Three Films Make A Post: Working here can be murder.

Thor: Ragnarok (2017): In another example to disprove the curiously much-vaunted nonsense that Marvel’s superhero movies don’t leave space for their directors to express their individuality, Taiki Waititi’s Thor movie is very much a Taiki Waititi Thor movie, featuring exactly the style and tone of humour you’d expect from the director. While I would have preferred someone to actually succeed at a Thor movie going for the big and operatic tone the best of the source material tends to have and actually succeed with it, I take a fun, fast and brilliant to look at SF action comedy with pleasure, even though I don’t enjoy it quite as much as James Gunn’s Marvel SF action comedies, which feel just a bit warmer to me. Which is to say that I had a lot of fun with Ragnarok’s loving and silly plundering of Greg Pak’s fine Hulk and Walt Simonson’s transcendentally brilliant Thor runs.

The Cradle Will Fall (1983): In a very different time, medium, and budget bracket, often great TV director John Llewellyn Moxey shot this adaptation of a Mary Higgins Clark potboiler about a brilliant assistant DA with tragic past-based commitment issues (Lauren Hutton) coming head to head with a mad scientist doctor (James Farentino). This certainly isn’t one of Moxey’s best movies, mostly thanks to a script that never quite seems to be able to hold tone and focus, a problem that’s further exacerbated by the need to shoe-horn various character from the soap “Guiding Light” into minor roles. From time to time, Moxey gets the opportunity for one of his patented classical suspense scenes, but much of the film seems fixated on the elements of the plot that are the most conventional and least interesting. Despite a spunky turn by Hutton and some joyful scenery chewing by Farentino, the whole thing never really comes together as a suspenseful narrative.

The World Beyond (1979): Staying in US TV movie land, this is the second of two abortive TV pilots about the adventures of Paul Taylor (the brilliantly named Granville Van Dusen), who is commanded by visions of dead people to protect the victim of the week (here portrayed by JoBeth Williams) from supernatural forces.


The plot sees Van Dusen and Williams fighting a mud golem on an island off the coast of main. Director Noel Black does some pleasantly atmospheric work with the locations, and seems to enjoy the sort of macabre little events that warm my heart too, so you bet there’s a mud golem hand staying active after having been cut off, an occult dabbler causing the whole affair, and some simple yet pleasant moments of classic suspense. There’s no depth to it, of course, but as an hour of spooky entertainment, even in the badly looking version recorded from TV and dubbed from what I suspect to be an EP VHS tape that’s the only way it is making the rounds, is well worth one’s time.

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

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

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


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

In short: What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

It looks like I need to rethink this blog’s stated stance regarding the intrinsic crappiness of horror comedies. At least, the last few years have found me encountering too many horror comedies that are actually worthwhile and can’t in all honesty continue to prophylactically dismiss the whole sub-genre until a given film can conquer my prejudices.

Case in point is Jemaine Clement’s and Taika Waititi’s (both also acting, writing and producing) fake documentary about a group of vampire flat-sharers in Wellington New Zealand, which is as good as anything you’ll get to see, comedy or not. It is – see also that whole “comedy” thing – a very funny movie that just happens to also have a lot of thoughtful things to say about life at large, the need to accept change, the nature of outsider-dom and probably half a dozen other things. All of it is realized without any preachiness, without the film ever feeling the need to look at the audience to explain that it isn’t a mere horror comedy but actually a film out to say IMPORTANT THINGS, most probably because its makers seem not to see any difference between these two things; having seen What We Do, I don’t see one either.

While the film’s at it, it also does some really clever stuff with standards of vampire mythology, finding its humour in the absurd and the slightly off yet just as often by just taking various versions of vampire lore at face value, working on the logical assumption that a life that goes on long enough will turn into a farce sooner or later. Even though the film does make fun of its characters in various ways, its position is less one of superiority than of a sort of slightly exasperated sympathy, the kind of approach you’ll have towards a friend with a tendency to just fuck things up, or, if you’re lucky with these things, towards your own flaws. Consequently, the film – despite containing a fine amount of pressure pump blood bursts (aka The Japanese Blood Fountain) – carries not a single cynical bone in its body. It’s difficult not to use the term “heart-warming” here for me, given how much the film made me smile at its characters whose not exactly quotidian (yet also clearly very quotidian for them) travails do mirror those we non-blood drinkers go through quite a bit, at least those of us who don’t fit very well into society’s ideas of matureness, sense, or sanity.

By the by, the directors also do a lot with the little money they have available, gathering a wonderful cast (including themselves) using special effects from the ridiculous to the surprisingly great (whichever is more appropriate for any given scene), adding a fun, off-beat soundtrack. It’s just an all-around fantastic achievement for living and undead alike.

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