Starcrash (1978)

aka The Adventures of Stella Star

Intergalactic smuggler Stella Star (Caroline Munro) and her weird-ass partner Akton (Marjoe Gortner) have been giving the forces of Law and Order quite the run for their money. Finally caught and sentenced to a quintillion years of hard labour, Stella stages a daring escape which is rudely interrupted by a plea for help from the Emperor of the First Circle of the Galaxy (Christopher Plummer) – whatever that is - himself. Apparently, the evil Count Zarth Arn (Joe Spinell) - not Sa Tan, alright - has developed a planet sized secret weapon of horrifying destructive power.

All attempts at actually locating the planet where this weapon is hidden have come up empty and even resulted in the disappearance of the Emperor’s only son Simon (David Hasselhoff) while looking for it. Stella’s superior piloting and Akton’s excellent navigational skills are the only hope left to the forces of good. They are to be supported by one Chief Thor (Robert Tessier) and the law robot who caught them, one Elle (the voice of the fittingly named Howard Camp in the body of Judd Hamilton). Obviously, the bad guys aren’t going to make things easy for them.

Fortunately, Stella has more luck than a Corellian smuggler, and Akton gets a new superpower whenever the plot needs it.

Among the various attempts at ripping off Star Wars on the cheap, this US-Italian co-production directed by the great Luigi Cozzi is one of the most entertaining. Nobody’d ever confuse it with one of those boring “good” films, but it certainly is a great one, a triumph of crass commercialism somehow turning into a feast of childish/child-like imagination, barely suppressed horniness and a love for the joys of pulp science fiction.

The films production design often suggests Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off, full of shapes and constructions that look sort of like the real thing if you squint but never quite so much as to invite a law suit. Every space ship interior, space(!) cavern and mine looks cheaper, weirder and more improbable than in the movie’s guiding light, but little of it looks carelessly thrown together. This may be the tackier, cheaper version of what George Lucas did, but it is a tackiness and cheapness somebody has clearly worked hard at, so it feels personable, alive, and exciting in a deeply goofy yet undeniable way.

Also palpable, and very typical of Cozzi as well as Italian SF cinema as a whole, is a sense of enthusiasm when it comes to hands on special effects. The stop motion robots may be ill advised, what with them looking as if they come right out of a peplum, yet they are also lovely, silly and exciting. The same goes for miniature effects that hold up to little scrutiny while exuding a sense of sheer joy. I can’t help but imagine Cozzi (who is a genre movie nerd in the best meaning of the phrase) looking at what he has wrought grinning from ear to ear.

The script does its very best to hit all of the pulp science fiction tropes, not just those Star Wars used, so the plot evolves/devolves into a series of encounters with everything from evil space amazons to space cave men, environmental dangers our heroes survive via random magical space powers, and only from time to time touches base with more direct, usually preposterous moments trying to evoke light sabres and Jedi.

On the acting side, Starcrash is a series of inexplicable yet awesome casting and acting decisions. See Joe Spinell as the awkwardly overweight big bad from what I can only assume to be Space New York! Be astonished at the way Caroline Munro goes through most of the movie in what amounts to fetish gear (particularly the colour-changed Vampirella costume is quite the thing, what little there is of it) and makes the costumes look like clothes a woman would actually wear! Puzzle at whatever Marjoe Gortner is doing in his role as Han Skywalker Wan, and at whatever any of his facial expressions mean! Gaze in awe at Christopher Plummer’s heroic attempts at suppressing the giggles by speaking very, very softly, attempting to project great personal charisma and sleepiness at the same time (whose flow he can hold, by the way, because of course he can)!

There are glories to behold in Starcrash.

In short: Shadowman (1974)

Original title: Nuits rouges

A mysterious criminal mastermind who likes to either wear silly costumes or a red ski mask, and therefore goes by the moniker of Man Without a Face (Jacques Champreux) gets wind of a way to acquire the lost treasure of the Knights Templar. While attempting to find the treasure, he tortures the uncle of sailor and obvious protagonist Paul de Borrego (Ugo Pagliai) to death, making himself an enemy who will team up with a beleaguered cop (Gert Fröbe), a “poet detective” (Séraphin Beauminon) – because this is still a French movie - as well the sailor’s sort of girlfriend (Josephine Chaplin) to get at the villain’s faceless hide.

Also rather cranky about some weirdo and his henchies murdering their members and trying to steal their shit are the Knights Templar themselves, who still exist in secret and are well able to stage a commando raid on a villain’s lair when need be.

Our villain isn’t helpless, though, for apart from his own man of a thousand faces shtick, he also has a huge number of masked henchpeople, the mandatory nameless, pretty, and pretty murderous woman as his number two (Gayle Hunnicutt), and a mad scientist tucked away in a cellar who turns normal people into pretty damn hilarious zombie killers. Among other things.

Despite carrying quite a few of the hallmarks of the genre, one really shouldn’t go into Georges Franju’s Nuits rouges expecting something on the lines of Eurospy or the more comics-styled Eurocrime films. They do share a lineage with one another, obviously, but this, as was Franju’s earlier Judex, is very much an homage to the serials of Louis Feuillade, full of attempts to consciously capture the peculiar surrealism and unexpected sense of off-beat poetry of things like Les Vampires.

Usually, trying to create the air of accidental surrealism or to artificially create the strangeness that just happens to some movies is a terrible idea. But more often than not, Nuits rouges achieves what Franju is aiming for, and has an air of individual peculiarity that’s more interested in inhabiting the strangeness of this sort of high pulp realm than in making it genuinely exciting as pulp. How much any given viewer will like this approach to the material is to a considerable degree a matter of personal taste, but if it doesn’t work, Franju’s the last one to blame, for he puts all of his considerable powers as a filmmaker into his project, caring little if anyone watching it might find it misguided. It’s difficult not to at least respect this. I, of course, found myself so charmed by the whole affair, I’m now trying to find the version of this Franju somehow got onto French TV as an eight part show.

Imagine the “Theme From Shaft” Here

If you’re like me, you probably have fantasized about a movie featuring a blaxploitation protagonist doing the good work of the psychic detective. I still can’t help you with the movie, but Edward M. Erdelac’s story collection “Conquer” (here’s a link to my local version of Amazon, you know how to use yours), concerning the adventures of the titular private eye with an eye for the weird, has you covered in book form.

Pleasantly, the stories don’t just coast by on the neat idea of “Shaft meets Carnacki” and Erdelac’s expert use of the pulp toolbox but do some fun conceptual work on its basic concept, adding some interesting ideas about how magic works in Conquer’s world, as well as demonstrating a fine eye for the interplay between the weird and the book’s 70’s setting.

With all its love for the period it is set in and inspired by, this is very much a book written in our time, so it does show a rather more inclusive and empathetic spirit than you might expect. Consequently, characters like the drag queens in one of the tales are treated much more dignified than you’d see in any blaxploitation flick. The book is, obviously, all the better for it.

Past Misdeeds: The Shadow (1994)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Seemingly bored millionaire Lamont Cranston (Alec Baldwin) actually has a rather interesting hobby during his nights: so he can atone for the sins of his past as drug-dealing warlord in Asia and channel his inner evil into something good a Buddhist monk has taught Cranston the power to cloud men’s minds, providing him with basic invisibility and other fun powers. So by night, Cranston turns into the mysterious crime-fighting vigilante only known as The Shadow, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men and fights New York’s underworld, recruiting people like taxi driver Moe Shrevnitz (Peter Boyle) as his agents.

The Shadow’s life becomes rather more difficult when Shiwan Khan (John Lone), the last descendant of Genghis Khan arrives in town. Shiwan Khan has learned the same mystical powers as The Shadow. but he’s quite violently not bought into that whole atonement business at all. Instead, Khan plans to use his power to conquer the world, a plan that clearly can’t help but start with the kidnapping of one Dr Reinhardt Lane (a horribly underused Ian McKellen), and end with the threat of a rather prematurely produced nuclear bomb. The Shadow for his part will do all in his power to safe New York from destruction.

