D. Randall MacDougall
Colour
So, once again I find myself defending an Elvis adaptation of a classic which gets more than its share of stick. Complaints I’ve read include that it’s all done without leaving the studio, that all the songs are boringly old fashioned and that it’s ridiculously hard to follow. And individually it’s difficult to make an argument against any of those points. They’re pretty much all on the nose, flaws that have to be acknowledged before any defence of ‘Nickleby’ can be made. But just picking out those individual faults ignores that a lot of this film actually works, and that casting Elvis Presley as sensitive, earnest, idealistic school teacher Nicholas Nickleby isn’t the irredeemably dumb idea many would expect.
For starters, handing Dickens’ long and sprawling novel to a fillet-happy butcher was a brilliant stroke. I said that casting Elvis as a sensitive, earnest, idealistic school teacher isn’t as stupid as one might expect, but actually the whole school teacher thing is only really alluded to. There is no Dotheboys and no Wackford Squeers. Some may see this as a bowdlerisation of the worse kind – but I think it’s bloody genius. It means that the focus is Nicholas’s time with the Crummles and their theatrical troupe – and if there’s ever a place where Elvis is going to feel at home, it’s near the bright lights of the stage, occasionally getting up to belt out numbers.
Okay, the songs aren’t great, but even so it’s never going to be dull to watch the King of Rock’n’Roll take on ‘Goodbye, Dolly Gray’, ‘I’m Henry the Eighth, I am’ and ‘The Man who Broke the Bank of Monte Carlo’. The choice of predominantly English music-hall songs is an interesting one, as the setting is Victorian New York, not Victorian London, which at least it removes the need for Elvis to attempt any kind of accent. If there’s one thing we’ve observed from these Elvis adaptations of classic novels, it’s that the boy really doesn’t like accents.
Elsewhere we have Nicholas’s virtuous and beautiful cousin Kate, for whom Nicholas holds a torch; there’s his villainous uncle Ralph (Harry Morgan, who later showed up in a more friendly role in ‘Frankie & Johnny’); and his slow witted sidekick, Smike. And that’s the real problem with this film, even with the Smithfield-esque butchering there is still so much plot and context needed to make the story works and no place to put it beyond clunking dialogue and clumsy asides. (“Ah, Mr Nickleby. I saw your Uncle Ralph the other day in his counting-house and a less pleasant cove I have scarcely glimpsed” is an actual piece of dialogue.) As the film progresses it becomes truly hard to work out why X hates Y, or what the history is between A and B, or why F is behaving in quite that way to G (and who the fuck is G anyway?) Indeed in an adaptation this confused and liberal, knowing the book becomes a positive disadvantage – as plot, character and relations are all gleefully subverted for ease, simplicity and sometimes just plain perversity. For example, we have Nicholas’s rather queasy love for his own sheltered cousin, Kate. Although given that that character is his sister in the book, it was possible for the film makers to embark on an altogether more troubling exploration of incest.
So, yes it’s flawed and yes Elvis is not playing Nicholas Nickleby – in looks, temperament or the fact he keeps belting out tunes – in any way that Dickens would recognise. And yes it’s hard to follow just what the hell is going on. But that’s to ignore that for most of the film Elvis is having a great time. This is the best Elvis ‘putting on a show’ movie ever made, and to hark on about its problems is just to close your eyes and ears to how damned entertaining it is.
Wednesday 30 April 2014
Sunday 27 April 2014
The Dalek War (1970)
D. Philip Strafer
Colour
This is what Terry Nation was striving for. From the first murmurings of dalekmania, his piggy eyes rang with pound signs and he was desperate to take his creations out into the world by themselves. Sod ‘Doctor Who’! He didn’t have the rights to ‘Doctor Who’ and so didn’t care about it. Indeed, arguably, the daleks were much bigger than the programme which beget them. They were the ones who made it the much watch show. What’s more, there had been five films at this point with the word ‘Dalek’ in the title and all of them had made money. There was clearly a market there for exterminators extreme and this movie was going to capitalise on it.
So whereas on TV The Doctor temporarily bid adieu to the daleks, in film the daleks waved a full goodbye to The Doctor. (That’s not as bizarre an image as it sounds: if a dalek holds its sucker at the right angle and weaves a little, it can do a pretty good wave.) So here we have a film which isn’t about The Doctor meeting and defeating the daleks, it’s about the daleks being the daleks and the audience revelling in their awesome metal coolness. This is the daleks being the best creatures in existence, shiny pepper-pots who will eventually control the universe.
Of course you couldn’t just have a film about daleks (even for Terry Nation a searing drama with a dalek only cast would have been a push) so there has to be some human characters as well. This comes in the form of a bunch of space soldiers – led by a young Gareth Hunt, with a shifty second in command played by Hywel Bennett – who crash land on Skaro, the daleks’s home planet. From being a hard-arsed incursion force, they suddenly find themselves having to survive long enough for the rescue ship to reach them. ‘The Dalek War’ is aiming to be a taut and claustrophobic movie, with lots of shiny corridors made dark by failing lights and humans being picked off one by one by the impressively relentless daleks.
To modern eyes the film it most resembles is ‘Aliens’, both are about military operations against an unremitting foe who can’t be beaten. Except in many ways it’s not at all like ‘Aliens’, as instead of being scary it finds new ways to be ridiculously cheesy at every turn. Imagine there were whole scenes in ‘Aliens’ given over to various xenomorphs chatting to each other about what strategy they were going to take. Imagine that the xenomorphs spoke in shrill, grating voices and actually had passionate arguments about what to do next. James Cameron’s vision suddenly becomes a lot less menacing, doesn’t it? But that is actually what we have here, sequences where daleks have ridiculous dalek conversations that just make them look far more comical than scary. But then part of the problem is that we’re clearly supposed to see the daleks as scary monsters, but also really like them as well. For all we’re supposed to care about the humans’ plight, there is part of the film that just desperately wants the daleks to win. And that gives it a real problem in tone, as with the charisma free Gareth Hunt, snivelling Hywel Bennett and nothing but anonymous meat bags surrounding them, it just feels like we shouldn’t want these idiots to escape even when two of them manage it. Instead we’re supposed to root for the daleks: to be scared of these pepper-pots, as well as finding them immensely cool, even when the film goes way out of its way to make them utterly bloody stupid.
