Kidnapped (1971)

You know the Robert Louis Stevenson tale: Scotland, shortly after the Battle of Culloden. Young David Balfour (Lawrence Douglas), after the death of both of his parents now without a family, introduces himself to his miserly uncle Ebenezer (Donald Pleasence), only to get sold into slavery by the sad old man unwilling to share a fortune that belongs by rights completely to David. Before his way to the indentured farming life in the colonies can get on its way, David falls in with Alan Breck (Michael Caine), a Bonnie Prince Charlie loyalist (the film never really uses the term “Jacobite”) on the run. Apart from a bit of a murderous disposition and the inability to understand his cause as lost, Alan’s a stand-up guy. He also really needs to get out of Scotland and get to France, where he plans on regrouping with whoever still wants another round of getting smashed by the English. Obviously, complications lie on the way for both men. The younger one will find true love in the form of Alan’s cousin Catriona Stewart (Vivian Heilbron), while the older man will find his conscience.

There’s quite a bit to like about Delbert Mann’s combined adaptation of Stevenson’s “Kidnapped” and its sequel “David Balfour/Catriona”. For one, the landscape photography is often genuinely striking. It not just looks pretty, it actually manages to add to the emotional weight of quite a few scenes in a pleasantly subtle manner. Also rather a joy is the bunch of great actors and character actors on screen, from Donald Pleasence to Gordon Jackson to Freddie Jones to Trevor Howard; most of them make a muddle of their Scottish accents, obviously, but that’s part of the fun of traditional adventure movies like this one. Speaking of accents, Michael Caine barely bothers with one, which seems to be the right decision, since his handful of pathos-filled speeches about bonnie Scotland are already melodramatic enough, and would become absurd with too much bad accent work. Of course, Caine’s most convincing here when he is either brutal or companionable – the big speeches do tend to be a bit too much, in part because Jack Pulman’s script can’t quite hit the right tone for them, so that they sound pompous rather than dramatic and moving.

Which is a curious thing in a script whose main strength otherwise is tone. Not just in its ability to get the brightly colourful and imaginative tone of the film’s more action-heavy and adventurous first half just right but also in its willingness to be fair-minded to both sides of the political conflict here, avoiding to declare one side as the good guys and the other as the baddies, as would be rather more typical for an adventure movie. Kidnapped shows very little love for the oppression of the Scottish through the English, and demonstrates this in very 70s ways. Yet it is just as sceptical about the Jacobite side, who, after all, wasn’t simply fighting for Scottish independence but working hard to get yet another civil war on the British Isles going, with the end goal to exchange one inbred fool on a throne for another, with the population of the countries having to pay the price. Which is a rather 70s way of looking at the situation as well, come to think of it.

At the same time, the script shows a lot of respect for people like Alan who live so strongly by their principles and beliefs, even when it disagrees with them. Alas, this very interesting and complex view on questions of peace, war, independence and personal and political loyalty does suffer a bit from the film’s need to squeeze two novels into a running time of less than two hours, so that rather a lot of emotional and thematic work that would be better expressed via action has to be simply talked out. Particularly Alan’s final decision doesn’t quite work treated this way.

This talkiness results in Kidnapped being front-loaded with practically all of its – finely realized – action set pieces taking place in its first half, and most of its talky bits in the final one. It’s not a fatal flaw in this particular case because of the whole affair’s general interest, yet it is one that’s clear and obvious enough even the best will can’t ignore it.

The Unholy (1988)

After young Catholic priest Father Michael (Ben Cross) against all reason survives being thrown out of a window by a supposed suicide without even the slightest injury, New Orleans’s archbishop Mosely (Hal Holbrook) and a blind, mysterious and hysterically overacted elderly priest we will later learn to be called Father Silva (Trevor Howard) look upon him with rather different eyes. Why, he might just be “the Chosen One”, which, as you know, is a very important part of Catholic doctrine that just happens to not be written down anywhere, certainly not in that book, whatsitcalled? Right, the Bible!

Anyway, his potential Chosen One status earns Michael his own parish, a church somewhere in what looks like one of the poorer, predominantly black, parts of New Orleans, yet which still harbours that whitest of things – a Satanist themed nightclub. The nightclub and its boss, one Luke (William Russ), aren’t too troubling for the rather modern Father Michael at first. He’s got worse problems to cope with: turns out his two predecessors in his church were both murdered right in front of the altar. The police were so helpless to solve the crimes they even asked the Church to close the place down; which they did before sending Father Michael. As the audience knows – and Michael will take quite a while to accept because he doesn’t believe in the devil or demons – the priests were murdered by a demon appearing as a pretty nude sexy (though curiously grown-up and female) woman (Nicole Fortier).

So clearly, some temptation of the flesh in form of one of Luke’s baristas is on the menu for Father Michael, as well as some theology lessons and other random nonsense.

Camilo Vila’s The Unholy is a deeply flawed film that I nonetheless love quite passionately. Its worst flaw is obviously the pacing: it starts, stops, starts, comes to a halt again, repeats plot points for no good reason to then get going again, and has about as much flow as a German rapper (don’t ask). I also can’t deny that it is much more talky than it needs to be, again tending to repeat ideas and plot beats for no good reason whatsoever. Then there’s the Ben Cross factor. While I don’t have anything against the man as an actor, the film’s slower parts could have used some enlivening by a leading men who is a bit more outwardly charismatic and whose acting style isn’t quite as dry as Cross’s.

Having said all that, here’s why The Unholy is awesome: living as we do in a time where all religiously themed horror (at least the Christian kind) seems to be inevitably about exorcisms, it is such a wonderful change of pace to see a film that just makes up some wacky bit of mythology it adds to Catholicism and then proceeds to tie things up with the sorts of things demons in the Christian interpretation are rather more interested in than possession. Temptation, particularly of priests (and saints) is rather a big thing in this mythology, and there aren’t too many films directly about it, even though this approach potentially adds fine opportunities for actually talking about morals, the complexities of the human heart and getting some nudity into your film.

The Unholy doesn’t stop there, though: in its final twenty minutes, it climaxes in (some might say devolves into) a very 80s horror concoction with multiple crucifixions, a thematically pertinent demonic parody of the Catholic mass, a ridiculous yet inspired demon (who also still looks like said sexy redhead in actually rather disquieting intercuts), his adorable assistant demon dwarfs, a short descent into hell with quick snippets of DEBAUCHERY! CANNIBALISM! LESBIANISM! ICKY STUFF!, and a sudden awakening of Cross’s inner scenery chewer. And while there’s certainly too much feet-dragging before, even earlier in the film there’s still space for fun stuff like Trevor Howard’s channelling of the spirit of Vincent Price in a really outrageous week, or the ten minutes in which Luke (who is only a fake Satanist for publicity reasons, by the way) turns into our short-term protagonist and visits a dramatic yet less than helpful medium who basically explains to the man afraid of the bad shit that’s going down that bad shit is going down and she’s utterly useless.


All of that is directed by Vila in spurts of somewhat stylish 80s colour, some dry ice fog, shot in some cool and some not so cool locations. What’s not to like (except for all that stuff I already mentioned)?