It’s quite easy to play the game of imagining one’s own perfect The Shadow movie out of whichever bits and pieces of Walter Gibson’s pulp novel series and the radio show it spawned and that would influence the continuing novels if Gibson wanted (which he didn’t) or not one prefers. The more pulp knowledgeable among the reviewers of Russell Mulcahy’s film tend to do that, of course, which generally results in attempts to compare the poor film with the pure perfection of one’s dream adaptation, a process that can only lead to tears.

If I, by now grounded a bit more in Shadow lore than I was when I first watched and enjoyed the actual film at hand, would play the old game of pick and choose myself, this would certainly be a different proposal, one which would keep the Shadow himself quite a bit more mysterious than the actual film does (probably turning the Lamont Cranston identity into the pure mask Gibson in the end decided it to be), which would play up the role of the Shadow’s agents, give Penelope Ann Miller’s Margo Lane a bit more to do than fetchingly wear awesome dresses and not get kidnapped, certainly provide the Shadow with a rather more creepy laugh, and would most definitely hire someone for The Shadow’s facial prosthetics who knows what they are doing.

However, not being one’s dream movie seems to be The Shadow’s main problem, at least as far as that curious bird, the 90’s blockbuster pulp movie adaptation/superhero movie in the wake of the success of Tim Burton’s miserable first Batman film goes. The rest of the weaknesses are just your typical mid-90s blockbuster stuff, things I take as a part of the genre make-up of the film. So The Shadow quite expectedly demonstrates a horrible fear of actually being dark when it is required to be and a love for rather lame hero’s journey stuff business even if that approach to heroics doesn’t fit the actual hero it concerns itself with at all.

However, despite all these flaws and various possible niggles, I still enjoy Mulcahy’s film a lot, beginning with its surprising success at taking one of the Shadow’s “yellow peril” enemies and not having him end up as a horrible racist caricature. In part, that’s thanks to David Koepp’s script only using the most neutral tropes of this sort of thing - and to good effect – adding knowing nods like Shiwan Khan’s sartorial liking for Brooks Brothers suits, but to a larger degree, Khan works thanks to a performance by John Lone that goes through ranting, raving, and clever little jokes with a wonderful physical presence and just the right amount of irony. Never so much of the latter it drifts into the realm of camp – generally not a problem of this particular film anyway, thankfully – but enough to turn Khan into something different from a racist caricature, not a bad guy because of his skin colour but because of his character.

And then there’s the other great joy of the film, its incredibly artificial style in the whole of its production design reaching from costumes to architecture. All of it locates The Shadow in an artificial dream world of style that takes iconic elements of 30s and 40s fashion and architecture and blows them up to ridiculously beautiful proportions, a 30s and 40s of the imagination. I believe we have Tim Burton’s Batman – if you ask me a much less entertaining adaptation of a piece of pulp culture – to thank for a mainstream production being allowed to indulge in this kind of way.

In any case, it’s this aspect of the film that turns it into a film not of the “style over substance” kind certain critics love to talk about and that I have only very seldom encountered myself, but one where – like in a Choer Yuen wuxia but of course not as incandescently – style is substance, dragging an audience into a world that very consciously isn’t the real one, treating cinema as a place of shared cultural dreams, or in this particular case, a place where an audience can dream about their own contemporary ideas of shared cultural dreams gone by. Not so we can self-consciously point and laugh and tell ourselves how morally superior we are to the past but – perhaps – to find the point where the old dreams and the new touch.


Mulcahy as a director is a perfect choice for this sort of thing, having spent the better parts of a career going up and down and up again making films that try to tell all they have to say through their surfaces (polished like mirrors), leading audiences into places that are often more akin to dreams than they are to stories as such; unless they end up being Highlander II: The Quickening, but putting shared dreamscapes on screen isn’t easy, so failure’s a natural risk there.

Past Misdeeds: The Bullet Vanishes (2012)

aka Ghost Bullets

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

China during the Warlords Era. Policeman Song Donglu (Lau Ching-Wan, doing his crazy detective bit with all the verve and charisma I expect from what might be my favourite living Chinese actor) may work in a prison, but he's a nearly superhumanly able investigator. He spends his time actually talking to the prisoners, clearing up wrongful convictions through his powers of deduction - not that this frees anyone, mind you - and learning what he can about human psychology from the inmates. Donglu may be a cop in a dirty system, but he's as humanist a man as one could imagine.

The numerous letters regarding the wrongful convictions he has written must have earned him the respect or supreme annoyance of somebody somewhere, for he is transferred to the city of Tiancheng to work on the local police force's corruption problem.

Not a man to be discouraged by little things like getting an office in the file archive in the cellar, Donglu quickly inserts himself into an interesting case, the kind of mystery he developed his talents for. A peculiar series of murders has begun in the munitions factory of a certain Mr Ding (Liu Kai-Chi, in a horribly over-done performance that doesn't jive at all with anything everyone else on screen is doing). The victims are shot by some unknown and unseen person, but the bullets are nowhere to be found. It's as if they were disappearing into thin air. So it's no wonder the workforce - held in virtual slavery by Ding - believes the killer to be the vengeful ghost of a killed worker girl who died in a game of Russian Roulette dressed up as "asking the heavens" for a verdict on a supposed crime by Ding.

Donglu, working with cop Guo Zhui (Nicholas Tse, as neutral as always acting-wise), the fastest gun in Tiancheng, and clearly a policeman nearly as clever and as interested in the cause of actual justice as Donglu is, soon realizes that Ding is the kind of guy who would cheat in a game of Russian Roulette, and that whoever commits the murders certainly does so in connection with crimes Ding committed himself. But realizing this and finding out and then proving what is actually going on are different things. Things that can be dangerous once one finds out that the local chief of police is in Ding's pocket, and there aren't many people an honest cop can trust.

At first, it's easy to assume The Bullet Vanishes to be a Hong Kong clone of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes movies, seeing as how the films share an eccentric and brilliant detective, some techniques of demonstrating said detective's brilliance, and a soundtrack style. However, once the film gets going it becomes clear that director Law Chi-Leung was certainly taking inspiration from the modern Holmes movies yet is wise enough to be doing very much his own thing with it. Which, as much as I enjoy Ritchie's pulp action mysteries, really is as it should be.

Law's film keeps inside the genre lines of the pulp mystery, with the mandatory - and excitingly done - chases and shoot-outs, the contrived murder method that can only be understood through just as contrived and very entertaining investigation techniques, and a damn boring romance sub-plot between Nicholas "I may win prizes for best actor but you sure wouldn't notice" Tse and Yang Mi as terribly cute fake soothsayer Little Lark (some women really know how to wear a 2012 idea of a 1920s hair cut is all I'm saying) who unfortunately share not an ounce of chemistry.

Despite the very uninvolving romance that feels shoe-horned in from a "blockbuster writing 101" checklist, I'd be perfectly satisfied with The Bullet if it did only repeat the expected genre beats in its own enthusiastic and accomplished fashion. However, Law is a more ambitious filmmaker than that. Consequently, Bullets goes through some mood shifts reminiscent of a style of Hong Kong film made thirty years ago, with tragedy and serious discussions of ethics as much on the program as detecting, shooting and a bit of silliness. The more po-faced aspects of the movie didn't work quite as well as I would have wished for, with some of the more melodramatic moments feeling not quite as well built up to as they should have been, and the discussion of political ethics coming somewhat out of the blue. However, I prefer a film like this that attempts to add something more to genre formula filmmaking and not quite achieves it to the more harmless and riskless kind of movie; at least when the not quite achieved ambition does not ruin the rest of the movie, which it doesn't here. Plus, it's nice to see a Hong Kong film that doesn't shy away from agreeing with a humanist view of people even though it is willing to respect other perspectives. There's none of the unpleasant respect even for corrupt authority that is en vogue in Hong Kong cinema since the Takeover to be found in the film, either - after all, these bad guys are Warlord Era capitalists, so there's surely no connection to contemporary China (or America, or Germany) here, right, Mister Censor?