It’s a confused movie which raises lots of conflicted emotions. It’s also the first dalek film not to make money, a crucial element would be back next time though.
Colour
This is what Terry Nation was striving for. From the first murmurings of dalekmania, his piggy eyes rang with pound signs and he was desperate to take his creations out into the world by themselves. Sod ‘Doctor Who’! He didn’t have the rights to ‘Doctor Who’ and so didn’t care about it. Indeed, arguably, the daleks were much bigger than the programme which beget them. They were the ones who made it the much watch show. What’s more, there had been five films at this point with the word ‘Dalek’ in the title and all of them had made money. There was clearly a market there for exterminators extreme and this movie was going to capitalise on it.
So whereas on TV The Doctor temporarily bid adieu to the daleks, in film the daleks waved a full goodbye to The Doctor. (That’s not as bizarre an image as it sounds: if a dalek holds its sucker at the right angle and weaves a little, it can do a pretty good wave.) So here we have a film which isn’t about The Doctor meeting and defeating the daleks, it’s about the daleks being the daleks and the audience revelling in their awesome metal coolness. This is the daleks being the best creatures in existence, shiny pepper-pots who will eventually control the universe.
Of course you couldn’t just have a film about daleks (even for Terry Nation a searing drama with a dalek only cast would have been a push) so there has to be some human characters as well. This comes in the form of a bunch of space soldiers – led by a young Gareth Hunt, with a shifty second in command played by Hywel Bennett – who crash land on Skaro, the daleks’s home planet. From being a hard-arsed incursion force, they suddenly find themselves having to survive long enough for the rescue ship to reach them. ‘The Dalek War’ is aiming to be a taut and claustrophobic movie, with lots of shiny corridors made dark by failing lights and humans being picked off one by one by the impressively relentless daleks.
To modern eyes the film it most resembles is ‘Aliens’, both are about military operations against an unremitting foe who can’t be beaten. Except in many ways it’s not at all like ‘Aliens’, as instead of being scary it finds new ways to be ridiculously cheesy at every turn. Imagine there were whole scenes in ‘Aliens’ given over to various xenomorphs chatting to each other about what strategy they were going to take. Imagine that the xenomorphs spoke in shrill, grating voices and actually had passionate arguments about what to do next. James Cameron’s vision suddenly becomes a lot less menacing, doesn’t it? But that is actually what we have here, sequences where daleks have ridiculous dalek conversations that just make them look far more comical than scary. But then part of the problem is that we’re clearly supposed to see the daleks as scary monsters, but also really like them as well. For all we’re supposed to care about the humans’ plight, there is part of the film that just desperately wants the daleks to win. And that gives it a real problem in tone, as with the charisma free Gareth Hunt, snivelling Hywel Bennett and nothing but anonymous meat bags surrounding them, it just feels like we shouldn’t want these idiots to escape even when two of them manage it. Instead we’re supposed to root for the daleks: to be scared of these pepper-pots, as well as finding them immensely cool, even when the film goes way out of its way to make them utterly bloody stupid.
It’s a confused movie which raises lots of conflicted emotions. It’s also the first dalek film not to make money, a crucial element would be back next time though.
Wednesday 23 April 2014
Scotland The Feared (2009)
D. Neil Marshall
Colour
It’s a tad surprising that Neil Marshall’s satire/horror/dystopian science fiction/gaudy spectacular of a film isn’t better known, I’d have put good money on it being referenced (by both sides) in the run up to the Scottish devolution vote. I’d have thought that with the future 'Dr Who' careers of two of its stars, Whovians like myself would be all over it. But no, it seems that after ‘Dog Soldiers’ and ‘The Descent’, Marshall’s films have struggled to get recognition. And that’s a shame as for all its flaws (and they are myriad), this is a film crammed full of ideas.
In the future, the Prime Minister of the independent Scotland (Peter Capaldi – not doing full Malcolm Tucker, but still in scary if not sweary mode) is agitated about Scotland’s influence on the world stage. Oil is running out and Scotland is facing becoming a poor country, “the bastard cousin” of a still dominant England. These strifes have already reached home, with gangs of disaffected youths – known as Haggises – roaming the land. However with the discovery of a nuclear weapon left over from Colonial times (as they’re referred in the film), Capaldi decides to start a war. It’s up to plucky young reporter James MacAvoy (bland) and his intern, Karen Gillan (inexperienced as an actress, but fetchingly lovely) to stop him.
The newly minted Twelfth Doctor and Amy Pond together on celluloid, you’d have thought the Science Fiction magazines would be panting over DVDs of this. Particularly, as I’ve already noted, the vote this year is going to make it truly topical. However the reason they won’t, is that having splattered all these elements together, ‘Scotland the Feared’ struggles to make any of them work.
‘The Mouse that Roared’ satire of the premise – where Scotland attacks England’s great ally, Portugal (it’s true that the one country in Europe England/Britain has never been to war with is Portugal) goes from ludicrously satirical idea to be taken intensely seriously by all the characters very quickly. But then maybe the idea of firing a nuclear warhead at millions of innocent Portuguese can’t be played for comedy for too long.
As for the horror, the Haggises are scarily tattooed and scarily Glaswegian, but are used far too frequently. By the end it seems like any scene which has become inert can easily be resolved by having a bunch of violent skinheads crash into the room. And there are only so many times watching a drooling skinhead wield a broken bottle of McEwans is actually entertaining.
And the dystopian future stuff? Well, that’s a mix of smog coloured sky, bright neons and impressive shadows. It isn’t as original as it could be, but you can see Marshall and his cinematographer straining against the budget to create something that is undeniable futuristic and Scottish.
Which is what I like about this film, how goddamn Scottish it is. For the most part this looks like a film made for an exclusively Scottish audience. To understand all the references it helps if you have good working knowledge of Scottish indie music, the suburbs of Edinburgh and The Jacobite Rebellion. There are characters who speak like particularly indecipherable extras from Rab C. Nesbit, with not a subtitle in sight. Okay, for a more general audience there are jokes about the first presidents of Scotland being Alec Salmond, Sean Connery and Alex Ferguson – but you won’t necessarily feel a welcome in the hills if you’re a Sassenach.
