critical failures they should be, so a film that should objectively be a bit of a polished turd feels rather a lot like a classic of its genre. I blame the Anti-Christ.

Three Films Make A Post: All guns. No control.

23 Paces to Baker Street (1956): This is a rather heavily Hitchock-indebted thriller by – sometimes brilliant – journeyman director Henry Hathaway, taking place in a London that is traditionally dark, foggy and rainy. Blind playwright and champion in self-pity Phillip Hannon (Van Johnson) overhears a curious, potentially sinister, conversation in a pub and becomes rather obsessed with solving what increasingly looks like a case (though not to the police). The film doesn’t quite have the psychological resonance of the best films of its sub-genre, and Johnson tends to overplay his character so desperately I wanted to punch the guy to shut up the melodramatic outbreaks more often than I found myself rooting for him. However, Hathaway knows how to stage a suspense scene as well as any director of his generation, the script – based on a novel by Philip MacDonald - is clever and twisty in the best way, and Milton Krasner’s photography is as pretty to look at as it is atmospheric, the film making excellent use of a London (even when parts of it are actually the Fox studios) that is still marked by World War II.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016): Taika Waititi’s wonderful New Zealand movie is about a kid (Julian Dennison in a drily witty performance that never becomes precocious or annoying) kinda-sorta absconding into the bush with his decidedly grumpy foster father (Sam Neill, decidedly grumpy and wonderful) after the death of the foster mother, the ensuing manhunt and the pair’s sometimes funny sometimes sad adventures. It’s a film that comes by the description of being “heart-warming” as fairly as the director’s What We Do in the Shadows, creating a slightly off-kilter world but putting characters into it one can’t help but care about. There’s an astonishing amount of whit, wisdom and imagination in the film, often wickedly funny humour, and New Zealand looks rather spiffy too.


Nightwing (1979): I don’t know why you’d want to hire Arthur Hiller, never a man known for his grip on action, of all possible candidates to direct your nature strikes back project based on a Martin Cruz Smith novel I suspect to be rather more tightly plotted than the film at hand, but the ways of Hollywood are wild and mysterious. One wouldn’t usually cast Nick Mancuso as a native American sheriff either. Not surprising anyone, the film is a bit of a mess, with generally competent bat attack scenes followed by brain dead 70s paranoia bits, and some mock-native American mythology stuff ripped right out of a 30s pulp tale, and therefore rather cringeworthy, though at least not meant in bad faith. David Warner takes on Robert Shaw’s mantel from Jaws to take a big bite out of a lot of scenery, Kathryn Harold is attractively frightened, and Stephen Macht is an evil rich guy, so while nobody would confuse Nightwing with a good movie, it most certainly is never a boring one.

Waxwork (1988)

Four college students, Mark (Zach Galligan), Sarah (Deborah Foreman), China (Michelle Johnson) and Tony (Dana Ashbrook) - the Poor Little Rich Boy, the Virgin, the Slut, and the Idiot respectively – make a very special late visit to the mysterious Wax Museum of an even more mysterious man (mysterious David Warner). As we all well know, wax museums are incredibly dangerous when there’s no masked luchador around, so it doesn’t come as much of a surprise when China and Tony get sucked into different exhibitions which, it turns out, work as time bubbles where they live out and die in some rather unhealthy episodes (the vampire life of Miles O’Keeffe and a very short werewolf tale with a minute of John Rhys-Davies shouting grumpily as is his custom) to eventually become waxen parts of the exhibition.

At first, Mark and Sarah don’t think too much about their friends’ disappearances, but when they stay gone the next day, they start a little investigation that’ll lead a poor cop (Charles McCaughan) into a mummy-induced death, and give Mark some opportunity to learn important things about his family history from his godfather Sir Wilfred (Patrick Macnee). Sarah for her part’ll learn all about her rather un-horror-movie-virginal desire to be whipped to death by the Marquis de Sade (J. Kenneth Campbell) – who for some reason likes to dress like a pirate. It’s all part of mysterious David Warner’s rather dubious plan for destroying the world (“Somebody has to!”), and only a Poor Little Rich Boy, a masochistic Virgin (something I’d really love to become a new horror movie character archetype) and Patrick Macnee can save us!

