Fangs (1981)

Original title: Anyab

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a young couple, planning to get married (after they’ll find an appropriately cheap apartment), find themselves stranded in the countryside during a rain storm. Thanks to a helpful yet somewhat sinister hunchback, they make their way to a creepy – yet awesome – mansion. There’s a very peculiar party going on inside, and the host tries to sweep the female part of the couple right off her feet.

Only in this case, the party is a masquerade of vampires who like to wear Halloween masks, and the host isn’t a sweet transvestite but Dracula (Ahmed Adawiyya).

Mohammed Shebl’s pretty mind-blowing horror musical comedy Fangs is the sort of thing we would have described as “psychotronic” in ye olden times. Produced on a low (low low low) budget but gifted with the nearly manic enthusiasm of a true believer in the power of popular cinema, this takes elements of Western pop culture and puts them through the blender of a very personal set of interests and obsessions in a cultural remix. The influences, quotes and re-works start with the obvious Rocky Horror (minus the LGBTQ material, though I suspect because this would have been a bridge too far for an Egyptian movie, not because Shebl didn’t want to), move over to Dracula (there’s an incredibly awesome-awkward restaging of the Count crawling up a wall you need to see to believe and love), and certainly do not end at using cheaper versions of the Biff! Bang! Pow! thought bubbles of the Batman TV show.

Shebl must have had quite the encyclopaedic knowledge of and nerdy interest in very different forms of – mostly US and British - pop culture, for his quotes and interests reach from the most obvious to the obscure. I can’t quite speak to the way these elements interact with the specifically Egyptian and probably pretty political parts of the movie, but forty years later and many kilometres away, there’s no mistaking -  this is a film made with total love for the material it borrows from.

Shebl also carries in his heart a sweet and probably abiding love for the fourth wall break: the plot, such as it is, is regularly interrupted by a gentleman in his private library who at first focusses on exposition and melodramatic pronouncements like a very serious horror host but eventually gets into a discussion with Dracula on the reality of vampires. Which in turn leads to the narrative coming to a screeching halt in favour of a number of absurdist skits that suggest a rather clear connection between vampires and capitalism.

In the main plot, Dracula will get into trouble for his autocratic leadership style as well, so even this non-80s-Egyptian viewer smells a degree of satire there.

However, between the fourth wall breaking, the quotes and everything, this is also a gorgeous, often utterly bizarre horror musical that makes up for a certain lack of budget through the virtues of imagination and natural weirdness. The film’s actual music should be on various hipster turn tables with its mix of disco, “Egyptian”-sounding percussion, synths and vocal lines that remind me more than a little of 70s Bollywood. Shebl needle-drops a variety of certainly copyrighted music as well, and there are as many clever gags based in the use of borrowed music as there are visual ones.

From time to time, Fangs even puts some emphasis on the “horror” bit of its multi-genre descriptors, and suddenly there’s genuinely icky vampire gore between the songs and the general strangeness. Clearly, Shebl liked a lot of things, and aimed to put them all on screen in the same movie – one never knows if it isn’t one’s first and only, after all.

In short: Holiday Inn (1941)

Say what you will about Mark Sandrich’s tale of showbiz woe in which Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire are vying for Marjorie Reynolds, but it certainly is ambitious in its attempt to encompass all holidays known to North Americans (half of which involve presidents, apparently) in a single movie fit for all holidays, with each and every one of them getting their own Irving Berlin tune.

For my tastes, Berlin always was the least interesting big name songwriter of this sort of thing at his time, tending to be a bit too tame and conventional, frankly a wee bit boring, when compared to the Porters and Gershwins of the world. So it’ll come as no surprise that I don’t actually think much about most of his ditties here, with the obvious exceptions of “Easter Parade” and the unstoppable juggernaut of proper holiday sentimentality that is “White Christmas”. But to be fair to Berlin, and to pretend I’m not an insufferable snob when it comes to my favourites in the Great American Songbook, holiday songs aren’t easy.

The film knows on which side its bread is buttered, too, seeing as White Christmas is the only song used twice here. Otherwise this is a very typical musical comedy of its time, with Crosby crooning second rate Berlin holiday songs, Fred Astaire mostly – there are a couple of exceptions – coasting through comparatively uninventive choreography, getting by on charm and the fact that he’s Astaire (which works out nicely for him and for at least this viewer), Reynolds making no impression whatsoever, and the typically obvious jokes falling flat more often than not, though not in an unpleasant manner.