So why isn’t this a rallying film for the independence campaign? Undoubtedly because the ending makes it clear that the film doesn’t know where it lies. (Spoiler alert) ‘Scotland the Feared’ does honestly end with England sending it troops to quell the Scots and make everything safe again. After all the stuff about being proud Scots and how the country can stand up for itself, it is forcibly taken back into English hands before it can cause any more damage. It’s a genuinely odd conclusion that makes you wonder who this film is aimed at. Surely anyone who believes in the Union doesn’t want to sit through 90 minutes of strident neon flag waving for independence; while anyone who believes in devolution doesn’t want to watch a film where England bails them out.
It’s all very odd, and just proves once again that you can’t have your Dundee Cake and eat it.
Colour
It’s a tad surprising that Neil Marshall’s satire/horror/dystopian science fiction/gaudy spectacular of a film isn’t better known, I’d have put good money on it being referenced (by both sides) in the run up to the Scottish devolution vote. I’d have thought that with the future 'Dr Who' careers of two of its stars, Whovians like myself would be all over it. But no, it seems that after ‘Dog Soldiers’ and ‘The Descent’, Marshall’s films have struggled to get recognition. And that’s a shame as for all its flaws (and they are myriad), this is a film crammed full of ideas.
In the future, the Prime Minister of the independent Scotland (Peter Capaldi – not doing full Malcolm Tucker, but still in scary if not sweary mode) is agitated about Scotland’s influence on the world stage. Oil is running out and Scotland is facing becoming a poor country, “the bastard cousin” of a still dominant England. These strifes have already reached home, with gangs of disaffected youths – known as Haggises – roaming the land. However with the discovery of a nuclear weapon left over from Colonial times (as they’re referred in the film), Capaldi decides to start a war. It’s up to plucky young reporter James MacAvoy (bland) and his intern, Karen Gillan (inexperienced as an actress, but fetchingly lovely) to stop him.
The newly minted Twelfth Doctor and Amy Pond together on celluloid, you’d have thought the Science Fiction magazines would be panting over DVDs of this. Particularly, as I’ve already noted, the vote this year is going to make it truly topical. However the reason they won’t, is that having splattered all these elements together, ‘Scotland the Feared’ struggles to make any of them work.
‘The Mouse that Roared’ satire of the premise – where Scotland attacks England’s great ally, Portugal (it’s true that the one country in Europe England/Britain has never been to war with is Portugal) goes from ludicrously satirical idea to be taken intensely seriously by all the characters very quickly. But then maybe the idea of firing a nuclear warhead at millions of innocent Portuguese can’t be played for comedy for too long.
As for the horror, the Haggises are scarily tattooed and scarily Glaswegian, but are used far too frequently. By the end it seems like any scene which has become inert can easily be resolved by having a bunch of violent skinheads crash into the room. And there are only so many times watching a drooling skinhead wield a broken bottle of McEwans is actually entertaining.
And the dystopian future stuff? Well, that’s a mix of smog coloured sky, bright neons and impressive shadows. It isn’t as original as it could be, but you can see Marshall and his cinematographer straining against the budget to create something that is undeniable futuristic and Scottish.
Which is what I like about this film, how goddamn Scottish it is. For the most part this looks like a film made for an exclusively Scottish audience. To understand all the references it helps if you have good working knowledge of Scottish indie music, the suburbs of Edinburgh and The Jacobite Rebellion. There are characters who speak like particularly indecipherable extras from Rab C. Nesbit, with not a subtitle in sight. Okay, for a more general audience there are jokes about the first presidents of Scotland being Alec Salmond, Sean Connery and Alex Ferguson – but you won’t necessarily feel a welcome in the hills if you’re a Sassenach.
So why isn’t this a rallying film for the independence campaign? Undoubtedly because the ending makes it clear that the film doesn’t know where it lies. (Spoiler alert) ‘Scotland the Feared’ does honestly end with England sending it troops to quell the Scots and make everything safe again. After all the stuff about being proud Scots and how the country can stand up for itself, it is forcibly taken back into English hands before it can cause any more damage. It’s a genuinely odd conclusion that makes you wonder who this film is aimed at. Surely anyone who believes in the Union doesn’t want to sit through 90 minutes of strident neon flag waving for independence; while anyone who believes in devolution doesn’t want to watch a film where England bails them out.
It’s all very odd, and just proves once again that you can’t have your Dundee Cake and eat it.
Sunday 20 April 2014
The Chocolate Man (1974)
D. Antonio Falucci
Colour
A seminal Italian horror film and one of my favourite movies ever made. A film which takes childhood innocence, guileless delight, the places youthful imagination runs to, and makes something incredibly creepy and horrible out of them. Lots of film trade in on childhood horrors, but this takes the whole of childhood, all desires – good and bad – and pushes them to their outer limits. ‘The Chocolate Man’ gives our inner child a fairy godmother, one whose wishes will taste sweet at first bite but are destined to stick hard and jagged in the throat.
Imagine if you received a hand made of chocolate. It’s the life-size hand of an adult human and is sculpted of the finest chocolate so that when you bite into it, it tastes like heaven. A hand is a large amount of chocolate, but you know you will eat it all even if it makes you feel sick. Before long a slender arm arrives, also made of chocolate. You devour that too. Not long after a chocolate sculpture of the bottom half of a female torso goes on display in a local gallery. It’s beautiful and slim and so well carved, and the whole thing is just deliciously edible. Then a chocolate head shows up and it looks just like an ex of yours. She used to be a model so perhaps she has modelled for this. But then you begin to realise that you haven’t seen your ex for a while, and suddenly all these life-like body parts you’ve been eating are curdling in your stomach.
Of course when the story starts to open out, a wild and over the top mad scientist living in the catacombs of Rome is involved, played with lip-licking aplomb by Gian Maria Volonté. This is the mad scientist to end all, the apex of mad scientists, the kind of loopy test-tube pusher who would make James Bond pee his pants. His rationale is based on the standard tropes of revenge, thwarted ambition, egomania, broken love, vindictiveness, irrational hatreds and a derailed academic career. (It’s possible he also has a small penis.) But Volonté’s performance is so excessively bonkers as to be operatic. The film starts with childhood fantasies about everything made of chocolate, and ends with a man who is the epitome of a childhood monster. And that’s before we get to the final part of Volonté’s plan, where he intends to release a gas into the world which will turn every single living creature into chocolate. Yes, it will end all life, but at least everything will go out tasting sweet.