Ah, US late 80s and early 90s horror, you are a bit weird aren’t you, with your insistence on turning everything into a comedy (like our contemporary horror TV shows, come to think of it), and never showing stuff that could actually disturb someone on a deeper level beyond the pleasant “yuck”.

If you can cope with that, though, Anthony Hickox’s Waxwork should be quite a good time, for this is a film that may not have any intellectual or emotional depths (or even many shallows of that sort) but that is also so full of an utterly un-ironic love for the horror genre’s past it’s bound to charm (possibly the pants off of) anyone who shares this love. The film demonstrates its love by including oh so many sight gags and so many moments of joyful genre nonsense you’ll mostly probably really miss stuff just by blinking, I couldn’t help but be impressed by their sheer force of numbers.

The waxwork exhibition episodes are of course mostly a basis for the film to let rip homages on all the most classic horror monsters, specific films (I particularly dig the early George Romero camera angles in the zombie bit), and all things macabre. Just imagine, the film grins, what if your Universal or Hammer horror would end really badly for the heroes and include many more buckets of blood? Turns out that’s very fun to watch, particularly in the hands of Hickox (now a solid direct-to-DVD-action director, then a promising horror guy), who knows how to time the icky stuff, as well as the jokes and directs everything as if he had a big happy monster-mashing grin on his face. The film even has so much love to share, it also finds space for a bit of a swashbuckler homage, as well as an excursion that makes the masochistic subtext of certain classical horror movies text. Bonus points also for having the oh so typical virgin character really getting into the whole death by de Sade thing, and orgasms, and not only not killing her but making her mildly ass-kicking afterwards (though I curse the film for not keeping that development in the much inferior sequel).

There’s so much love going around here for everything: Warner and Macnee clearly standing in for classic horror hams and beloved actors and doing good by it, the shrugging absurdity of the film’s finale that just might be the most fun updated peasant mob versus monsters sequence we’ll ever get to see, and so on, and so forth, until a crawling hand (hi, Ash!) crawls good-bye.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,british movies,reviews,horror,anthony hickox,zach galligan,deborah foreman,david warner,patrick macnee

Straight Into Darkness (2004)

It’s the tail end of World War II. After a a mine accident kills the MPs bringing them in, deserters Losey (Ryan Francis) and Deming (Scott MacDonald) are making their way through wintery Western Europe, ending up somewhere behind the frontlines. The very different, yet both traumatized men – Losey being more the soft and thoughtful type, and Deming abrasive and violent – encounter the detritus of war: corpses, ruins, and people having taken on the appearance of both. Eventually they end up in a half-ruined building that turns out to be the base of a very special guerrilla group – a bunch of mentally ill or developmentally handicapped children that have been taught the ways of war by their former teachers (David Warner and Linda Thorson).

Shortly afterwards, a troop of Nazi soldiers (including a tank) appears, and the two deserters and the child soldiers and their minders have to attempt to fight them off.

Straight Into Darkness’s director Jeff Burr has spent most of his career making second row genre movies like Pumpkinhead III or Puppet Master 3 and 4. I imagine this sort of work doesn’t exactly provide one with the opportunity to bring much of one’s personality into a movie – and it’s probably not something the producers involved would want a director to provide in a post-Corman-when-he-was-good world. On the positive side, if that sort of work doesn’t kill you, it must give you some of the chops needed to get a cheap, more personal project rolling sometime.