There are a couple of interesting elements here, like a rather meta ending that seems to belong to a much more inventive, and perhaps emotionally more involving, movie, or how a film that includes a, probably well-meant, blackface number (for Lincoln’s Birthday, no less) that’ll make 2010s and 2020s audiences cringe also treats its black characters (who are of course and alas a maid played by Louise Beavers and her children) with comparative dignity and humanity. Despite that and its status as at least a minor holiday classic, I simply don’t believe Holiday Inn’s a terribly great film. Thanks to Old Hollywood magic doing its work, it is, however, still a slick and watchable production, and at least we’ll always have “White Christmas”.

In short: Anna and the Apocalypse (2017)

It’s Christmas time in the sleepy Scottish town of Little Haven. Now nearing the finish line of her highschool life, our titular heroine (Ella Hunt) is planning on taking an off-year before going to university. That plan is somewhat inspiring the ire of her working class dad (Mark Benton) – who clearly fears she’s pissing away her chance for a future that doesn’t see her having to do stuff like janitorial service at the school her children go to as he does – as well as puppy-eyed sadness in her best friend John (Malcolm Cumming). And yes, Virginia, of course John’s secretly in love with her. There’s also some business about Anna having an actual crush, a total arsehole called Nick (Ben Wiggins), and various friends and hangers-on.

All of this is going to stay as important as very obvious character relations can stay when the worst sort of Christmas trouble in form of the zombie apocalypse arises. You know the drill with that one. On the plus side, Anna’s really rather good at killing zombies once she gets going.

This little bit of plot already makes it clear that director John McPhail really attempts to go all in with the genre mash-up here, mixing teen comedy, somewhat gory zombie horror comedy, and a tiny smidgen of romantic comedy (minus all of the tropes of that genre that are actually satisfying, as it will turn out), mostly using the genres in their most clichéd forms.

Because that’s apparently not enough genres, the film’s also a musical, featuring a bunch of tunes that are catchy but also not terribly good in other regards, and choreography that mostly gets by on a bunch of young, clearly talented, actors really going on a charm offensive, which is what keeps much of the film lively and comparatively fun to watch. Alas, this does not change the fact that most of the songs are in the style of second string contemporary broadway tunes. Personally, I tend to find even the first string of this type of music with its love for the technical and the slick pretty much the opposite of most of what I appreciate in music, so this isn’t exactly making me happy. Your mileage may obviously vary here.

Tonally, the film suffers from having a few too many genres to work through, ending up disappointing genre expectations for every single genre it belongs to in turn, something even a truly clever script could not necessarily avoid in a case at this; the workmanlike one with its series of clichés and tropes Anna has certainly can’t.


All of this does make Anna and the Apocalypse sound like a worse experience than sitting through it actually is, though, for while things don’t hang together terribly well here, and the film avoids to do anything actually interesting with it genre mash-up, it does have the already mentioned charm of the cast, as well as a lot of the kind of energy I can’t help but read as a desperate wish to entertain. And even though the film certainly entertains far below its possibilities, who am I to deny it a wish this appropriate to the season?

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Mary Poppins Returns (2018): This musical is a terribly charming throwback to 50s Hollywood entries into the genre, updated with light but sure hand by its director Rob Marshall. There are a plethora of adorable little moments, scenes that understand to milk magic out of the very artificiality of the musical as a form, and lovely performances by Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda (as a cockney lamplighter, obviously).

Despite all these charms, it never comes quite together as anything but a series of deeply charming and fun vignettes. The thematic throughline is weak (even for a musical), and there’s really not enough substance to justify the running time of 130 minutes. Of course, I do understand why Marshall didn’t cut two or three musical numbers – they are all so very lovely, and would have been darlings particularly difficult to kill. But then, that’s what directors are sometimes supposed to do.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018): This perfectly deserved Academy Award winner by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, on the other hand, demonstrates how to make a film full of wonderful little moments and details and more ideas than your typical Hollywood director will have in a lifetime, and still let it come out as a perfect whole, full of life, intelligence and love, carried by what feels like love for and excitement about all things Spider-Man. There are so many little nods to artists and writers that worked on these characters and version of these characters before, so many different animations styles and ideas but they are all perfectly weighed parts of the whole, important to the film’s understanding of the kind of heroism the webslinger is supposed to be about (something the Andrew Garfield Spidey movies generally missed by a mile).