While I and many of my Hong Kong cinema loving peers have written many sad words about the descent of Hong Kong cinema already, if you watch the right movies, the old lady still has some life in it beyond whatever Johnnie To directs in a given year. More importantly, there still seem to be filmmakers like Law Chi-Leung willing to do interesting and at least somewhat ambitious things inside of very commercial genres without looking down on them or their audience. The wild years of Hong Kong cinema may be long over, but films like The Bullet Vanishes are proof that there's a good chance that the second decade of the slick years of the city's cinema can still produce films very much worth watching and thinking about. Like Lau Ching-Wan's character in the movie, I choose to remain hopeful.

Three Films Make A Post: They were created to save mankind. Something went wrong.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004): It’s taken me a good decade to learn to appreciate Kerry Conran’s only feature film. And now I’m thinking “what the hell is wrong with me and why has it been taking me so long”? Of course, in that decade, I consumed a very fair share of the pulps, serials, and comics this is an updated homage to, and gained a bit more knowledge about the people who built the wall this particular ball is bounced off of. Though, honestly, even before that, I should have appreciated the detail-rich production design and costuming, the love and care taken with a peculiar yet effective visual aesthetic, the sure-handed way Conran handles his one-note (but the right one) characters, the fact that – unlike in many a film of this type – Gwyneth Paltrow’s reporter character Polly Perkins actually gets to do stuff beyond looking pretty and being a love interest (although she handles that part rather excellently too), the expert pacing of the one damn and awesome thing after another plot, and so on, and so forth. Seriously, what is wrong with me?

The Nightmare (2015): If you’re looking for an actual documentary about sleep paralysis and the people suffering from it, Rodney Ascher’s documentary won’t be for you, because it basically handwaves away the actual science, concentrates on its mostly cheesy re-enactments of the sufferers’ hallucinations, and ends up with a lot of rambling about Jesus, aliens, and demons, and never makes even the tiniest sceptical or critical gesture towards even the greatest bullshit story. Perhaps, if one doesn’t get quite as annoyed by the film and its approach, one might be mildly creeped out by the archetypal nightmare imagery, but honestly, there are quite a few films admitting they are fiction that are much better at that,

Hangar 10 (2014): I found myself positively surprised by Daniel Simpson’s POV horror film of the UFO persuasion, which makes use of the UK’s favourite UFO incident. It even makes good use of it, actually hinting at various bits of the mythology concerned during the course of the film instead of just waving its hands and screaming UFOs. Like with a lot of POV horror films, there are some moments of mild tedium around the end of the first act but the film actually escalates things from there nicely, going through various POV horror greatest hits but avoiding the most annoying ones and ending in a handful of effectively creepy scenes quite its own.

There’s an actual visual pay-off in this one, too. Add to that Simpson’s ability to frame atmospheric and effective shots while keeping in hand-held consumer camera mode, a decent cast, effectively creepy sound design and subtract the sort of automatic hatred many people have evolved towards the POV form, and you actually have a clever and effective little piece of low budget horror.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,british movies,adventure,sf,pulp,documentary,woo woo,horror,kerry conran,jude law,gwyneth paltrow,rodney ascher,daniel simpson

Arsène Lupin (2004)

Gentleman thief Arsène Lupin (Romain Duris) steals from the rich, mostly by soulfully/smarmily flirting with women while he steals their jewellery from their throats, though right now he’s wanted for murder because he was a bit too good at ducking during a police chase. There’s a lot of melodramatic hither and yon about the possible return of the mysterious person who killed his (thief and savate master) father, a former childhood friend who grew up into a young Eva Green, and the film’s need to play swelling music at every possible opportunity.

Eventually, Lupin finds himself on the trail of three crosses that somehow disclose the hiding place of the lost French Crown Jewels. Other parties are involved too. A secret society with the goal to bring back the monarchy lead by the Duc D’Orleans (Mathieu Carrière), the sinister Beaumagnan (Pascal Greggory) and finally Joséphine de Cagliostro (Kristin Scott Thomas), professional femme fatale and possible immortal evil, are all searching for the crosses. Lupin naturally teams up with Joséphine but there just may be various twists and turns in his future that suggest this to have been not a very good choice at all.

Jean-Paul Salomé’s rethinking of everyone’s favourite gentleman thief is a truly peculiar film, seeing as it mixes French blockbuster style action and adventure, melodrama turned up to Eleven like in one of those French swashbucklers the nouvelle vague directors loathed so much, with a bit of the style of the French serials a la Feuillade the same nouvelle vague directors adored. The resulting film is certainly individual yet also the sort of thing even someone quite predisposed to its style might just hate when she’s seeing it in the wrong mood, because Arsène Lupin is utterly unrelenting to point of obnoxiousness.

It’s not enough for this film to have loudly scored action scenes in a style as old-fashioned as they are on the technical state of the art, it has to have the loudest, most old-fashioned action scenes; it’s not enough for it to be as melodramatic as a French roman feuilleton, it needs to be the most melodramatic thing possible. More often than not, this rather shrill approach to just about everything turns out to be rather effective, perhaps because the film’s overblown style isn’t a product of irony (though there is a bit of ironic humour in the film) but something it has come by honestly by taking itself seriously to a degree that borders on the absurd. On the other hand, the film’s overblown approach does make it impossible for it to be subtle in any way, shape or form, with everyone and everything in it having larger-than-life dimensions, and nobody and nothing having much to do with actual human beings or the actual world we live in. Fortunately, the film clearly isn’t trying for even the faintest whiff of reality, and more involved with working on a palette based on a pretty, loud surface.

Salomé did hire the right actors to perform here, too. While I’m not particularly excited by Duris’s Lupin, and think Eva Green is rather wasted on the damsel-in-distress-with-excellent-uterus (and yes, that’s kind of a plot point, alas) part of Clarisse - in fact, I’d have cast him as Clarisse and her as Lupin – the rest of the cast is absolutely perfect, with Thomas in particular pulling out all of the stops in textbook examples of controlled uncontrolled over-acting that are a joy to watch.

Unfortunately, Arsène Lupin’s general pomposity also results in a film that by far overstays its welcome, with a film that should have ended when a certain character falls down a cliff (you know, when the film’s actual plot is over) droning on and on and on for twenty-five long further minutes that try and (very loudly) fail to pack a full sequel into half an hour, ending the proceedings on the sourest note possible for no reason I could make out.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,adventure,pulp,jean-paul salomé,romain duris,kristin scott thomas,eva green,pascal greggory

On ExB: Magistrate Toyama: Falcon Magistrate (1957)

If you go by Western cult film web sites like mine, there wasn’t much happening in Japanese genre films before the new wave of samurai and yakuza films of the mid 60s and onwards. That’s of course not true, because the Japanese studios had been churning out genre movies in absurd tempo throughout the 50s, and while these films weren’t generally as rebellious, or crazy, or visually inventive as what would follow, it would be rather bizarre if they were all without merit or interest.

Indeed, once you dive into sub-genres like the jidai geki pulp mystery (insert fancy Japanese genre name here), you’ll quickly find pearls like Magistrate Toyama: Falcon Magistrate, the film my column over at the stately Exploder Button will have to say quite a bit about.

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,reviews,jidai geki,mystery,kinnosuke fukada,chiezo kataoka

Northmen – A Viking Saga (2014)

A small band of Viking outcasts surrounding young Asbjorn (Tom Hopper) were outlawed by King Harald because they “have opinions Harald doesn’t like”, or so Asbjorn tells us. Seeing as they begin the film crashing their boat against the coast of Scotland while they were actually trying to reach Lindisfarne for a bit of rape and pillaging, one might think of somewhat different reasons, but oh well.

