Three Films Make A Post: Take The Trip

Stone (1974): This Australian bikie (thanks for that term, Australia) exploitation movie is a weird thing. It starts out as a paranoid acid trip (that is to say, pretty awesome), turns into a nearly anthropological look at its version of bikie culture - with some added fun violence in between, of course – and ends with the sort of 70s downer business that really puts all that talk about honour in the scenes before into a rather brutal perspective.

One-time feature director and occasional actor Sandy Harbutt has quite the eye for going from 70s psychedelia, through the scenes that feel documentary, to the cheap and fun action, dropping some acerbic bits about class, and getting back to the bad trip quality while making things feel natural.

Hell Drivers (1957): There’s also quite a bit of class commentary in Cy Endfield’s curious mix of melodrama, truck action, and noir tropes. Unlike in many a 50s British movie, one can even imagine the director having met working class people before. The film also shows for its time surprising sympathy for its Italian “Gastarbeiter” character (though he is played by the decidedly not Italian Herbert Lom), and generally seems to have a good working idea of how a certain type of working class pride can easily be exploited to destructive ends.

On a less theoretical level, for my tastes, the film comes down a bit too hard on the side of the melodrama, putting the action and the noir elements sometimes too far in the back. The cast is pretty amazing however, not only featuring Lom, Patrick McGoohan, Stanley Baker and Peggy Cummins in the leads, but having pop up William Hartnell, David McCallum, Gordon Jackson, and even Sean Connery in small before they were famous parts.

The Comeback Trail (2020): George Gallo’s remake of the Harry Hurwitz movie is one of those comedies that sometimes go out of their way to repeat a joke for the slow audience members, likes to mistime perfectly fine punchlines, and often shows surprisingly little talent for staging its jokes as best as it could. Frome time to time, the script’s very funny indeed (particularly if you like your low budget movies), but just as often, it seems to coast on some basic ideas in it being funny without actually bothering with turning them into funny scenes.

That the resulting film is still watchable and entertaining enough (in an undemanding manner) is mostly the responsibility of the actors, well, really mostly Tommy Lee Jones, Robert De Niro and Morgan Freeman (a trio frankly much too good for the film), who put quite a bit of effort into classing up the joint. As an addendum for your nightmares, please appreciate how much Emile Hirsch looks like a young, thin, Jack Black in this one.

In short: Zorro (1975)

Young Miguel de la Serna (Marino Masé) comes to Mexico to not just take on the post of provincial governor his uncle left him by dying of the kind of malaria that comes from the edge of a blade but to do so as a beacon of justice and righteousness. Alas, he is murdered before he can even reach his province, dying in the arms of his old friend, the rather more worldly and cynical master fencer Don Diego (Alain Delon). Diego – perhaps after some exciting reading of Icelandic sagas? – is all pumped up to take bloody vengeance on the people responsible, but Miguel’s last wish is that his friend take his vengeance by restoring order and justice in the province without killing anyone. So Diego does the obvious and goes undercover as a fake, buffoonish dandy new governor whom it is pretty difficult not to read as a gay stereotype, an approach that certainly keeps evil Colonel Huerta (Stanley Baker), a man so evil milk probably curdles through his sheer presence, far from suspicious.

Thanks to the inspiration of a little orphan boy (no idea who plays him, alas), Diego dresses up as the local legendary protector of all that is good, Zorro, and starts to swashbuckle Huerta and his men into submission.
Unfortunately, I’m not really the ideal audience for Duccio Tessari’s version of Zorro. I may not be the kind of guy anymore who isn’t able to enjoy an adventure comedy at all, but this thing feels as if someone had seen Richard Lester’s Musketeers and only seen the slapstick, leaving out the films’ particular ideas of historical veracity, its dark sides, as well as the sheer verve of it all. Which leaves us with a Zorro film that is basically all slapstick all the time - and it’s the kind of slapstick that only misses somebody doing the old banana peel thing.

It’s about on the level of the more childish Bud Spencer and Terence Hill movies, a series of films Zorro’s further reminds me of by its incessant use of its horrible (and alas earworm-y) title song whenever Zorro appears. “Here’s to being free, here’s to you and me, la la la la la la, Zorro’s back” until brain and ears bleed. And you’ll really hear it a lot, because this thing is nearly two hours long, not exactly ideal for a low brow comedy.

However, it may very well be this’ll be perfectly fun for people not-me. At least, Alain Delon looks as if he’s having a blast (and how often have you seen that in a career spent looking coldly disinterested?), and Tessari knows how to choreograph his slapstick action.

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.

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