That the film is also perfectly joyful (even in its sad and knowing moments), and inclusive in that way that embraces everybody who wants to be embraced, just make the whole thing more wonderful and more fun.


Aquaman (2018): Also very fun (though not on the level of Into the Spider-Verse), is watching DC finally stumbling onto the insight that superhero films are indeed allowed to be goofy, silly, and imaginative. That James Wan of all people is the guy who gets this is a bit of a surprise if you’re me and basically hated everything he made in horror movies, but get it, he clearly does, so his film – after the mandatory bad first twenty minutes even Wonder Woman and this are apparently mandated to have by the gods of DC themselves – turns into a series of four-colour incidents permanently fluctuating between the silly, the absurd, the semi-operatic, and the colourfully strange. Which is so much better than another attempt at making superheroes so grimdark the whole hero bit falls by the wayside (which is not a problem Marvel Studios ever had, even when their films get dark).

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Wild (2014): In part, Jean-Marc Vallée’s film (based on a memoir)about a woman making a thousand mile plus hike through the US wilderness to conquer her personal demons is certainly made of the material of self help books, but there’s also actual emotional weight in Reese Witherspoon’s performance, in the way Vallée tries to make the rhythm of her days in nature visible, in the beauty as well as an amount of danger (usually in the form of threatening men who never quite get around to doing something to Witherspoon but also make clear that they very well could which is a thing we male parts of the audience should take a good look at) the film finds by the wayside, and in the film’s general lack of preachiness. I also rather admired the way Wild shifts into flashbacks that feel as associative as actual memory, suggesting something true about the way memories come to the surface of our minds.

Go for Sisters (2013): This is probably not the best or “most important” film John Sayles has ever made, but there’s so much unhurried beauty, and such a clear eye for the ways cultures and people intersect in border regions that it’s still impossible for me not to find it rather on the brilliant side. On paper, the plot could make a thriller, but in practice, this is a road movie about friendship, class, and borders that lets its dangers and crimes happen as just another thing coming up by the wayside.

This approach doesn’t feel slow or lazy but has a relaxed beauty mirrored in wonderful performances by LisaGay Hamilton, Yolonda Ross, Edward James Olmos and various others. Like quite a few of Sayles’s later films, this feels like a product of someone who has a lot to say about people and the very specific world they inhabit, and shares it thoughtful, without grand gestures. I imagine Sayles to be a very good listener.

Begin Again aka Can a Song Save Your Life? (2013): This film by John Carney is a bit of a Hollywood feel good film about the saving graces of music featuring Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo, but it comes about its positive feeling the honest way: by accepting the bad shit and thinking about ways to get through it. That some of these ways might not be a hundred percent applicable in real life seems neither here nor there – this is a film that cherishes hope, music and friendship so much it’s not a lie but a promise. It also has a better ending than you’d expect or fear.


Carney knows and understands music much better than many directors making films about musicians, so there’s a lot in here about the way songs and life intersect, the impact a song can still have on a life (and not just of those writing them), as well as the sheer joy of music. The music the characters make is also just right for them as well as the film. This is the kind of movie that really can make someone happier and more hopeful for a bit. At least this someone.

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The Disappointments Room (2016): I dunno, but unlike much of the rest of the internet, I think D.J. Caruso’s movie about a family escaping a tragedy to a supposed rural dream home, only to have the mother (played by a surprisingly effective and human Kate Beckinsale) start seeing ghosts, is a perfectly acceptable bit of contemporary mainstream horror, with perfectly okay ghost bits. There’s also a semi-competent effort at updating the old “is the woman MAD?” trope into something more palatable, perhaps even meaningful to contemporary eyes. It’s not quite as feminist as it probably thinks it is in its approach there, but like the rest of the film, it’s thoughtful and interesting enough to get a vague thumbs up from me.

The Go-Getter (2007): Martin Hynes film concerning a teenager (Lou Taylor Pucci) going on a road trip in a stolen car to find his long-time absent brother, meeting strange people, falling in love with the owner of the car (Zooey Deschanel), and perhaps doing some growing up in the progress on the other hand is more than just deserving of a vague thumbs up. Stylistically, it’s very much inside of the indie mainstream of its time, but Hynes uses the genre (and believe me, this sort of thing is just as much part of a “genre” as is a slasher or a vampire movie) with warmth, a sense of poetry and obvious liking for his characters – including their fault lines and flaws – while getting fine performances out of Pucci, Deschanel and usual suspects like Judy Greer and Jena Malone.