None of this makes much sense. How could you remove a human foot and turn it into a piece of confectionary which is so smooth and sweet throughout? Surely a severed foot dipped in chocolate is going to be the equivalent of crunchy frog. But the film is presented in such a wild, grand-guignol style, that all quibbles and questions of that nature are swiftly rolled aside in the powerful sweep of drama and tension. It’s all building to a conclusion of madness and confectionary where nothing is off the table, no plot twist is impossible and even if it will probably end with the villain drowned in chocolate, we know that it’s going to be an eye-popping journey to get there.
Colour
A seminal Italian horror film and one of my favourite movies ever made. A film which takes childhood innocence, guileless delight, the places youthful imagination runs to, and makes something incredibly creepy and horrible out of them. Lots of film trade in on childhood horrors, but this takes the whole of childhood, all desires – good and bad – and pushes them to their outer limits. ‘The Chocolate Man’ gives our inner child a fairy godmother, one whose wishes will taste sweet at first bite but are destined to stick hard and jagged in the throat.
Imagine if you received a hand made of chocolate. It’s the life-size hand of an adult human and is sculpted of the finest chocolate so that when you bite into it, it tastes like heaven. A hand is a large amount of chocolate, but you know you will eat it all even if it makes you feel sick. Before long a slender arm arrives, also made of chocolate. You devour that too. Not long after a chocolate sculpture of the bottom half of a female torso goes on display in a local gallery. It’s beautiful and slim and so well carved, and the whole thing is just deliciously edible. Then a chocolate head shows up and it looks just like an ex of yours. She used to be a model so perhaps she has modelled for this. But then you begin to realise that you haven’t seen your ex for a while, and suddenly all these life-like body parts you’ve been eating are curdling in your stomach.
Of course when the story starts to open out, a wild and over the top mad scientist living in the catacombs of Rome is involved, played with lip-licking aplomb by Gian Maria Volonté. This is the mad scientist to end all, the apex of mad scientists, the kind of loopy test-tube pusher who would make James Bond pee his pants. His rationale is based on the standard tropes of revenge, thwarted ambition, egomania, broken love, vindictiveness, irrational hatreds and a derailed academic career. (It’s possible he also has a small penis.) But Volonté’s performance is so excessively bonkers as to be operatic. The film starts with childhood fantasies about everything made of chocolate, and ends with a man who is the epitome of a childhood monster. And that’s before we get to the final part of Volonté’s plan, where he intends to release a gas into the world which will turn every single living creature into chocolate. Yes, it will end all life, but at least everything will go out tasting sweet.
None of this makes much sense. How could you remove a human foot and turn it into a piece of confectionary which is so smooth and sweet throughout? Surely a severed foot dipped in chocolate is going to be the equivalent of crunchy frog. But the film is presented in such a wild, grand-guignol style, that all quibbles and questions of that nature are swiftly rolled aside in the powerful sweep of drama and tension. It’s all building to a conclusion of madness and confectionary where nothing is off the table, no plot twist is impossible and even if it will probably end with the villain drowned in chocolate, we know that it’s going to be an eye-popping journey to get there.
Wednesday 16 April 2014
Hot Cross Bunny (1985)
D. Tim Delingpole
Colour
A hot cross bun is a spiced sweet bun made with currants or raisins and marked with a cross on the top, it’s traditionally eaten on Good Friday in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada. A bunny is basically a rabbit, with a twitchy little nose, four paws and loping ears. It doesn’t usually come with sunglasses, firearms and a really bad attitude; but let’s just pretend – for sake of argument here – that a bunny is all of those things. As although the pun of the title might indicate that this is somewhat connected with seasonal pastries, the fact is that what we have here is an utterly bizarre Australian horror comedy about an anthropomorphic rabbit with an incredible mean streak, a lust for violence and a nice line in floppy eared puns.
Here we are in downtown Sydney and bullied Oliver Smyth – a more snot nosed little boy it would be difficult to find – makes a wish. He is having a tough time at school and feels friendless and powerless. Rather than burying his nose in his books though and saying he’ll show them one day, he wants revenge. So in his silly and childish thirteen year old boy, he makes a wish – and because of some odd combination of a drop of his blood, the time of year, some magical Easter nonsense, the kind of made up voodoo bullshit you always get in movies like this – he wins himself a friend, and not just any friend. Here is the actual Easter bunny, Rocky is his name and he is armed and sneering and just the rabbit to sort out young Oliver’s problems.
Without a doubt Rocky is a fantastic creation, he is smart, profane and has a line in wisecracks that suggests the screenwriters were looking to graduate to James Bond one day. He is also remorselessly violent, so much so that everyone who has been rude to Oliver – or sneers at his new three foot tall very furry friend – is going to get his. Voiced by a pre-Crocodile Dundee Paul Hogan, there is a lot of charm to this rabbit, a lot of spunk and likeable antihero vigour to this bunny. However the thing that people are more likely to remember about the creation is how remarkably low-tech he is. You see, Rocky may be a tough rabbit, but he’s realised with what is basically a glove puppet. It makes for a really odd film, with Rocky talked up as big and tough and yet in reality being a hand puppet in a leather jacket shot really close to the camera so it seems roughly in proportion to his human co-stars.
I said this was a horror comedy; well its charms lie distinctly more in the latter than the former.
That said when the violence gets going, the gore content is quite high. Fellow pupils, sneering girls and even one teacher (British comedian Mel Smith in a sweating cameo) are all dispatched in ways gruesome and horrible (as long as you forget that what’s causing these outrages is basically an expletive happy version of Sooty). It’s a ridiculous set up but one which comes with oodles of charm. And since thousands of miles away at the same time, such a high-tech maestro as George Lucas was making a duck his hero with no charm whatsoever, then one has to say that if you are going to make a film with a homicidal rabbit – this is probably the way to go.
Colour
A hot cross bun is a spiced sweet bun made with currants or raisins and marked with a cross on the top, it’s traditionally eaten on Good Friday in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada. A bunny is basically a rabbit, with a twitchy little nose, four paws and loping ears. It doesn’t usually come with sunglasses, firearms and a really bad attitude; but let’s just pretend – for sake of argument here – that a bunny is all of those things. As although the pun of the title might indicate that this is somewhat connected with seasonal pastries, the fact is that what we have here is an utterly bizarre Australian horror comedy about an anthropomorphic rabbit with an incredible mean streak, a lust for violence and a nice line in floppy eared puns.
