The Agitation of the Mind

Jennifer Westfeldt

2012-02-02T21:41:00.003Z

Happy 42nd birthday to the multi-talented Jennifer Westfeldt. Best known for for indie bi-curious rom-com 'Kissing Jessica Stein', she's also a bona fide Broadway star thanks to her show-stopping role in 'Happy Town'.

Charlie Wilson's War

2012-01-29T11:04:00.005Z

Posted as part of an intermittent series of espionage-related cinema leading up to the release of the new James Bond film ‘Skyfall’ later this year

How best to describe ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’? The “based on a true story” tag-line screams biopic, but it’s more like ‘Wag the Dog’ with a covert war instead of a stage-managed one, or ‘Rambo III’ with more in the way of strippers and hot tubs.

This is how we meet our … uh, let’s just go with “hero” and place all moral considerations in cold storage for 98 minutes. He’s the Charlie of the title (Tom Hanks), he’s a Texan congressman and his principle interests appear to be women, whisky and … actually, I think we got done with his interests at women and whisky. He’s hanging out in a penthouse apartment with some – not to be judgemental here, but let’s call it like it is – lowlifes. High-rolling lowlifes, but lowlifes all the same. His choice of company comes back to haunt him later.

It’s the 1980s, the Russkies are in Afghanistan and Wilson is swiftly coerced by hifalutin society lady Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) to help the Afghanis out in the name of God and country and … well, mainly God. Which he proceeds to do, with the aid of disenfranchised CIA agent Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Avrakotos is given an equally memorable introduction, effectively torpedo-ing his career prospects by telling his boss to go fuck himself and vandalising the fellow’s office into the bargain.

And while Mike Nichols’s film focuses on Wilson wheeling and dealing, and Avrakotos belligerently out to hammer the Red Menace, it’s fast, funny and scabrously satirical, Aaron Sorkin’s script zinging with the razoer-sharp dialogue for which he’s renowned. But all too often Nichols and Sorkin wear their hearts on their sleeves and the review-o-meter dips from “pretty good” to mediocre. Wilson’s transformation from political player to humanitarian never quite rings true. A visit to a refugee camp on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border wants to deliver the same howl of outrage as the last half of ‘The Constant Gardener’, but doesn’t make the grade. An apposite moment, here, to mention Stephen Goldblatt’s flat and utilitarian cinematography: he never fully integrates with any scene, visually parlaying the viewer into the thick of events. The film retains a slightly bland sheen throughout; you’re always aware that you’re watching a film, and that’s never a sign of success.

The cast is top-notch, though: Hanks and Roberts are clearly having big fun, while Hoffman doesn’t just steal scenes but walk away with the whole movie. Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Rachel Nichols, Om Puri, Ken Stott, Peter Gerety and Ned Beatty all get their moment in front of the camera (even if, in some cases, it is only a moment: Blunt in particular is wasted).

A handful of set-pieces can hold themselves up to anything in Nichols’s distinguished (if, of late, somewhat hit-and-miss) filmography, particularly Wilson and Avrakotos’s first meeting, played out against the revelation that Wilson is being stalked by bad press and a possible subpoena due to the aforementioned lowlife company; it’s beautifully paced, laugh-out-loud funny, with enough entrances and exits to invite comparison with a Brian Rix farce.

And yet … and yet … ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ never fully coheres. As a satire (how the Americans armed Afghanistan: a timely tale of ulterior motives and irresponsibility!), it pulls its punches. As a political drama, it’s a little too glib to deliver any real insight. As a thriller, it keeps its protagonists away from any element of danger, thereby failing to generate tension. As an exercise in mapping out the contours of conspiracy, it’s never convincingly labyrinthine enough.

All told, that first paragraph ‘Wag the Dog’ comparison arguably sums it up: like Barry Levinson’s film, made ten years earlier, it takes a terrific concept and a powerhouse cast, delivers some genuinely amusing moments but squanders so much potential through its inability to decide what it wants to be.