Be that as it may, after that tiny mishap Asbjorn and his men – dude with bow, old guy, guy who doesn’t like Asbjorn very much but will come around in the end, etc (all acted well enough for what they are) – do stumble upon a group of Scottish soldiers whom they proceed to kill, acquiring a Scottish noble daughter named Inghean (Charlie Murphy) in the process. Inghean, the men think, just might be what will buy them places in the closest Viking settlement. Alas, Inghean isn’t just any noble daughter but actually the daughter of the King of Scotland himself, so soon there’s half an army on our protagonists’ tracks. Worse, they won’t even be able to trade Inghean in for their safety, because while the king “only” wants his daughter killed if necessary, his favourite mercenaries leading the hunt, Bjorn (James Norton) and Hjorr (Ed Skrein), think it’s much better politics to slaughter her in any case.

Well, at least a friendly Christian warrior monk (Ryan Kwanten, who isn’t as atrociously miscast as you might expect) is around to help the Vikings out a little while they and the increasingly friendly Inghean are looking for a way to leave Scotland.

Now, as I might have mentioned a dozen times or so before, pseudo-historical pulp action movies have an easy time with me, so it probably won’t be much of a surprise that I found myself enjoying Claudio Fäh’s German, Swiss, South African co-production with a bunch of English language actors quite a bit, despite the film’s obvious flaws.

Among these flaws are: you know which colour scheme and you can – if you want – just mentally insert my usual rant about colour films who don’t actually want to take on the visual responsibility of colour but are too chickenshit to actually be black and white here; a script I’m pretty certain if seen filmed a dozen times or so before with slightly different character names and ethnicities; characters who generally aren’t terribly well individuated beyond their names and hair styles; various wasted opportunities to add any kind of thematic weight to the film (and there’s quite a bit of weight pulp adventure can carry, if the people writing it just want it); and the fact that these Vikings and Scottish clanspeople don’t actually act according to the things we know about their cultures.

Fortunately, some of these flaws are problems that I am not exactly happy to encounter yet which still are not too problematic for the enjoyment of the film at hand – apart from the non-colour scheme that wastes quite a few clearly impressive landscape shots for no reason at all. While I naturally prefer the thematically enriched kind of pulp adventure more, there’s nothing really wrong with the more basic version presented here, where every man speaks in gruff grunts that suggest bad hormone problems or damaged vocal chords, at least when he’s not fighting, a situation that can only involve him loudly shouting “Yaaaaaaargh” while showing off his perfect, perfect, teeth, and where there’s clearly nothing at all going on in the characters’ heads. At the very least, director Fäh knows how to film these things clearly and sometimes even moodily (of course – again! – except for that darn lack of colours), and does a fine enough job pacing the series of chases and skirmishes that make up most of the film’s running time. Sure, he’s no Neil Marshall but there’s no shame in that.

While this still sounds like I’m damning the film with faint praise, I honestly quite enjoyed Northmen, its focus on being the simple pulp action piece it wants to be, the grace that comes to a film without pretensions and without the need to apologize for not having pretensions via irony or by being offensively bad (like, say, much less fun Viking movie Hammer of the Gods).

Technorati-Markierungen: swiss movies,german movies,south african movies,reviews,action,adventure,pulp,claudio fäh,tom hopper,ryan kwanten,charlie murphy

Hercules (2014)

Colour me surprised, for the thing I expected least of this particular Hollywood Hercules movie was for it to actually entertain me. On paper, it has everything going for it to push all the wrong buttons for me: directed by Brett Ratner, usually one of the worst directors working in mainstream cinema, and doing that horrible “telling the true story behind the myth thing” that seems meant for an audience that can’t even suspend its disbelief when it comes to a film about mythical figures of ancient Greece. I can’t help but call that an imaginary audience, going by the popularity of superhero movies and all things fantastic in the mainstream right now.

But while watching Hercules, a strange and surprising thing happened: I found myself drawn into the film. While the script really doesn’t accept anything supernatural into its world at all, it’s not at all going for real po-faced realism but the kind of pulp historical adventure I personally find highly enjoyable, populated by one-dimensional yet distinctive and fun to watch characters (on the side of the good guys, Ingrid Bolsø Berdal’s amazon Atalanta and Rufus Sewell’s Autolycus were the obvious stand-outs for me), doing stuff that isn’t exactly realistic in the sense the word would be used by somebody who is really into mimetic literature. Surprisingly enough, the film puts quite a bit of effort into getting certain historical basics right, actually seeming to have more than just a vague idea of military tactics in ancient Greece, even realizing why and wherefore the phalanx was used. Of course, this being a historical adventure in the pulp style, Hercules is also perfectly willing to let the real and appropriate application of fighting styles rest by the wayside when it wants its heroes to do some actual heroics, aiming for the best of both worlds and – for my highly specific tastes – generally hitting the mark.

I also found myself surprised by how little Hercules turned out to be the grim and gritty version of the Greek myths I expected. Sure, there’s the not exactly unexpected redemption arc for Hercules waiting in the wings (with a truly awkward writing hiccup waiting in the final scenes concerning the sudden appearance of Joseph Fiennes’s character that seems to come from a very different, and decidedly inferior film), most everyone in his little family of mercenaries has some sort of trauma in her or his past, and there are a lot of dead bodies on screen, but tonally, this isn’t a film interested in exploring the dark recesses of humanity when it can instead let its characters make a quip and do something adventurous and probably awesome. And, quite in the tradition of sword and sorcery movies without the sorcery, when the film has to decide between psychological realism and cheesy heroics, it’ll choose the cheesy heroics every time. As would I, particularly when this sort of thing can result in a scene of a ridiculously evil, basically cackling, John Hurt condemning his own daughter to death, provoking Hercules into the traditional breaking of chains by really ill-advised mockery (and evilness). Perhaps to appease old peplum fans like me, the film additionally features a moment of extreme statue toppling, as well as not a single boring moment.

Ratner’s direction this time around turns out to be surprisingly decent, too, with the director showing himself always at least to be competent, staging clear and exciting battle scenes, and turning his not-quite real Greece into a perfectly fitting place for his heroes and villains to inhabit.

Because this is an American movie, it also has a lot of nice things to say about the basic value of showmanship, about the lies people telling others turning into the basic truths about themselves if they only tell them with enough belief, and the redemptive value of pretending to be the son of Zeus. Personally, being European and all, I’m more into winning the day by the power of the actual truth, or clever instead of boisterous lies, but then I’m not toppling any statues over here.

Last but not least, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson deserves his own shout-out here too, turning out a Hercules who is likeable, charismatic, and demonstrating an excellent sense of timing as an actor. If anyone wanted to make an actual Robert E. Howard adaptation instead of whatever that last Conan movie with poor Jason Momoa was supposed to be, Johnson would be the guy to cast, if you ask me. Alas, that’s not going to happen.

However, I’ll always have this excellently fun bit of silly nonsense to enjoy.

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On ExB: The Shadow (1994)

Russell Mulcahy’s adaptation of the adventures of what was possibly the greatest of the classic pulp heroes (though I’ll always love the insanity of The Spider more) isn’t too well loved by Shadow fans or film critics, but to me, it’s a film that has as many virtues as it has flaws.

This week’s column over on Exploder Button speaks about both.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,action,fantasy,superheroes,pulp,russell mulcahy,alec baldwin,john lone,penelope ann miller,peter boyle,tim curry

Ironclad: Battle for Blood (2014)

The Dark Ages. Norman Gilbert De Vesci (David Rintoul) and his wife Joan (Michelle Fairley) are holding a castle in the territory of the Scots clans. A minor raid by Maddog (Predrag Bjelac) and his people ends with De Vesci losing one arm and Maddog’s son losing his life, leaving the Normans without proper leadership and quite a fighter and Maddog with a thirst for vengeance only the destruction of the castle and all who dwell in it will quench.