The film at hand – as far as I’ve read partially self-financed by Burr -clearly is such a project, and even though the slightly lower than you’d wish it had budget leads to some rough edges, it’s quite a success too. It’s a war film that turns things slightly surreal and gothic, with the outward world having gone so crazy and cruel it’s not clear anymore if it is mirroring the characters or the characters are mirroring it. With simple yet effective measures, and some classic montage techniques that I found a bit heavy-handed in their symbolism from time to time (but then that’s montage for you), Burr brings the irreality of the horrors surrounding his characters to life, portraying a world that has come completely unhinged. Despite there being no supernatural element here, there is an air of the Gothic and of the horror genre about Straight Into Darkness, using war movie tropes to make a horror film where we are the monsters, and we have driven the world and each other insane; or possibly it’s the other way around, genre-wise.

Despite being rather on the dark side (as promised by the title), Straight Into Darkness is philosophically not opposed to small traces of optimism, and the suggestion of a better future, but it is also willing to be honest about the fact that most of its characters won’t make it there, and not all who make it might deserve it if looked at morally, as it is about the fact that people will even find an excuse to make to themselves for slaughtering children (while others lose all faith in themselves for things they just couldn’t have avoided). In fact, the film’s so consequent about these things in its final act it’s not just impossible to imagine this done with even a minor mainstream budget; even I found the final twenty minutes or so pretty hard to take, but then, that’s not the film being needlessly cruel or transgressing to be transgressive but the film achieving what it set out to do. Being easily digestible in this case would mean lying to the audience to make it easier on them, and, as a wise woman once said, art isn’t supposed to look down.

(The film also gets extra credit for having post-dubbed its German soldiers by actual native speakers speaking actual German; they’re not particularly good voice actors, but the mere fact the film is doing what most major studio productions don’t is a swell example of how much the film cares about what it does).

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,war,horror,jeff burr,ryan francis,scott macdonald,linda thorson,david warner

Three Films Make A Post: ONLY THE COBRA COULD SATISFY HER UNEARTHLY DESIRES.

Perfect Friday (1970): On paper, Peter Hall’s caper film is a fun proposition, with three leads in David Warner, Ursula Andress and Stanley Baker who have actual chemistry going on between them, and a friendly caper plot where no outside body gets hurt. The thing is, it’s all just a bit too fluffy, with too many moments of the film basically going “look delightfully clever I am, dear audience” yet not really delivering on the promised cleverness.

There’s also the glaring suspicion that there’s not actually much going on in the film, Hall distracting from the rather too simple heist at the film’s centre by filming around it stylishly and complicatedly, yet never really interested in revealing much about the characters beyond the basics. It’s certainly a good enough time as long as the movie’s running, but afterwards, it’s hard to find anything about the film that warrants thought or memory beyond two or three funny lines and David Warner’s wardrobe.

Birdemic 2: The Resurrection (2013): I think I’ve heard this joke before, and that one, and that one, and that one too. They were funny the first time, but now, not so much anymore.

I Want Him Dead aka La voglio morto (1968): Paolo Bianchini’s Spaghetti Western about Craig Hill taking revenge for the death of his sister and incidentally thwarting a plan to prolong the US Civil War is a bit more run of the mill than the last half of this description suggest. That’s on account of Bianchini’s inability (or unwillingness) to make anything out of the opportunities that part of the plot could have afforded him. The film treats these things so generically, they might just as well have been replaced with “evil people are up to no good by doing evil” and kept the same flavour, or rather lack of flavour. Politically, we learn that capitalists are evil (breaking news!).

Having said that, the film’s still perfectly serviceable entertainment: people shoot at each other, innocents die, Craig Hill scrunches his face up, a generically cool Spaghetti Western score plays, and Bianchini does keep things moving along at a nice pace.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,american movies,italian movies,comedy,crime,horror,spaghetti western,peter hall,stanley baker,ursula andress,david warner,paolo bianchini,craig hill

In short: Necronomicon (1993)

Every couple of years, I re-watch the Brian Yuzna-produced Necronomicon, asking myself – making a ridiculous and puzzled face, I suppose - why I don’t remember anything at all about it beyond the fact that Jeffrey Combs plays Lovecraft in the film’s wrap-around segments. Then, having watched the film, I realize I don’t remember anything about it because it’s far from a memorable movie, which in turn will of course lead to another round with it in five years time, unless I take a look at this useful post right here.