Cowboys and Aliens

2012-01-23T18:17:00.004Z

(with apologies to Robert Service)

Danny Craig and Harry Ford,
Some mighty fine castin, Lord!
Tough guys wearin spurs n guns,
Shootin up them ay-lee-uns.
Sam Rockwell’s also in the cast,
Miss ’Livia Wilde’s a purdy lass.
Too many folk dun wrote the script,
’Haps that’s why it’s hit n miss!
That kinda title, it should be fun,
’Cept it ain’t – it’s moribund.
Danny Craig and Harry Ford,
Who’d thunk I’d be so bored?

Diane Lane

2012-01-22T11:58:00.001Z

Happy 47th birthday to the perennially beautiful Diane Lane

THE SILLITOE PROJECT: Road to Volgograd

2012-01-20T19:36:00.001Z

It’s strange how sometimes a work can be overtaken by time. Even when I discovered Alan Sillitoe, as a teenager in the late 80s, ‘Road to Volgograd’ was the Sillitoe title I knew of only by its inclusion in the “also by” section in the other titles I owned.

When, last year, I found a copy on eBay, it was the original Pan paperback with a pre-deciminalization cover price of three shillings and sixpence. It was a 1966 reprinting of a book first published in 1964. Its pages were sepia. It had been printed six years before my birth.

As early as 1939, Winston Churchill (not a popular figure in the Sillitoe canon – see ‘Key to the Door’) said “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That was pretty much still the post-divided Berlin, post-Berlin Wall, post-Iron Curtain public perception of the Soviet Union in 1964.

1964 – the year after John le Carre published his watershed novel ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’, a bitter and angry response to the erection of the Wall; the year that Ian Fleming died, whose immortal secret agent – if more in the movies than the books – would give the Red menace a good seeing-to. 1964 – a year which started with British motor manufacturer Leyland exporting buses to Cuba in defiance of the US blockade. 1964 – the year that Alan Sillitoe published an account of his travels and observations in the Soviet Union.

Alan Sillitoe (in translation) was one of the USSR’s bestselling authors. In 1963 he was invited to spend a month in Russia. A socialist, a worker himself and – as ‘Key to the Door’ attests – an avowed leftist, he jumped at the chance. ‘Road to Volgograd’ isn’t as gee-whiz as it might have been (Sillitoe was too perceptive, enquiring, cynical and world-weary to have fallen into that trap), but it’s clear – reading the book with the smug benefit of hindsight – that his hosts took pains to steer him clear of the brutal realities of life under the Soviet regime. Later, when Sillitoe discovered these aspects, he spoke out against the totalitarian rule. It’s interesting to note that ‘Road to Volgograd’ found its corollary and corrective, forty-three years later, in his last published work ‘Gadfly in Russia’. Much of his work emerged in pairings – the short story ‘Mimic’ and the novel ‘The Storyteller’; ‘The Lost Flying Boat’ and ‘The German Numbers Woman’; ‘Raw Material’ and ‘A Man of His Time’; the short story ‘The Good Women’ and the novel ‘Her Victory’ – but never have two interconnected works occurred at such chronological odds to each other as ‘Road to Volgograd’ and ‘Gadfly in Russia’.

History and retrospect make ‘Road to Volgograd’ a strange and awkward book – awkward not in its writing (hell no; Sillitoe is on excellent form here) but in the perspective of retrospect. To repeat myself, it’s a work overtaken by time. It faded all too soon from the Sillitoe bibliography and wouldn’t be readdressed until the very end.

Betty White

2012-01-17T21:13:00.002Z

Kudos to anyone who looks like your favourite aunt while delivering this line like she means it:

Happy 90th birthday to the inimitable Betty White.

John Carpenter

2012-01-16T21:35:00.004Z

Happy 64th birthday to John Carpenter.

Thanks for some of my all-time favourite horror movies, sir!

THE SILLITOE PROJECT: The Ragman’s Daughter

2012-01-15T22:05:00.001Z

Published in 1963, this collection of short fiction contains seven stories: ‘The Ragman’s Daughter’, ‘The Other John Peel’, ‘The Firebug’, ‘The Magic Box’, ‘The Bike’, ‘To Be Collected’ and ‘The Good Women’. There is a common theme to the collection, as described in a review in The Financial Times: “these stories are variations on the theme superbly expressed in Sillitoe’s masterpiece ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’; namely, the excitement, the poetry and the integrity underlying an anti-social act.”