De Vesci sneaks his decidedly un-macho son Hubert (Tom Rhys Harries) out of the castle to go for his cousin Guy (Tom Austen) – one of the survivors of the siege of Rochester in the first Ironclad film – for help. Alas, Guy has grown up to be a bitter sell sword, and even wants payment for helping out his own family, which Hubert fortunately is able to provide. They grab three random fighters – not exactly mentally healthy murderess Crazy (see?)Mary (Twinnie Lee Moore), executioner Pierrepoint (Andy Beckwith) and Guy’s best buddy Berenger (David Caves), and ride off to help the besieged and frequently attacked castle.

Obviously, most of them don’t look forward to a healthy future, but perhaps something – like the love of De Vesci’s daughter Blanche (Roxanne McKee) – just might at least give Guy reasons for a redemptive character arc. Quite clearly, slaughter and many a slow motion death will ensue before any of that redemption can go down.

Despite the different character of its protagonists’ enemies, returning director/writer John English’s Battle for Blood most of the time doesn’t feel so much like a sequel to Ironclad as much as a remake with a lower budget and accordingly lesser ambitions. So the actors – even the character actors – are a tier lower on the thespian pecking order and on the charisma table than those in the first movie, the script hits a lot of the same plot beats but with less thematic resonance, its main bad guy is less outrageously acted, and the film feels rather more constrained in its locations and sets.

This doesn’t mean Battle for Blood isn’t worth your time, at least if you’re like me and enjoy a good piece of historical pulp adventure, you just can’t go in expecting much depth or a charismatic lead. The best I can say about Tom Austen is that he’s serviceable enough and does know how to strike the right poses during fights, but as he plays him, Guy’s bitterness is as lacking in conviction as is his love interest Blanche in, well, interest. We’re not in the realm of the horrible here, but where better actors gave the film’s clichés a bit more life in the original Ironclad, not all of the guys and girls on screen here ever really manage that, with Danny Webb, Twinnie Lee Moore, Michelle Fairley (who is the most upmarket actor in the film, obviously), and Tom Rhys Harris as the exceptions to that rule. Still, these talking, sword-wielding clichés as such are entertaining enough to watch, and while they never achieve the gravitas some of their death scenes call for, they’re more than enough for the film’s simple siege scenario and redemption tale. As in the first movie, the script also finds some surprising (for a film of this style) space for its female characters beyond Blanche to actually be characters and have a degree of agency; at the very least, Battle for Blood is a film where the existence of warrior women is just a fact of life nobody even finds worth mentioning, and where a gender having less power in general doesn’t mean its members are all damsels in distress.

English also gets bonus points for this time around avoiding to mutilate established historical facts for no good reason, and for not only having an eye for the awesome violence but also at least some of its consequences. The latter aspect might have become its own kind of movie cliché by now – the camera walking the battlefield afterwards while mournful music plays, and so on - but it is at least one that’s broadening the emotional impact and provides a film with the opportunity to not have to demonize its antagonists too much.

When it comes to Battle for Blood’s main attraction, the fighting, English uses a bit more shaky cam than in the first film, I think, probably to hide the fact that this time around there are even fewer men fighting the battles, and there’s probably less money for choreography and too many repeats of scenes as well. It works better than I would have expected because English still manages to focus his audience on what’s actually going on in the fights, the shaky cam more often plausibly mirroring the rush of adrenaline and fear going through the characters. It’s not how I like my fight scenes to be shot, but it works reasonably well for the film at hand, particularly in combination with the sense of ferociousness and brutality of the fights. There’s also a high – some might say needless – amount of gore on display making the fights grittier and a bit unpleasant from time to time, as is proper and well in the world of exploitation movie violence.

All this adds up to a very flawed yet highly entertaining bit of pulpy, mildly exploitative entertainment, leaving Ironclad: Battle for Blood a sequel that I don’t think was precisely necessary yet that I wouldn’t mind seeing again now that it exists.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,adventure,action,pulp,jonathan english,tom austen,michelle fairley,roxanne mckee,twinnie lee moore,pedrag bjelac,tom rhys harries

Arsène Lupin (1932)

Supremely grumpy Parisian police inspector Guerchard (Lionel Barrymore) has been hunting for gentleman thief Arsène Lupin (?) for quite some time now without ever even coming close to catching his man, leaving the police quite embarrassed. After his newest failure, during which he arrests the Duke of Charmerace (John Barrymore) as Lupin, an idea that is of course utterly impossible, Guerchard is given one final week to catch Lupin.

Guerchard is convinced the Duke actually is the thief, and the duke certainly doesn’t act like he isn’t, so it’s a helpful “coincidence” for everyone involved when Charmerace heroically volunteers for helping protect the jewellery and paintings of one Gourney-Martin (Tully Marshall) - rich people must help each other out, dontcha know – Lupin seems to be after next. The thief doesn’t have to cope with a tenacious, if sometimes ridiculous, detective who is now very close on his trail now alone, though, there’s also danger for his heart in form of Russian noblewoman Sonia (Karen Morley).

But romancing his perfect woman, thwarting the police in anti-authoritarian ways, and stealing various valuables is all in a night’s work for him.

It’s pretty curious that what seems to be the first really successful screen adventure of French master thief Arsène Lupin was not made in France but by MGM. But then, the early 30s were – at least quality-wise – one of the high points of this sort of light, somewhat pulpy, mystery film in Hollywood, so the character just fit the vibe of its surroundings quite nicely, if one can excuse the horrible things some of the actors involved do to French names. I suspect these films – at least when they involve highly moral law-breakers - were becoming increasingly difficult to make once the production code began its sad reign, for how do you make a film a bout a thief hero when the rules you have to work under say that criminal behaviour on screen has to be punished. Which is pretty much the opposite of what’s happening here, where even Guerchard is in the very end so charmed by his eternal opponent he helps his arch enemy escape. I’m actually quite interested in how the production code Lupin films that do exist got around the problem, and will report once I’ve found out. I very much suspect just letting him get hitched like this film does won’t be enough, and am right now betting on the old “thief who only steals from thieves”.

John Barrymore certainly is a wonderful Lupin, embodying the humour, the verve, and the strange morality (because at least this version of Lupin is far from being amoral, he’s just working from different ethical assumptions) of the character, as well as the romance inherent in its basic concept; and all this while looking good in early 30s evening wear. Casting John’s brother Lionel as his eternal nemesis Guerchard also turns out to be quite a coup. These two have a highly enjoyable screen chemistry going on as antagonists, which makes at least half the fun in a piece like this.

I’m also quite fond of how in Lionel Barrymore’s hands  Guerchard is not one of these bumbling cops that usual hunt the loveable rogues, but clearly a capable, if sometimes cynical and perhaps even cruel, man who is probably only missing a bit of luck to catch his prey. This makes the whole plot of “in which delightful way will Lupin fool the policeman next?” quite a bit more exciting than it could otherwise be, leading to a game of silly yet awesome, sometimes eyebrow-raising, fun.

For once the script (by Lenore Coffee, Bayard Veiller and Carey Wilson) is up to the task too, going about its business with the appropriate breakneck speed, while throwing out one witty line after the other. Because this is the pre-code era, there’s also some fun sexual innuendo between Morley and John Barrymore, with a kind of matter-of-fact positivity towards sex you won’t even find all that often in films today (we’re really much more interested in seeing people punished for their sexual behaviour today than watching them enjoy it, it seems).