Because I’m a rather relaxed person when it comes to that sort of thing, I can’t even get angry about a film supposedly based on three Lovecraft tales generally having fuck all to do with the stories. I’m really rather more interested if the segments in themselves are any good. Alas…

Yuzna’s wrap-around tale is a good bit of fun, with Combs being Combs, Lovecraft being a rather two-fisted version of himself that is as much Indiana Jones as the old gent from Providence (pretend I’m now blathering on for ages about the man’s racism, because clearly that’s relevant and worthy of burning hatred when talking about a man who died in 1937), and the plot being silly, short, and with neat monster designs.

Christophe Gans’s highly gothic tale of a man (Bruce Payne) mourning the death of his wife, and nearly repeating the mistake of an ancestor (Richard Lynch), is probably the high point of the film. Sure, it has nothing whatsoever to do with The Rats in the Walls which it is supposedly based on, but the motives – if not its emotional base in love, one of Lovecraft’s least favourite emotions – it uses are very much Lovecraftian, and Gans is pretty great at building a mood that does resemble Corman’s Poe adaptations to a pleasant degree, until everything is wrapped up with fine monster designs and a shift towards nearly swashbuckling action that is the sort of thing the later director of Le Pacte des loups did already so very well at the time this was made.

I am a big admirer of Shusuke Kaneko’s 90s Gamera, perhaps the best kaiju eiga made after the original Gojira but his segment here is just a mess, finding neither a visual, nor a thematic nor even just a plot focus, with little happening in it that isn’t obvious, and nothing at all that’s interesting, unless you were always dreaming of watching David Warner in an awkward sex scene. On the more positive side, this segment does actually use plot elements of Lovecraft’s Cool Air, just not sensibly or to any effect.

Last but not least, we have Brian Yuzna’s segment, which is a very typical series of ever more grotesque effect scenes, the kind of thing I find entertaining enough as long as I’m in the process of watching it – particular with creature and, well, stuff design like it is here – but that not really makes for a satisfying climax when the grotesque isn’t in service of anything. Again, it’s no surprise I won’t remember any of this in a few years.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,horror,lovecraft,christophe gans,brian yuzna,shusuke kaneko,jeffrey combs,david warner

In short: Felony (1994)

A D.E.A. raid on a supposed drug house in New Orleans goes horribly wrong, and a good dozen of cops is blasted to high heaven by chewing-gum fan Cooper (David Warner) and his well-armed goons. Cooper is a rogue CIA operative who, together with his boss Taft (Lance Henriksen), has gone into the drug business to acquire enough money to free some operatives imprisoned in some unnamed South American country.

Unfortunately for Cooper and Taft, Cooper's rather impolitic slaughter has been filmed by TV reporter Bill Knight (Jeffrey Combs) and his Vietnam vet hippie buddy Robby (Patrick J. Gallagher). Bill, clearly not the brightest bulb in any chandelier, decides to not give the resulting video tape to the cops investigating the affair, Detectives Kincade (Leo Rossi) and Duke (Charles Napier).

This turns out to be something of a mistake, and soon enough the cops, Cooper and Taft and their men, as well as Cowboy spy "mediator" Donovan (Joe Don Baker) are all after Bill, some of them with rather murderous intent, others with more ambiguous ideas. Bill's only help is nurse Laura Bryant (Ashley Laurence), because we really needed at least one female character on our hero's side (otherwise, there's only Taft's evil girlfriend played by Corinna Everson to represent half of the human population), plus hey, it's Ashley Laurence.

But will that be enough for Bill to survive various shoot-outs, car-chases and double-crosses?

Ah, post Action International David A. Prior films are always something of a wonder to behold. Prior, once an utter weirdo director, had at this point in his career learned so much about the art of filmmaking he was perfectly able to just make a straightforward and cheap little action movie of the type that can never completely deny its cheapness but works so hard making the most out of what it's got it's impossible not to be at least a bit charmed by it.