Here we are in downtown Sydney and bullied Oliver Smyth – a more snot nosed little boy it would be difficult to find – makes a wish. He is having a tough time at school and feels friendless and powerless. Rather than burying his nose in his books though and saying he’ll show them one day, he wants revenge. So in his silly and childish thirteen year old boy, he makes a wish – and because of some odd combination of a drop of his blood, the time of year, some magical Easter nonsense, the kind of made up voodoo bullshit you always get in movies like this – he wins himself a friend, and not just any friend. Here is the actual Easter bunny, Rocky is his name and he is armed and sneering and just the rabbit to sort out young Oliver’s problems.
Without a doubt Rocky is a fantastic creation, he is smart, profane and has a line in wisecracks that suggests the screenwriters were looking to graduate to James Bond one day. He is also remorselessly violent, so much so that everyone who has been rude to Oliver – or sneers at his new three foot tall very furry friend – is going to get his. Voiced by a pre-Crocodile Dundee Paul Hogan, there is a lot of charm to this rabbit, a lot of spunk and likeable antihero vigour to this bunny. However the thing that people are more likely to remember about the creation is how remarkably low-tech he is. You see, Rocky may be a tough rabbit, but he’s realised with what is basically a glove puppet. It makes for a really odd film, with Rocky talked up as big and tough and yet in reality being a hand puppet in a leather jacket shot really close to the camera so it seems roughly in proportion to his human co-stars.
I said this was a horror comedy; well its charms lie distinctly more in the latter than the former.
That said when the violence gets going, the gore content is quite high. Fellow pupils, sneering girls and even one teacher (British comedian Mel Smith in a sweating cameo) are all dispatched in ways gruesome and horrible (as long as you forget that what’s causing these outrages is basically an expletive happy version of Sooty). It’s a ridiculous set up but one which comes with oodles of charm. And since thousands of miles away at the same time, such a high-tech maestro as George Lucas was making a duck his hero with no charm whatsoever, then one has to say that if you are going to make a film with a homicidal rabbit – this is probably the way to go.
Sunday 13 April 2014
Privates Lives (2001)
D. Otto von De Mille
Colour
Two years after the disaster that was the final Sexy Goth Girls movie, Liddy D’Eath and Otto Van De Mille reteamed for this spin on Noel Coward’s ‘Private Lives’. It’s difficult to see from the outside what kept D’Eath and Van De Mille together, why one of them didn’t explore what other opportunities there were. There are rumours of an affair between the two, but it seems to have finished before they started making films. So far, so Woody Allen/Diane Keaten, but Keaten did at least go off and make ‘The Godfather’, Liddy D’Eath just stayed true to Von De Mille. This is surprising as whereas he is an adequate director, there’s something quite special about her screen presence. Not just her physicality, which is waif like, with blonde hair and big eyes and tattoos which suggest a tarnished angel, but also a genuine charisma that only Van De Mille seemed to want to capture. And that’s odd, as once again in a collaboration between the two we see Liddy D’Eath using a defibelator on the struggling material she has been given, going so far as to give it frantic life to life in a struggle to give it any kind of pulse. It must have been disconcerting for her to work so hard and still only get phone-calls from her weirdly named ex-boyfriend.
Before long the two of them would embark on another series of films which would match the best of the Sexy Goth Girls movies, but first there is this interesting, curiosity of a mis-step. A comedy of modern sexual manners, a bedroom farce which doesn’t get near achieving the right balance between bedroom and farce. Having married impetuously, Liddy and her new wan-faced husband (played by the void like, Jackson Wilson) find themselves on honeymoon in a remote desert hotel. But she is shocked to discover that in the next bedroom is not only her ex hot and heavy boyfriend (the big and brooding, Douglas Conifer) but his new bride, who happens to be her college lesbian lover (Jenny Picard). The stage is set for passion, jokes, recriminations, misunderstandings, fetching leather lingerie, laughter, tears, innuendo, broken hearts and more exploring of sexual confusion than even Noel Coward would ever have dreamed possible.
Let’s be clear, this isn’t porn. There are points when it looks like it’s just going to tip into porn, particularly when the women seem about to reignite their passion with a breathless, full-on session. The camera lingers and it feels as if the bass line is going to strike up and we should either be watching this in a darkened room alone, or in a cinema with lots of other shifty men. But it never quite tips over into porn, although nor does it really become anything else. The dialogue, as you’d expect from the man who made the ‘Sexy Goth Girls’ movies, is frequently very funny – but it’s hardly likely to reach the standards of Noel Coward. (I think that Coward would have enjoyed this film though, perhaps with martini in hand and a bemused, amused look on his face). However the dialogue never touches the emotions it needs to. And because in a set up like this the emotions need to be addressed, there are whole amateurish scenes with craply written dialogue just to get them out of the way. As such what we end up with is a drama which isn’t dramatic enough, a comedy which isn’t funny enough and a porno which isn’t pornographic enough. Liddy D’Eath doesn’t even look that gothic, for god’s sake. It’s an odd faltering stumble of a movie, although one massaged into some kind of decent shape by the charms of its leading lady, but better isn’t far away.
Colour
Two years after the disaster that was the final Sexy Goth Girls movie, Liddy D’Eath and Otto Van De Mille reteamed for this spin on Noel Coward’s ‘Private Lives’. It’s difficult to see from the outside what kept D’Eath and Van De Mille together, why one of them didn’t explore what other opportunities there were. There are rumours of an affair between the two, but it seems to have finished before they started making films. So far, so Woody Allen/Diane Keaten, but Keaten did at least go off and make ‘The Godfather’, Liddy D’Eath just stayed true to Von De Mille. This is surprising as whereas he is an adequate director, there’s something quite special about her screen presence. Not just her physicality, which is waif like, with blonde hair and big eyes and tattoos which suggest a tarnished angel, but also a genuine charisma that only Van De Mille seemed to want to capture. And that’s odd, as once again in a collaboration between the two we see Liddy D’Eath using a defibelator on the struggling material she has been given, going so far as to give it frantic life to life in a struggle to give it any kind of pulse. It must have been disconcerting for her to work so hard and still only get phone-calls from her weirdly named ex-boyfriend.