Le parapluies de Cherbourg aka The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964): Jacques Demy’s musical is of course a stone cold classic, applying things learned from the nouvelle vague and the director’s very personal idiosyncrasies to a conception of the musical that seems – also thanks to the sung dialogue – to try to apply approaches of the opera to the kind of people most traditional opera doesn’t care about, consequently also using quite a different kind of music. Compared to his next musical, the surface-friendlier Young Girls of Rochefort (which I slightly prefer) the material’s dark elements aren’t pretending to be as light (Rochefort doesn’t even make a deep emotional thing out of a serial killer). This is the sort of musical romance that doesn’t get a traditional happy ending because life usually doesn’t have one, and it is one that really wants to talk about actual life in an artistically heightened way. It also happens to be a film that is so drop dead gorgeous (and not just because its actors are) in sound, shape, and movement, the “realistic” sadness of its ending seems to be the least interesting thing about it.

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The Lure aka Córki dangingu (2015): Apart from the bare facts, Agnieszka Smoczynska’s film is one of those films which should be watched rather than written up. Fortunately, the basic facts should make this one enticing to exactly the sort of people who will enjoy it. So let’s just say this is a modern Polish retelling of the tale of the little mermaid as a musical taking place in a sleazy nightclub, with some fantastic musical numbers, eye-popping and often deep production design, some gore, nudity both sexy and grotesque, incredible acting particularly by mermaids Marta Mazurek and Michalina Olsuanska, one eye for the tragic and the other eye for the comical, feminist undertones carried by a director who somehow makes this stuff look like an aesthetic whole. If that sounds like the sort of thing you like, this is going to be a thing you adore. I, at least, found myself like that living cliché – the viewer glued to the screen.

The Love Witch (2016): Anna Biller’s rather more obviously feminist film using the perfectly emulated and enhanced ideal of late 60s/early 70s exploitation movies to explore concepts of love, desire, the male and female gaze in practice, and the pressures of societal expectations on women via the murderous adventures of one Elaine (Samantha Robinson) and her habit to first magically seduce and then murder men when they can’t live up to her (or really, her society’s) ideals of love or manliness would probably make a fantastic double feature, seeing as it shares The Lure’s deep aesthetic unity, though its aesthetics are very different ones. Both films also share the fact that they’re pretty incredible in a every respect.

I say the film emulates and enhances the ideal of the exploitation movies whose model it uses, but really, no actual exploitation movie ever looked this consciously constructed, seldom this intense in their use of colours, this intoxicatingly beautiful. Nor did these films usually use their slightly off acting styles as intelligent as lead Samantha Robinson and the rest of the cast do here. If that (and some of the reception) make the film sound insufferably camp – it isn’t insufferable all. There’s irony, there’s distance, but this is a film that is serious about its aesthetics and its message even though it also can see the joke in the former; it’s just not actually joking about it.

All the President’s Men (1976): Saying that the most famous film of Alan J. Pakula’s paranoia trilogy is a timely film to watch is so obvious I’m a bit embarrassed to even have mentioned it. However, it stands to mention how downright optimistic the film looks from today, seeing as it does suggest people in power will actually eventually be held accountable one way or the other, and features at least parts of the free press actually interested in truth more than access to the political feedings trough.


On the filmmaking side, it’s a brilliant film, calmly told, with an undertone of dread under the surface of an investigative tale that meets its audience at eye level and clearly has no doubt viewers will be able to follow it, without feeling the need to exposit or over-explain, or to add much overt drama to the proceedings, because all that’s in the story if you care to look closely. Add performances of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman (who wins at reaction shots) in their prime and a delightful turn by Jason Robards and you have a pretty damn perfect film.

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Eyewitness (1981): This film by Peter Yates is a weird one: part thriller, part dubious romance, full of fantastic actors being fantastic (William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Christopher Plummer and James Woods in their prime are certainly nothing to sneeze at), there’s also text and subtext about the way the personal and the political intermingle that never quite comes together coherently, and a load of scenes of stuff that seems completely incidental to plot, characters or theme and just hangs there dragging things down.

When the film is good, it is brilliant: the first attempts of Hurt’s character to get closer to his long-time crush TV news reporter Weaver are pathetic, creepy and even sweet in equal measures; some of the suspense scenes are taken right out of the Hitchcock handbook in the best possible way; and an American film actually talking about class is always to be praised.