That alone would be enough to recommend Prior's movies of this period (and really, most of his even cheaper Action International work too). However, it doesn't seem to have been enough for Prior himself, so Felony and its brethren not only feature the affordable amount of action but also scripts which are ever so slightly - or sometimes completely - skewed into the direction of the outré and the weird.

The script of Felony is full of Prior's typical curious mixture of just plain silliness (just try to make sense of what happened in Felony once the last act plot twists have made a mockery of sense and sensibility) and ironic self-consciousness that should really result in the sort of self-ironic winking nonsense I can't stand at all. In Prior's weirdness-experienced hands, though, what should be annoying turns charming with many a scene that is just as funny as it is fun.

Of course, given the low budget movie heaven that is Felony's cast, it's not a complete surprise that even the silliest line in the script is delivered either with scenery-chewing relish or just the right amount of self-consciousness. Everyone involved, from Combs over Laurence to Warner and Henriksen, obviously knows that much of the plot is utter nonsense and their characters aren't actually characters, yet still delves into the whole affair with a palpable sense of fun, projecting none of the bored "just cashing a cheque here, buddy" feelings you sometimes encounter in film's of Felony's price class.

As I always like to say about Prior movies: what's not to like?

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,action,thriller,jeffrey combs,ashley laurence,leo rossi,charles napier,david warner,joe don baker,lance henriksen,david a. prior

Three Films Make A Post: You feel your Heart POUNDING, You know It's out there, You can't SCREAM, NOW IT'S AT YOUR THROAT

Le Serpent aka Night Flight From Moscow aka The Serpent (1973): Generally, this French film by Henri Verneuil with a very international cast is declared to be one of the better serious spy movies of its time, and I certainly can see the care that went into the construction of its plot, approve of the cast and so on and so forth. However, in practice, I find the film pretty much insufferable. It's ponderously in love with its own seriousness, and as self-important as the most pompous film one could imagine. I'm also not at all convinced its plot needed to be told in quite this slow manner, and be quite this concentrated on least important matters.

Time after Time (1979): Very much lacking in self-importance and pomposity, but not in intelligence and a great cast, Nicholas Meyer's generally delightful film about the fight of a time-travelling H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) against Jack the Ripper (David Warner) in 1979 San Francisco, may be the director's best film; in the very least, it's his most consistently entertaining one. Meyer spends much time and love on Wells's culture shock when he realizes the new time he's landed in is not the socialist utopia he was hoping for, but in some respects even worse than the time he came from (though, truth be told, when we compare the ages in more detail than a movie like this can or wants to, I'd rather stay in 1979) in its more humorous and its darker aspects. Surprisingly enough, the film also manages to make its plot-driving romance between Wells and bank teller Amy (Mary Steenburgen) kinda sweet in a not too contrived and not too unbelievable way, which is pretty helpful seeing that the film's basic pessimistic thesis is that life in any age sucks if not for love. And honestly, how could I not love a film that doesn't even attempt to hide this ideology behind its dapper time-travelling adventure?

The Burning (1981): When, oh when will you learn, America!? As horror movies have proven again and again, there's nothing more dangerous - well, except for your gun laws - than sending one's children to summer camp. If they're not indoctrinated by a cult or possessed by aliens there, they are sure as hell going to be killed by one of the large number of summer camp oriented slashers. Case in point is this documentary about a horde of poor summer camping teenagers (many of them actually played by teenagers, which gives some of the murders a rather more disturbing note than they deserve) falling ill of a garden scissor lover named Cropsy who is out to take revenge for his horrible summer camp accident related burn wounds.

The resulting film is of course a slasher very much by numbers, but in 1981, slashers by numbers still had a certain budget, and people with a degree of talent in front of and behind the camera, so it's decently realized, mildly exciting, and rather well shot, which makes The Burning an okay enough way to spend one's time. In "spot them before they were famous" news, say hallo to Jason Alexander with hair.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,american movies,in short,sf,spies,horror,slasher,nicholas meyer,henri verneuil,yul brynner,malcolm mcdowell,david warner,mary steenburgen,tony maylam