Before long the two of them would embark on another series of films which would match the best of the Sexy Goth Girls movies, but first there is this interesting, curiosity of a mis-step. A comedy of modern sexual manners, a bedroom farce which doesn’t get near achieving the right balance between bedroom and farce. Having married impetuously, Liddy and her new wan-faced husband (played by the void like, Jackson Wilson) find themselves on honeymoon in a remote desert hotel. But she is shocked to discover that in the next bedroom is not only her ex hot and heavy boyfriend (the big and brooding, Douglas Conifer) but his new bride, who happens to be her college lesbian lover (Jenny Picard). The stage is set for passion, jokes, recriminations, misunderstandings, fetching leather lingerie, laughter, tears, innuendo, broken hearts and more exploring of sexual confusion than even Noel Coward would ever have dreamed possible.
Let’s be clear, this isn’t porn. There are points when it looks like it’s just going to tip into porn, particularly when the women seem about to reignite their passion with a breathless, full-on session. The camera lingers and it feels as if the bass line is going to strike up and we should either be watching this in a darkened room alone, or in a cinema with lots of other shifty men. But it never quite tips over into porn, although nor does it really become anything else. The dialogue, as you’d expect from the man who made the ‘Sexy Goth Girls’ movies, is frequently very funny – but it’s hardly likely to reach the standards of Noel Coward. (I think that Coward would have enjoyed this film though, perhaps with martini in hand and a bemused, amused look on his face). However the dialogue never touches the emotions it needs to. And because in a set up like this the emotions need to be addressed, there are whole amateurish scenes with craply written dialogue just to get them out of the way. As such what we end up with is a drama which isn’t dramatic enough, a comedy which isn’t funny enough and a porno which isn’t pornographic enough. Liddy D’Eath doesn’t even look that gothic, for god’s sake. It’s an odd faltering stumble of a movie, although one massaged into some kind of decent shape by the charms of its leading lady, but better isn’t far away.
Wednesday 9 April 2014
To Hunt A Victim (1992)
D. George Armitage
Colour
I’d say that right now Micky Rourke is our most endurably eccentric movie star. The long hair, the ludicrous muscles, the fact his face resembles a teak cabinet which has unaccountably learned to speak, the army of Chihuahuas he keeps to do his unholy bidding. All of this adds up to an impressive hand of quirks which I don’t think anyone still making major motion pictures can match. But even in the more handsome, early nineties, tail-end of his heyday, his eccentricity was always really close to the surface. Here he is as a Los Angeles detective, one of those guys in a not so good suit and a not so good car, trying to make a decent living as a knight in shining armour. He is a modern day Philip Marlowe or a Lew Archer. (Actually, the young Mickey Rourke would have made a great Lew Archer, and a new Lew Archer is something the world needs. After all, if you take on Philip Marlowe you have to contend with Humphrey Bogart, but with Lew Archer you only have to go toe to toe with Paul Newman.) His name is Peter Locque, and he works the mean streets of Los Angeles. Except Locque has a crucial difference to set him apart from Marlowe and Archer, he hails from Provence, and that allows Rourke to spend the whole film working on the most ludicrous French accent heard since Peter Sellers’ passing. As I said, the eccentricity has never been that far from the surface.
Rourke is hired by the widow of a California land owner, Diane Ladd, to find her wayward daughter, Sherilyn Fenn. This being an early nineties Micky Rourke film, it isn’t long at all before things are getting very hot and heavy, with Rourke and Fenn finding themselves nude and locked in slow-mo artful love-making of the most soft focus kind. And that’s before her troubled friend, Erika Eleniak, gets involved. Fenn is tied in with hard-nosed gangster, the great J.T. Walsh, and it isn’t long before murder occurs and Rourke has to move quickly to clear her name. Amongst those who Rourke has to face off against on his search for the truth are such semi-forgotten luminaries as George Segal, Valerie Perrine, George Takei, Sandra Lockhart and most surreally of all, former Doctor Who, Sylvester McCoy – who is great fun as a particularly cantankerous Scottish librarian. Possibly his appearance is there just to balance things out; saying to the audience that if you think the guy playing the detective is eccentric in this movie, wait until you see who’s in charge of the library.
All the way through Rourke gives us “bonjour”, “merci”, “mon cheri” and even a camply enthusiastic “ooh la la”. The result is to make his detective seem part Lew Archer, part Philip Marlowe, but with a sizeable dash of Hercule Poirot. Probably the presence of the far superior ‘Angel Heart’ persuaded Rourke to take this direction with his accent, to differentiate it from the earlier film. If we’re honest ‘To Hunt A Victim’ isn’t a patch on ‘Angel Heart’, but what could have been your bog-standard early 90s noir thriller – with the predictable lashings of nudity and violence – becomes in the crisp and clear direction of Armitage, and the wonderful over the top eccentricity of the star, something really strange and special indeed.
Colour
I’d say that right now Micky Rourke is our most endurably eccentric movie star. The long hair, the ludicrous muscles, the fact his face resembles a teak cabinet which has unaccountably learned to speak, the army of Chihuahuas he keeps to do his unholy bidding. All of this adds up to an impressive hand of quirks which I don’t think anyone still making major motion pictures can match. But even in the more handsome, early nineties, tail-end of his heyday, his eccentricity was always really close to the surface. Here he is as a Los Angeles detective, one of those guys in a not so good suit and a not so good car, trying to make a decent living as a knight in shining armour. He is a modern day Philip Marlowe or a Lew Archer. (Actually, the young Mickey Rourke would have made a great Lew Archer, and a new Lew Archer is something the world needs. After all, if you take on Philip Marlowe you have to contend with Humphrey Bogart, but with Lew Archer you only have to go toe to toe with Paul Newman.) His name is Peter Locque, and he works the mean streets of Los Angeles. Except Locque has a crucial difference to set him apart from Marlowe and Archer, he hails from Provence, and that allows Rourke to spend the whole film working on the most ludicrous French accent heard since Peter Sellers’ passing. As I said, the eccentricity has never been that far from the surface.