The title story explores the psychology of theft. The narrator recalls his first instance of stealing: at primary school, he and the other kids are given cardboard cut-out coins to use in reckoning-up exercises. Although valueless, he is compelled to pocket some. He keeps shtum when the teacher puts him on the spot (a nifty and unforced analogy to the professional criminal saying nothing during police questioning). Is our boy a kleptomaniac? Or is there a core of individualism at the heart of his pilfering? This passage goes some way towards an answer:

In spite of the fact that I nicked whatever I could lay my hands on without too much chance of getting caught, I didn’t like possessing things. Suits, a car, watches – as soon as I’d nicked something and got clear away, I lost interest in it. I broke into an office and came out with two typewriters, and after having them at home for a day I borrowed a car and dropped them over Trent bridge one dark night. If the cops cared to dredge the river about there, they’d get a few surprises. What I like most is the splash stuff makes when I drop it in: that plunge into the water of something heavy …

A romantic subplot manages not to detract from the underlying concept but feed into it: our boy’s relationship with a girl from a nouveau riche family spurs him on to new heights of daring. What follows is an almost arbitrarily truncated Nottingham version of ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ with a misjudged shoe-shop heist in place of a slo-mo blaze-of-glory denouement. As in much of his fiction, Sillitoe dissects the aftermath and finds the compromised humanity in his characters. He writes as a witness, not a moralist.

‘The Other John Peel’ feels like a palimpsest, or a try-out for a possible longer work. Two buddies head off at the crack of dawn for a spot of poaching. A .303 service rifle kept over from the war leads to thoughts of armed revolution. The act of poaching loses its traditional meaning – the placing of meat on the table for those who couldn’t afford it other than by filching it from a rich man – and a more expansive sense of social disaffection becomes apparent. There is very little narrative on offer but the last line – “silent headstocks to the left towered above the fenced-off coppices of Sherwood Forest” – establishes an aesthetic through-line to Nottingham’s most famous outlaw.

If Trash-Can Man in Stephen King’s ‘The Stand’ had spent his childhood years in pre-war Nottingham, the result might have been something like ‘The Firebug’. A companion piece to ‘The Ragman’s Daughter’ inasmuch as it’s narrated by a character who is compelled to commit anti-social acts (here small acts of arson as opposed to half-arsed break-ins) without fully knowing why except that he gets a kick out of it. “I smile as much as feel ashamed at some of the things I did,” he begins, before going on to recount the bitter, tear-stinging frustration of carrying off an effective bit of arson only for the glorious carnage of the fire itself to be utterly ignored. The story ends, somewhat abruptly, with a German bomber attack doing more damage than our anti-social narrator ever could; he’s fourteen by this time and is soon packed off to work in a factory. His pyromania, pardon the pun, fizzles out. It’s like seeing Arthur Seaton in ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ have the rebellion leeched out of him before he’s even old enough to start boozing and get into real trouble. But an unvoiced hook remains in the reader’s mind: how long till the latent tendency erupts from him again?

Fred, the henpecked protagonist of ‘The Magic Box’, comes across as a less ebullient version of Arthur’s brother Brian Seaton in ‘Key to the Door’. Like Brian, his formative years were spent as a wireless operator in the forces. A pools win gives him the wherewithal to buy a morse set. He tunes into a private world that drives a wedge into his marriage. Morse code and radio operators recur through Sillitoe’s fiction, from the cruise ship radio operator who plays an important part towards the end of ‘The Storyteller’ to the blind yet heroic protagonist of ‘The German Numbers Woman’. Reality and the destructive power of the mind/imagination are also common themes. ‘The Magic Box’ explores ideas that would later find fuller expression in the short stories ‘Mimic’ and ‘The Second Chance’ as well as the two aforementioned novels. Some of Fred’s characteristics inform the quixotic John Handley, one of the key players in the William Posters trilogy. ‘The Magic Box’ is a thorny and unflinching story, and key to a whole sub-section of Sillitoe’s work.