Jack Conway’s direction finishes off Arsène Lupin’s all-around excellence with an approach that’s as sprightly as you could away with in a talkie made in 1932, doing justice to the actors, the often clever sets, and each and every fun idea the script throws at its audience.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,mystery,pulp,jack conway,john barrymore,lionel barrymore,karen morley

Daredevils of the Red Circle (1939)

A certain Harry Crowel (Charles “Future Emperor Ming” Middleton doing some fine mugging), now preferring to be called after his prison number 39013, has escaped from prison. He’s out for revenge on his former (legal) business partner Granville (Miles Mander) whom he makes responsible for his prison stint.

39013 is quite the evil master mind, so soon Granville’s various business holdings are exploding left and right. One of these attacks kills the little brother of circus performer Gene Townley (Charles Quigley). Together with his performing buddies Tiny Dawson (Bruce Bennett) and Bert Knowles (David Sharpe), and their rather handy dog Tuffie, Gene hires on as a very special security detail for Granville, in the hopes of laying hands on 39013 this way.

Little do they expect that Granville isn’t Granville anymore but 39013 who keeps the real Granville locked up in a hidden cell in his house for regular gloating sessions. Consequently, the daredevils’ missions to thwart 39013 tend to be rather more dangerous than they should be. Fortunately, they’re serial heroes. Additionally, a mysterious shadowy figure our daredevils imaginatively come to call the Red Circle leaves them helpful – yet not too helpful – warning messages under their own red circle symbol.

In general, serials do have a worse reputation now than they actually deserve, and I think much of the blame for it lies in later generations like mine watching the poor things in inappropriate ways. They were, after all, made to be seen in weekly instalments, and neither to be binged on like a TV show made in the 2010s – which makes their repetitive nature annoying – nor to be watched in the often horrible film versions that try to stitch a serial into a narrative that makes sense as a movie – which doesn’t work because the source material was usually just not written that way.

When watched properly (or if you’re like me once a day), perhaps as an appetizer before each film in your own private Bergman retrospective, it becomes far easier to appreciate the serials’ actual strengths, as well as their weaknesses. The latter mostly lie in cardboard characters, sometimes illogical plotting, again repetitiveness, and sometimes pretty horrid racism (in Daredevils represented by the fortunately not very frequent horrifying “comedy” stylings of Fred “Snowflake” Toones, and the horrifying way the rest of the cast treats him, which is to say, worse than the dog). The first three things aren’t much of a problem if you’re watching the episodes with the fact in mind that what you’re seeing was meant to provide a jolt of excitement before the evening’s cinematic main event; the last one is inexcusable, but for me at least (and in this case) easily shrugged of by seeing it as a sign of its times and the people the serials were made for. Everyone’s mileage will of course vary at that point.

What’s good about serials, and the Republic serials of directors John English and William Witney (with English shooting the talky stuff and interiors, and Witney the outside scenes and the action), of which Daredevils is supposed to be one of the best, is the sheer excitement and pacing of the action sequences, with some really imaginative stunts, and as many explosions and destroyed buildings as the budgets could come up with or the directors could special effects magic in. It’s all pleasantly breathless, sometimes uncomfortably dangerous looking, shot with surprising care if you keep the shooting schedules and budgets for these things in mind, and directed with a lot of visual imagination. You can, in fact, watch this and see how Witney (co-)invents not a little of the visual language of action filmmaking; much of it is still used today.

While the acting of our three heroes is at best serviceable, they do have the right sort of physicality for the action, and given that Daredevils expresses all that’s important to it, and all that’s good about it, through its physicality, that’s exactly what the serial needs.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,serial,reviews,action,pulp,john english,william witney,charles quigley,bruce bennett,david sharpe,carole landis,miles mander,charles middleton

The Unknown (1946)

Some nasty business has been going on in the old Southern Martin family about two decades ago, leaving daughter Rachel (Karen Morley), and sons Edward (James Bell) and Ralph (Wilton Graff) in thrall of their dominating mother Phoebe (Helen Freeman) and in various states of mental un-health; the only sane member of the family is their black butler Joshua (J. Louis Johnson) - who is also one of the few black characters in 40s movies I’ve seen neither there to demonstrate the supposed superiority of the white cast, nor to provide the kind of comic relief that makes a boy want to slug the filmmakers. The interactions between said white cast and him are of course still rather painful to watch. Of the family, particularly Rachel is bad off, hearing the cries of her long lost baby daughter and having lost track of minor details like what decade it is quite some time ago, living in a kind of perpetual young womanhood.

Things change when the matriarch dies and the mysterious benefactor who financed her schooling orders young Nina Arnold (Jeff Donnell) to go to the reading of Phoebe’s will on the old Martin plantation. Nina, it turns out, is Rachel’s long lost daughter. Fortunately for Nina, her – still mysterious – benefactor has hired international men of adventure and private detectives Jack Packard (Jim Bannon) and Doc Long (Barton Yarborough) to help and protect her, for there’s something very wrong in the house even if you ignore the whole decadence and madness vibe. The baby noises Phoebe hears seem to be quite real, for example, Nina’s new uncles are nasty old men beyond expectation, and somebody who likes to dress like a proto-giallo murderer is sneaking through the dark trying to kill our heroine.

The third and final Columbia movie based on the popular radio show I Love a Mystery, again directed by Henry Levin, changes up tone and style quite a bit, turning from the two-fisted charms of the pulpy mystery to the melodramatic joys of a – still pulpy so don’t worry – Southern Gothic old dark house tale.

One’s appreciation of this development will certainly depend on one’s sympathy for the type of melodrama that’s generally part and parcel of Southern Gothics, or rather, on one’s tolerance for the film’s broad application of it. The acting of everyone involved except for Donnell, Bannon and Yarborough – fittingly given their position as outsiders – is as broadly melodramatic as a film can get away with, more than just bordering on areas some viewers will read as camp and/or will feel decidedly uncomfortable with.

Melodrama’s the watch word not only for the acting: The Unknown’s plot and mood are just as melodramatic, which makes complete sense when you see both as an expression of the genre-mandatory decadence and madness (the beautiful twins, the film would probably call them), the feeling of a world moving on outside while the Martin family inside can’t – or won’t - move with it. In this context, it can hardly be an accident that Rachel specifically is trapped in a perpetual past. It also seems rather poignant to me that Nina’s addition to the family, as someone who is young and very much not part of the noble tradition of come-down slave-owning shits by anything but blood, is the thing that might drag at least some family members back to sanity and the world, unless they manage to drag her down with them.

Levin tells this tale with his usual professionalism but also a good sense for the appropriate shadowy mood. While you can’t exactly feel the decay of the house (40s low budget filmmaking in general being not really up to that particular task independent of the talent of the directors involved), Levin provides the film with its fair share of cheap yet effective Southern Gothic thrills, and never loses control of his scenery-chewing cast, unless you think letting them chew the scenery is already losing control of them.

It’s not what I expected of the final I Love a Mystery film, but The Unknown is a very pleasant surprise as a film that knows very well what it’s doing and does it well, too.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,mystery,gothic,pulp,henry levin,jim bannon,barton yarborough,jeff donnell,karen morley

In short: I Love a Mystery (1945)

What caused San Francisco society man Jefferson Monk (George Macready) to lose his head in a freak accident? And whatever happened to his head? Private detectives Jack Packard (Jim Bannon) and Doc Long (Barton Yarborough) know the answer to at least one of these questions because they started working on the highly mysterious case of Mr Monk a few days earlier.

About a year before the detectives came into play, Monk, you see, was quite disturbed by a prophecy made by the high priest (Lester Matthews) of a Mysterious Oriental Cult™ saying he’d lose his head a year later. Oh, and might he be willing to sell it then, for Monk looks like the spitting image of the cult’s founder whose mummy is unfortunately starting to rot?

By the point Monk meets the detectives, he’s worked himself into quite a panic regarding the whole matter, particularly after a friendly letter from the cult leader prophecies his wife Ellen (Nina Foch) “becoming an invalid” and Ellen actually losing control of her legs just a few days later. Then there’s the fact that a mysterious guy with a peg leg carrying a valise “just the right size for a human head” keeps following Monk around. Clearly, Packard and Long have their work quite cut out for them.