Rourke is hired by the widow of a California land owner, Diane Ladd, to find her wayward daughter, Sherilyn Fenn. This being an early nineties Micky Rourke film, it isn’t long at all before things are getting very hot and heavy, with Rourke and Fenn finding themselves nude and locked in slow-mo artful love-making of the most soft focus kind. And that’s before her troubled friend, Erika Eleniak, gets involved. Fenn is tied in with hard-nosed gangster, the great J.T. Walsh, and it isn’t long before murder occurs and Rourke has to move quickly to clear her name. Amongst those who Rourke has to face off against on his search for the truth are such semi-forgotten luminaries as George Segal, Valerie Perrine, George Takei, Sandra Lockhart and most surreally of all, former Doctor Who, Sylvester McCoy – who is great fun as a particularly cantankerous Scottish librarian. Possibly his appearance is there just to balance things out; saying to the audience that if you think the guy playing the detective is eccentric in this movie, wait until you see who’s in charge of the library.
All the way through Rourke gives us “bonjour”, “merci”, “mon cheri” and even a camply enthusiastic “ooh la la”. The result is to make his detective seem part Lew Archer, part Philip Marlowe, but with a sizeable dash of Hercule Poirot. Probably the presence of the far superior ‘Angel Heart’ persuaded Rourke to take this direction with his accent, to differentiate it from the earlier film. If we’re honest ‘To Hunt A Victim’ isn’t a patch on ‘Angel Heart’, but what could have been your bog-standard early 90s noir thriller – with the predictable lashings of nudity and violence – becomes in the crisp and clear direction of Armitage, and the wonderful over the top eccentricity of the star, something really strange and special indeed.
Sunday 6 April 2014
Stamped Overdue (1994)
D. Robert Harmon
Colour
Just as Steven Seagal once furthered his action hero career by posing as a chef, and Arnold Schwarzenegger became a cop at a kindergarten, here Jean Claude Van Damme takes on a seemingly normal sounding job and brings added explosions and gunfire to it. For the small town library in the New England hamlet of Shakespeare has itself a new librarian, but this is no fusty middle aged spinster, it’s the mussels from the Brussels himself. He is Jacques Duvall, bibliophile, qualified librarian and French Foreign Legion commando. (I’m not exactly sure if commando is a rank one can attain in the Foreign Legion, or why this man – who is otherwise portrayed as French – was allowed to join the French Foreign Legion in the first place. But, please, this film really doesn’t invite too many questions.) Coincidentally, a legendary and incredibly valuable diamond is being displayed at the museum attached to this library, and villainous James Woods and his gang of criminals are set to steal it. The stage is set for car chases, automatic gun fire and explosions in this sleepy, leafy little New England town. As the one thing this gang hasn’t counted on is the librarian.
Few films have such commitment to being mindless, adrenalin soaked fun as ‘Stamped Overdue’. It’s almost as if the writers (six of whom, incredibly, are credited), worked out a whole list of elements which JUST HAD to be in their action movie/library combo. Will the hero have a gunfight in the middle of the library, gunfire shooting books from the shelves so that they explode in charred sheets of paper? Of course he will. When the hero runs out of bullets, will he use a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to beat a foe into submission before making a tired semi-literary quip? Without a doubt. Will the hero be able to save himself by pulling the bookshelves on top of him and letting the books absorb the gunfire? Yes, because resourceful is his middle name (and books seemingly only disintegrate under gunfire when he needs them to). Will the bad guy make some sneering remark about those who like books being wimps? Absolutely. And will the young librarian assistant, so tightly wound and frigid in her bun, finally relent to the hero’s charms to undo her hair and reveal what a gorgeous face and hot bod she has? Please, this isn’t just an action movie, it is poetry!
Of course this is all magnificently stupid stuff. You truly have to admire the filmmakers’ commitment to being so absolutely, fantastically, moronically stupid. They set out to make a big, dumb film and succeeded in making a film so lacking in IQ that even that year (the year of ‘The Specialist’ and Van Damme’s own ‘Streetfighter’), it was the idiot child sat in the corner trying to suck its own thumb but somehow failing. But my problem with this big, brash film where the hero is a bibliophile librarian and the villain professes to hate reading, is that a lot of books do suffer. As a bookish man myself, it distresses me to see all those broken spines and flying leaves. By the end, when half the library is on fire, all this destruction just seems like a hell of a shame and one which doesn’t merit the big heroic flourish in the music. As for all the lead character’s stated love of books, the message of this film seems to be: books are good, but martial arts and blowing things up are way cooler – especially when the things you’re blowing up burn as easily as books. And surely that’s not the message a film set in a library should send.
Colour
Just as Steven Seagal once furthered his action hero career by posing as a chef, and Arnold Schwarzenegger became a cop at a kindergarten, here Jean Claude Van Damme takes on a seemingly normal sounding job and brings added explosions and gunfire to it. For the small town library in the New England hamlet of Shakespeare has itself a new librarian, but this is no fusty middle aged spinster, it’s the mussels from the Brussels himself. He is Jacques Duvall, bibliophile, qualified librarian and French Foreign Legion commando. (I’m not exactly sure if commando is a rank one can attain in the Foreign Legion, or why this man – who is otherwise portrayed as French – was allowed to join the French Foreign Legion in the first place. But, please, this film really doesn’t invite too many questions.) Coincidentally, a legendary and incredibly valuable diamond is being displayed at the museum attached to this library, and villainous James Woods and his gang of criminals are set to steal it. The stage is set for car chases, automatic gun fire and explosions in this sleepy, leafy little New England town. As the one thing this gang hasn’t counted on is the librarian.
Few films have such commitment to being mindless, adrenalin soaked fun as ‘Stamped Overdue’. It’s almost as if the writers (six of whom, incredibly, are credited), worked out a whole list of elements which JUST HAD to be in their action movie/library combo. Will the hero have a gunfight in the middle of the library, gunfire shooting books from the shelves so that they explode in charred sheets of paper? Of course he will. When the hero runs out of bullets, will he use a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to beat a foe into submission before making a tired semi-literary quip? Without a doubt. Will the hero be able to save himself by pulling the bookshelves on top of him and letting the books absorb the gunfire? Yes, because resourceful is his middle name (and books seemingly only disintegrate under gunfire when he needs them to). Will the bad guy make some sneering remark about those who like books being wimps? Absolutely. And will the young librarian assistant, so tightly wound and frigid in her bun, finally relent to the hero’s charms to undo her hair and reveal what a gorgeous face and hot bod she has? Please, this isn’t just an action movie, it is poetry!