For all that many of his characters don’t particularly like their jobs, it’s a constant of his writing that his protagonists demonstrate a keenly defined work ethic. The unnamed narrator of ‘The Bike’ reacts with hostility to the prospect of a lifetime of hard graft, but soon prefers to earn his way, albeit on piss-poor wages, rather than thieve or freeload. His supposed mate Bernard, who cons him into a buying a bike that Bernard has in fact stolen, is emblematic of a purportedly more intelligent but morally disenfranchised stratum of society. Meanwhile, our hero – personifying the honest but exploited working class, bides his time till he can get even. “If ever there’s a revolution and everybody’s lined-up with their hands out, Bernard’s will still be lily-white because he’s a bone-idle thieving bastard – and then we’ll see how he goes on; because mine won’t be lily-white, I can tell you that now. And you never know, I might be one of the blokes picking ’em out.”

‘To Be Collected’, about a family of scrap metal dealers, stumbling on a cache of weapons, reads like ‘Only Fools and Horses’ meets ‘Billy Liar’ without any of the laughs and played out against a grim and rain-swept background. It’s blunt and compelling.

Little has been made about Sillitoe’s feminist characters (perhaps because many of his first-person male narrators are as laddish and politically incorrect as their working class backgrounds would suggest). ‘The Good Women’, concerning the feminist voice in political activism – from union action to CND protests – is the first step in an increasing empathy with his female characters that would eventually find expression in his longest and arguably most ambitious novel ‘Her Victory’.

If ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ and ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’ defined Sillitoe for a generation of readers, ‘The General’ proved that he couldn’t be taken for granted in terms of his range and penchant for experimentalism, and ‘Key to the Door’ demonstrated the breadth of canvas he was capable of working on, then ‘The Ragman’s Daughter’ can easily be defined as a setting out of the stall for his later career. But it’s more than that. It’s a box containing seven literary hand grenades. It’s a call for revolutionary thinking and action. It’s the fuck-you to authority that only Alan Sillitoe could have written.

Licence to blog

2012-01-12T21:26:00.003Z

There's a great article by Kimberly Lindbergs over at Movie Morlocks on James Bond at 50 ('Dr No' was released in 1962) and the program of MGM and Twentieth Century Fox events scheduled to celebrate the anniversary. Of equal interest to any fans of good writing on film is the news that Kimberly will be publishing a monthly on Movie Morlocks, under the banner "Spy Games", with each article focusing on a specific area of the espionage genre, or a particular espionage movie.

Is there any greater display of enthusiasm than wanting to get in on the act oneself - particularly having kicked off 2012 on Agitation with two le Carre adaptations.

What's that? A 007 blogathon - a Bond-a-thon - leading up to the October release of 'Skyfall'? Oh, all right then. If I must.

Attack the Block

2012-01-08T16:28:00.002Z

Comedian Joe Cornish’s directorial debut presents a couple of challenges from the outset. The first is that its protagonists are an essentially unlikeable bunch of hoodies whose first onscreen act is the mugging of a nurse walking home from her shift, who are incapable of construction a sentence that doesn’t start with “yo” and end with “bruv” or “blood” – worse, delivered in a Sahf End Lahndan accent so that “blood” comes out as “blahd”. “Yo, blahd”, “wassup, blahd”, etc etc. Oh, and they also use weapons grade quantities of American gangsta-speak. Personal bugbear, but I just can’t understand why British kids want to act like they’re East Coast. East Coast may have a certain underworld cachet in the States, but all East Coast means in the UK is crap holiday resorts. Bridlington, Cleethorpes, Maplethorpe, Skegness. “Yo, blahd, we is da Ingoldmells Massiv.” What the fuck?

Oooops, sorry. Rant over.

The second challenge is that the material is so old-school, the homages so plentiful and the basic set-up so patently absurd that – along with the advertising campaign that bigs it up as the new ‘Shaun of the Dead’ (word to the wise: ‘Hot Fuzz’ is the new ‘Shaun of the Dead’ and we’ll leave it at that, shall we?) – that my expectations ran to a fast-paced, irreverent, laugh-out-loud funny slab of creature-feature mayhem. And while ‘Attack the Block’ ticks some of these boxes, Cornish’s script gets too wrapped up in lionizing his hoodie gang heroes (yup, he insists, come the denouement, on painting them as heroes) that he often forgets he’s supposed to be making a knowingly ironic horror-comedy with a deliberate B-movie aesthetic.