I Love A Mystery is the first of three Columbia productions based on the eponymous popular radio show written by Carlton E. Morse, and going by what I’ve read about it the show – there’s horrifyingly little of it available to actually hear of it in old time radio fan circles – the film’s mixture of seemingly supernatural occurrences, preposterous yet also awesome and pretty clever plot twists and an all-around air of anything goes is quite typical of it; it’s also quite typical of things I describe as “awesome”.

And awesome Henry Levin’s film indeed is, at least if you like your mysteries weird and somewhat two-fisted, and aren’t too annoyed by the whole “Oriental Mysteries” business – though there’s a fun twist to that aspect of the film too, so we’re not talking Fu Manchu style yellow danger racism here. The film’s script is even clever enough to not annoy me despite explaining most of the potentially supernatural occurrences away. That might have something to do with the plain (and pleasantly preposterous in a good sense) weirdness of the whole tale even without prophecies and curses actually existing in its world, or with Levin’s fine sense of how to pace the telling of said tale. At the very least, there are neither dithering nor detours here, with every scene fulfilling an actually important function in the plot and at the same time also containing at least one element of clever pulpy fun.

Fun seems to have been the film’s watch word, even though the plot is, if you think about it, actually as dark as that of the darkest noir, and a very fun time I Love a Mystery turns out to be.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,mystery,pulp,henry levin,jim bannon,nina foch,george macready,barton yarborough,in short

Der Rächer (1960)

aka The Avenger

Murder-plagued London is disturbed by a killer who prefers to deposit the heads of his victims – most of whom are these proverbial criminals who escaped the law - in nice cardboard boxes for the police to find keeping the bodies all for himself. Publicly, he goes by the name of the Head Hunter, though he himself prefers to see himself as the Benefactor.

The Head Hunter’s latest victim was a traitorous member of the British security service, so this organization’s boss (Siegfried Schürenberg) puts agent Michael Brixan (Heinz Drache) on the case. Some quite vague hints quickly convince Brixan to home in on a film production in which Ruth Sanders (Ina Duscha), the niece of the murdered agent, is playing a bit part as the best place to concentrate his investigation on. Not only does he hit it off with Ruth very nicely, it is also difficult to assume he’d find a better group of potential killers anywhere else.

There are, after all, former explorer, current sleaze-bag and owner of a very large collection of swords Sir Gregory Penn (Benno Sterzenbach), frighteningly intense dramaturge Lorenz Voss (Klaus Kinski), cynical veteran actress Stella Mendozza (Ingrid van Bergen) and oh so nice and friendly director and producer Jack Jackson (Friedrich Schoenfelder) all there for the suspecting. And that’s before we come to Penn’s servant Bhag (Al Hoosman), a gentleman of colour who, in alas typical German post war manner, embodies the Big Black Man As An Animal trope with all the racial sensitivity you’d suspect; which is to say, none whatsoever.

I foresee shots in the darks, secret doors and punching in Brixan’s future.

Der Rächer is one of only two German post-war Edgar Wallace adaptations not made by Rialto Films. It was made by an outfit called Kurt-Ulrich-Film instead. After the success of the first two Wallace movies, Rialto bought up the rights to all Wallace novels, except for the two that were already sold, this one, and “The Yellow Snake” which was owned by the inevitable Artur “Atze” Brauner (who was also involved in the distribution of the Rialto films, because the German movie industry was small).

Tonally, Der Rächer is made pretty much from the same mould as Harald Reinl’s Frosch mit der Maske, which is to say, as close to classic pulp-style filmmaking as German post-war cinema got, and pretty darn entertaining with it, even though it keeps away from Rialto’s insertion of humour. The production design and the music aren’t quite as fine as that of the Rialto films, I think, but the film still doesn’t look at all like the quickly shot affair meant to cash-in on the Wallace boom nobody involved can have expected to last as long as it did that it was. There’s real style and real commitment on display, both things that make or break the sort of melodramatic pulp mystery the German krimi was at its heart.

Director Karl Anton had been active since 1921, so you can see more than just an echo of German expressionism in his efforts, if you want to. Particularly some of the later scenes with their mild chiaroscuro effects, their clever use of shadows, and their melodramatic mugging are remarkable in this regard, and give the film an intensity that – again – isn’t exactly typical of German filmmaking of the era, particularly outside the krimi world. Even though he isn’t quite on the level of Harald Reinl, Anton also has a nice sense of keeping things dynamic: events zip along, camera and actors move so as to keep everything else moving, and action scenes are actually staged with a degree of care and enthusiasm. It’s all pulp cinema 101, of course, and the film’s as old-fashioned as all get out (though not as old-fashioned as Wallace’s books) but then knowing this doesn’t make the film any less entertaining to me.

Der Rächer is also quite remarkable for introducing three future mainstays of Rialto’s Wallace movies to the Wallace style krimi, with the as always cool (and how often can I use that word when describing a German actor?) and intense Heinz Drache, eternal Sir John Siegfried Schürenberg (surprisingly enough not in a comical, or “comical”, role), and not in need of a description Klaus Kinski. It’s as influential a bit of casting as you can imagine, and even if you’re one of those people who dislike Der Rächer because it doesn’t offer itself for ironic appreciation (the coward’s way of appreciation, as I see it) too well, you’ll have to respect at least that aspect of the film.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,reviews,pulp,krimi,karl anton,heinz drache,ina duscha,benno sterzenbach,siegfried schürenberg,klaus kinski

The Phantom (1996)

At some point in time between the World Wars. Kit Walker (Billy Zane) is The Phantom aka The Ghost Who Walks, the newest in a long line of adventuring pulp-style heroes, ruling about some "native tribes" while wearing ugly purple costumes and having something of a skull fetish. When he's not chatting with the ghost of his father (Patrick McGoohan), Kit's in the habit of smiting evil in a semi-competent manner a bit too semi to not leave ghost dad rather exasperated from time to time. The evil Kit has to smite this time is a megalomaniac business tycoon from New York, the excellently named Xander Drax (Treat Williams).

Drax (not to be confused with Drax the Destroyer) and his merry band of evil-doers (including Catherine Zeta-Jones and James Remar) are trying to acquire three magical skulls that combine into a weapon of awesome supernatural power, with the usual resulting world domination dreams. Obviously, this sort of thing won't stand with the Phantom, nor with Diana Palmer (Kristy Swanson), the niece of a newspaper owner up to Drax's tricks. Diana, what with her having some actual survival skills (though not enough to not get kidnapped every ten minutes), is of course the perfect potential girlfriend for a pulp hero (and in fact, Kit and Diana know each other already, though that's a part of the script so useless to the proceedings I can only assume it is a left-over from an earlier script version), so face-punching, woman-rescuing, and romancing can ensue.

Simon Wincer's The Phantom is one of a handful of attempts made in the 90s to get at some of that old pulp magic by reviving long dead characters. Unfortunately none of these films was commercially successful enough to lead to sequels or a larger pulp and serial renaissance in the movies. The character of the phantom did of course start out in a newspaper strip, but in style and content, it's about as pure a pulp hero as you can find, though one lacking the craziness of The Spider as well as the cleverness of Doc Savage or The Shadow.

The movie at hand is generally entertaining in a very old-fashioned manner, and not really in the business of trying to change up much of import about the Phantom or its mythology. Though, to give the film its dues, it does pare the racist elements of the original down from "holy crap, seriously?" to "problematic" and attempts to make Diana slightly more than an object to be kidnapped and rescued. Unfortunately, and quite typically for this sort of endeavour, the film stops with this slight re-imagination about half-way, using the old "kidnapping of the heroine" cliché so much that said heroine's general poise and ability to kick a bit of ass are undermined for no good reason (surely, the script could find someone else to kidnap at least half of the time), which is a particular shame seeing how much Kristy Swanson seems to enjoy herself in her more heroic moments. That enjoyment stands quite in contrast to Zane's rather awkward performance that suggests an actor who can't forget that he's in a very silly adventure movie wearing a particularly silly costume.