Too bad that the bizarrely sugary ending seems to forget everything that was ambiguous, creepy or actually difficult in the proposed relationship between Hurt and Weaver, and that the film again and again stops in its tracks to run off in perfectly useless directions.

Shoot ‘Em Up (2007): Made in the same spirit as the Crank movies, but less annoying and with an actor (Clive Owen) instead of a persona in the lead, this one holds itself exactly to what its title promises. Then it adds an obsession with carrots (you will believe you can kill a man with a carrot), eye mutilation (also eye mutilation by carrot), a Monica Bellucci who is totally wasted in her role as lactating prostitute (hey, I didn’t write the movie, so don’t look at me) yet still awesome, Paul Giamatti eating all of the scenery (yes, even yours), and action scenes that reach from the absurd to the hilariously insane. Oh, and the right kind of rock music, too, because every act of cartoon violence is improved by adding “Ace of Spades” to it.
It’s stupid fun in the best way, says this carrot.

Sing Street (2016): This John Carney film about a young guy  growing up poor in 1980s Dublin finding self respect and love, talent and hope when he founds a band to impress a girl does sound a bit too friendly and nice on paper, but in practice, Carney is a sharp observer of human ambiguities who can show the lies his characters tell themselves without looking down on them. Not looking down at his characters is one of Carney’s strengths in general: this is a director who lets his young characters say youthfully pretentious stuff, knows it is youthfully pretentious, but neither makes fun of them nor nods at them from a distance, taking their dreams seriously even though they aren’t his dreams anymore. Carney’s a bit of a music specialist, so it’ll come as no surprise that the music’s great too (and this is a musical in anything but name, and not just in the music video daydream scene) while also being the sort of music these characters in this time would believably make.


There’s so much genuine sympathy and warmth on screen here, only the most cynical will not to moved and charmed.

In short: Stage Fright (2014)

Ten years after the murder of his star Kylie Swanson (Minnie Driver doing the old, traditional, famous first victim thing) directly following the premiere of their probably career making musical production of “The Haunting of the Opera”, former producer Roger McCall (Meat Loaf being quite awesome for someone whose music I loathe) is the owner of a not exactly successful musical summer camp. He has taken Kylie’s children Camilla (Allie “I’m your final girl of the evening” MacDonald) and Buddy (Douglas Smith) in like real adopted children, which is to say, they work as cooks for him.

This year, the musical kids have decided to stage a revival of “The Haunting of the Opera”. Camilla has long dreamed of stepping into the shoes of her mother, and she certainly has the talents to match, so she decides to audition for the lead role. Not only will she have to fight through the expected backstage intrigues (and possibly sell her soul – or at the very least her body - for her role), but there’s also a metal singing killer lurking around in the camp’s dark places who just might provide a very interesting opening night.

This might suggest I’m a cynic, but when I heard Jerome Sable’s Stage Fright described as a comedic slasher musical, I was rather convinced the resulting film would be a victim of that most dangerous of illnesses, gimmick-itis. Turns out that’s not true at all, for Stage Fright feels like an absolute labour of love instead of an attempt to cash-in on surface strangeness.

Just look at the sure-handed way the film mixes genre quotations, a rather meta story, everything you ever heard about the backstage shenanigans in musicals, song and dance I’m not at all prepared to judge beyond calling them really fitting, and some pretty fun kill scenes. Nary a minute goes by in which the film doesn’t do something clever, or funny, or delightful (if you’re the kind of person delighted by over-blown violence in your movies, at least, which I tragically seem to have turned into) with the genre pieces it is working with, without ever falling into the sort of lame drudge where a director only quotes better films but doesn’t actually know how to turn these quotes into a thing of its own.

A large part of Stage Fright’s copious charms are of course based on the seeming incompatibility of the genres it mixes. However, once you’ve taken the film’s measure, you might agree the very formulaic genres of the slasher and musical have quite a bit in common, as all things formulaic have, and work rather well in tandem, particularly when there’s a script at play that really knows how to play with the respective genres’ individual absurdities, as well as with our idea of what the genres are about. There’s a playfulness at display here that left me feeling delighted more often than not, even though – it has to be said – Stage Fright does get a bit flabby around its middle, mostly, I suppose, because featuring more murders before the grand finale than the film does would have made the plot rather more implausible than even a meta horror musical with a metal slasher could get away with.

That’s not too much of a problem for Stage Fright, though, because the flabbiness never becomes actual boredom, and the film stays an unexpected pleasure even when its plot is dragging its feet a little.

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