Of course this is all magnificently stupid stuff. You truly have to admire the filmmakers’ commitment to being so absolutely, fantastically, moronically stupid. They set out to make a big, dumb film and succeeded in making a film so lacking in IQ that even that year (the year of ‘The Specialist’ and Van Damme’s own ‘Streetfighter’), it was the idiot child sat in the corner trying to suck its own thumb but somehow failing. But my problem with this big, brash film where the hero is a bibliophile librarian and the villain professes to hate reading, is that a lot of books do suffer. As a bookish man myself, it distresses me to see all those broken spines and flying leaves. By the end, when half the library is on fire, all this destruction just seems like a hell of a shame and one which doesn’t merit the big heroic flourish in the music. As for all the lead character’s stated love of books, the message of this film seems to be: books are good, but martial arts and blowing things up are way cooler – especially when the things you’re blowing up burn as easily as books. And surely that’s not the message a film set in a library should send.
Wednesday 2 April 2014
Arranging My Affairs (1979)
D. Bob Spiers
Colour
Fans of ‘The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin’ should seek out this rare starring role in cinema for Leonard Rossiter. Normally on the big screen he was limited to playing weary policemen in ‘Pink Panther’ sequels, or small roles in Stanley Kubrick movies, but here he is the star and centre of everything. Playing an unnamed Cabinet Minister in the British government, Rossiter is absolutely astounding. Speaking as quickly as Reggie Perrin, Rossiter presents his politician as that rare thing – an almost still whirling dervish. He doesn’t charge or race around, but clearly his mind is always whirring and spinning, with words spilling out of him so fast, constantly twisting one way or another. He obfuscates, he misleads, he tells half-truths, semi-truths and even resorts to just lying, all to get out of various jams of his own making. And it’s brilliant to watch, as Rossiter makes this man immensely likeable, even when ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ are clearly just half remembered words in the dictionary. This, without a doubt, is one of the most cynical films ever made about politics and politicians.
Suddenly finding himself at risk of exposure for his various misdeeds, our political hero has a day or so to get all his affairs into order so that he can present a squeaky clean image to the general public. This includes sorting out some dubious loans from his ultra-seedy cousin (Peter Sallis, in a role which seems like the dark twisted mirror to Norman Clegg; the antichrist to Wallace); getting hold of some compromising snaps from a brothel madam (Kate O’Mara, purring over line like creamy liquor); and ending affairs with a duo of glamorous mistresses, Joanna Lumley and Lynn-Holly Johnson (both actual Bond girls) and ridiculously handsome toy-boy, Anthony Andrews (who surely must have been considered for Bond). In addition he has the attention of a blackmailer (Michael Ripper), a problem which may need more drastic measures to resolve. All the way through Rossiter talks, carving and chipping away with words, as if they can alter reality itself. This is a man who is dangling by a thread, but who won’t admit that the thread is anything other than a sturdy rope and far from dangling he is floating above serenely taking in the panorama of the situation. He sweats, undoubtedly the panic rises, but no matter how dire the predicament he doesn’t give up. He just keeps on talking and talking and talking. It’s no wonder that when his wife, Sian Phillips, stares at him it’s with a smile of pride rather than a snarl of frustration.
If we’re honest it looks more like a TV movie than an actual film. It’s made by television professionals and never really escapes that. But in Rossiter’s magnificently shifty yet sincere performance, in the seediness of the tabloids which pursue him, in the way that the political establishment rallies around and supports him when the danger is not just hammering his door but trying to climb through the window, we have an extremely cynical and wonderfully funny film which is just as horribly applicable today.
Colour
Fans of ‘The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin’ should seek out this rare starring role in cinema for Leonard Rossiter. Normally on the big screen he was limited to playing weary policemen in ‘Pink Panther’ sequels, or small roles in Stanley Kubrick movies, but here he is the star and centre of everything. Playing an unnamed Cabinet Minister in the British government, Rossiter is absolutely astounding. Speaking as quickly as Reggie Perrin, Rossiter presents his politician as that rare thing – an almost still whirling dervish. He doesn’t charge or race around, but clearly his mind is always whirring and spinning, with words spilling out of him so fast, constantly twisting one way or another. He obfuscates, he misleads, he tells half-truths, semi-truths and even resorts to just lying, all to get out of various jams of his own making. And it’s brilliant to watch, as Rossiter makes this man immensely likeable, even when ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ are clearly just half remembered words in the dictionary. This, without a doubt, is one of the most cynical films ever made about politics and politicians.
Suddenly finding himself at risk of exposure for his various misdeeds, our political hero has a day or so to get all his affairs into order so that he can present a squeaky clean image to the general public. This includes sorting out some dubious loans from his ultra-seedy cousin (Peter Sallis, in a role which seems like the dark twisted mirror to Norman Clegg; the antichrist to Wallace); getting hold of some compromising snaps from a brothel madam (Kate O’Mara, purring over line like creamy liquor); and ending affairs with a duo of glamorous mistresses, Joanna Lumley and Lynn-Holly Johnson (both actual Bond girls) and ridiculously handsome toy-boy, Anthony Andrews (who surely must have been considered for Bond). In addition he has the attention of a blackmailer (Michael Ripper), a problem which may need more drastic measures to resolve. All the way through Rossiter talks, carving and chipping away with words, as if they can alter reality itself. This is a man who is dangling by a thread, but who won’t admit that the thread is anything other than a sturdy rope and far from dangling he is floating above serenely taking in the panorama of the situation. He sweats, undoubtedly the panic rises, but no matter how dire the predicament he doesn’t give up. He just keeps on talking and talking and talking. It’s no wonder that when his wife, Sian Phillips, stares at him it’s with a smile of pride rather than a snarl of frustration.
If we’re honest it looks more like a TV movie than an actual film. It’s made by television professionals and never really escapes that. But in Rossiter’s magnificently shifty yet sincere performance, in the seediness of the tabloids which pursue him, in the way that the political establishment rallies around and supports him when the danger is not just hammering his door but trying to climb through the window, we have an extremely cynical and wonderfully funny film which is just as horribly applicable today.
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