The costume is rather emblematic of the film's other great weakness, set design and costuming that just isn't all that interesting, ending in a particularly lame villain lair that's mostly cramped and brown and without any interesting visual features. I'd have rather wished for more colour, imagination and an openness to at least be as silly as the Phantom's costume in the sets; after all, the film has no problem with being silly in everything else.

Still, if you're looking for a serial-style adventure movie, you can do much worse than The Phantom. It is at least well paced, acted with zest by an excellent bunch of character actors (excluding Zane whose perfect perfect teeth just aren't that impressing, as much as he shows them), and full of exactly the sort of stunts you'd expect.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,australian movies,in short,adventure,pulp,simon wincer,billy zane,kristy swanson,treat williams,catherine zeta-jones

Outpost III: Rise of the Spetsnaz (2013)

Oh, look, it's the third movie in what is now officially the premiere Nazi zombie movie franchise (by sheer virtue of actually being a franchise). Not that the Outpost movies aren't fun enough to watch, but I'll come to that a bit later.

First, let's get that "plot" thing out of the way. Despite the very obvious "to be continued" ending of Outpost 2, the movie at hand is not a sequel but a prequel, so if you want to learn the origin story of the bunker in film one, or maybe film two (the films didn't impress so much I actually remember much of what was going on in them beyond Nazi zombies and underground bunkers, which is probably for the best), this was made directly for you.

So it's World War II, and a small unit of Soviet Guards led by Dolokhov (Bryan Larkin doing one of the better, that is to say, least hilarious accents in the film) is harassing the Germans behind their frontlines somewhere in German occupied territory. They get pretty close to a secret German scientific base where the Nazis under the leadership of a certain Strasser (Michael McKell, with a fake German accents that manages to be at once inauthentic to an embarrassing degree as well as often difficult to penetrate) make the kind of crazy super soldier experiments that don't result in Hauptmann Hakenkreuz but in nearly uncontrollable rage zombies.

Unfortunately, the surroundings of the titular outpost are quite well patrolled and defended, so most of the Russians are soon dead, while Dolokhov, his friend Fyodor (Iván Kamarás who is Hungarian not Russian, but hey, it's closer than being Scottish, at least) and their colleague soon-to-be-dead-guy are captured to be used in some choice Nazi science. After a bit of Nazi zombie cage fighting, Strasser decides his captives are best used for zombification. They are, after all, much tougher than his own men, and might just survive the zombification process better than them. He doesn't explain why he thinks building Russian super soldiers is a good idea, but then he does rant and rave a lot without half of his sentences actually being understandable. Whatever could go wrong?

As is obvious, the largest part of this Outpost is pretty much exactly like the first two, with many a scene of armed men running and sneaking through a dark bunker and doing violence to other armed men, and an occasional Nazi zombie or three. While this sounds a bit boring on paper, in practice, O: RotS (you didn't expect me to write the stupid title out, did you?) is rather good low budget movie fun, at least when one can accept that this Nazi zombie movie contains more zombie-less bunker-based action than one would hope. Said action is realized by director Kieran Parker (acting as a producer and writer on the first two films) fast-paced, bloody, and competently choreographed, though, so I didn't find myself missing the zombies too desperately when they weren't there, particularly since the zombie make-up turned out to be the point where O: RotS''s low budget shows most. As in, the zombie make-up is really quite bad.

Visually, the film's a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, I appreciate that Parker doesn't go all out on horrible digital editing tricks, whoosh-edits and that sort of distracting nonsense, on the other hand, O: RotS is yet another contemporary movie whose colour scheme is so desaturated it can hardly be called a colour scheme. One might be tempted to say they might as well have shot the film in black and white, but then black and white films need filmmakers to think about the relation between light and shadow in their compositions where the desaturated style is more a way for the lazy or unimaginative not to have to think about colour uses and colour meanings at all.

Still, O: RotS is mostly entertaining pulp action fun with one or two cute ideas, a lot of violence, deeply unpleasant protagonists fighting even more unpleasant enemies (seriously, there's a scene of Strasser urinating on a corpse just for shock value and to prove that he's really evil, as if the whole Nazi zombie thing weren't a hint), some moments of grim b-movie humour, and a few fine cheesy lines of the sort that clearly didn't write themselves. Consequently, I find myself looking forward to a potential fourth film, perhaps even one with one (or even two!?) larger female roles again - as long as it's not going to be called Outpost: Cry of the Nazi Valkyries.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,pulp,horror,action,kieran parker,bryan larkin,iván kamarás,michael mckell

In short: Die Schwarze Kobra (1963)

aka The Black Cobra

Truck driver Peter Kramer (Adrian Hoven) is having a bad week: his latest cargo turns out to be drugs oh so cleverly disguised as washing powder, the owner of the cargo, a gangster known as The Corse, makes a very rude front-seat passenger, and then a competing gang working for the Syndicate kills the Corse right in front of Peter's eyes to boot. Which of course makes poor Peter a risk for the gangsters.

Soon enough, Peter finds himself alternately fleeing the Syndicate, the former gang of the Corse, and the police. Because this is that kind of movie, what ensues is mostly a series of kidnappings and re-kidnappings of Peter's girlfriend Alexa (Ann Smyrner) by the various factions, while Klaus Kinski betrays one gang to the other so he can snort that sweet, sweet coke. Also an appearance make Klaus Löwitsch as "Boogie", the violent pumped-up coke fiend to Kinski's snivelling one, a mysterious police undercover agent, a mute thug named Goba (Michel Ujevic), a knife-throwing Herbert Fux, mildly eccentric policemen (Paul Dahlke and Peter Vogel, the latter doing a milder version of the traditional Eddi Arent bit), Peter's former box champion now roadside rest stop animal show owner friend Punkti (Ady Berber), and a cobra (well, for one scene).

Obviously, Rudolf Zehetgruber's Die Schwarze Kobra is another non-Edgar Wallace krimi attempting to catch a bit of the commercial fire of the Rialto movies. Despite being shot in Vienna and at least nominally being an Austrian film, Zehetgruber's film features many of the usual faces in the more or less usual roles. The German language genre film world wasn't big after all, and really, when you can hire Kinski to do some snivelling, you do hire Kinski to do some snivelling.

Stylistically, this is - of course - much less intricately styled than the Rialto films were, with some okay sets and locations but also a handful of rather impoverished looking ones. The visual influences of and parallels to noir and gothic are mostly rather minor; moodiness, it seems did not stand high on Zehetgruber's list of things to include. Instead, the director does his best to make up for a very silly and often inappropriately melodramatic script (so one quite typical of German as well as Austrian genre writing), by getting as energetic as genre films of its place and era got. He's not quite as elegant at it as Harald Reinl was in comparable Wallace movies but the resulting film still is pleasantly fast-paced and action-filled. Sure, the fight choreography and quality of the stunt work (such as it is), isn't anything intricate, but the film had no problems convincing me that watching two big, slow man ponderously and very visibly not hitting each other in a fight was a rather fun thing, soon to be followed by other fun things, which is really all I expect of pulp-y krimis.

After having seen Die Schwarze Kobra I'm not at all surprised Zehetgruber would go on to direct a few of the Komissar X movies. While not being quite as enjoyable and pop as the later films, Die Schwarze Kobra is clearly the product of exactly the sort of sensibility best suited to bringing to live that particular series of cult film fan favourites, and therefore a fine way to spend ninety minutes.

Technorati-Markierungen: austrian movies,in short,krimi,pulp,rudolf zehetgruber,adrian hoven,ann smyrner,klaus kinski,klaus löwitsch