The pre-credits sequence has Sam (Jodie Whittaker) robbed at knifepoint by Moses (John Boyega) – his name, given his final act of courageous leadership, is staggeringly unsubtle – Pest (Alex Esmail), Dennis (Franz Drameh), Jerome (Leeon Jones) and Biggz (Simon Howard), during which attack another attack occurs (see what I did there?) and our lovable rascals find themselves battling aliens who plummet to earth during a Bonfire Night fireworks display.

Sorry to labour a point here (I actually enjoyed much about the film, honest!) but the suggestion if you rob a lone woman by pulling a knife on her and knocking her to the pavement, she should somehow be grateful that she wasn’t raped or killed into the bargain is a concept I’m having a fuckton of trouble trying to get my head round. I’m also throwing up a big fat “does not compute” at the knowledge that Cornish was one mugged in like manner and started to wonder whether his aggressors weren’t in fact as scared as he was. Now, I’ve been on the receiving end of hoodie thuggery myself (one punch to the face, one attempted boot to the kidneys which I fortunately managed to deflect), and I can tell you that with a film crew and a budget at my disposal, my artistic response would have been closer to ‘Harry Brown’ than ‘Attack the Block’!

Anyway, Moses and his crew are attacked by something that looks like it didn’t quite make the casting call for ‘Alien’. They respond by tracking it down to a kids’ playground and kicking the shit out of it under a climbing frame. Kudos to Cornish and his DoP Thomas Townend: they turn in some pseudo-iconic Spielbergian imagery while at the same time effectively pointing up the absurdity of the moment. (Similarly, a scene where one of the gang straps a samurai sword to his back, straddles a motorcycle and roars off to get some payback is wonderfully puncture by a cut that shows him puttering away on a 10cc moped with a pizza-delivery box on the back decorated with a learner driver sticker.)

Sorry, another digression there. Anyway, they haul the extraterrestrial corpse back to their council estate apartment block, Wyndham Tower*, where they stow it in Ron’s weed room (“What’s Ron’s weed room?” “It’s a big room full of weed. And it’s Ron’s”) while they figure out the best way to fiscally exploit their find. The lugubrious Ron (Nick Frost) works for edgy crime boss Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter) who, after a misunderstanding, decides he wants Moses’s head on a plate. As do the police, since Sam has by now reported the mugging.

Meanwhile, the alien invasion is gearing up in fine style and the boys find themselves public enemies numbers one to five as far as the invaders are concerned. A word on the aliens: they’re a terrific creation, midnight-black furballs with claws like tungsten carbide blades and teeth that glow with electric-blue light. Cornish’s script picks up and he sends his cast hurtling round Wyndham Towers as they try to find sanctuary, rescue cut-off members of the party and find a way to defeat their furry nemeses. Imagine the grimy locale of Ken Loach’s ‘Ladybird Ladybird’ shot like something out of a Michael Bay film, crawling with the non-human cast of ‘Critters’ (only given a serious upgrade) and everyone locked into a siege situation a la John Carpenter in which a bunch of kids give the adults a Joe Dante-like run-around and ultimately save the day.

This latter aspect works the best, with a frenetically edited moped/pushbike chase vying with a fireworks-as-incendiaries kids vs aliens smackdown as the film’s high point. Credit where it’s due, also, to Cornish’s facility with actors – most of the cast are making their debut here. Of the professionals, Jodie Whittaker makes for an appealing and unsentimental heroine while Nick Frost provides his dependable line of laid-back schtick in an essentially there-for-a-few-belly-laughs role. The man of the match award, however, goes jointly to Sammy Williams and Michael Ajao as, respectively, Probs and Mayhem, a pair of little kids who gleefully embrace the chaos as an opportunity to cut loose and be badasses. God love you, fellas: here’s to the film career you deserve.

‘Attack the Block’ is entertaining. It’s slick, it’s energetic and it doesn’t outstay its welcome (running time: one hour seventeen minutes if you don’t count the ludicrously interminable end credits). It looks great and it bodes well for Cornish’s future as a director. But it’s difficult to get round the fact that, as a horror-comedy, it misses more often than it hits where the comedy is concerned. It’s clever in its construction and the way in which the kids take the fight back to the aliens, but none of this cleverness makes it as far as the dialogue which, with only a couple of exceptions, is devoid of the witty, hip, eminently quotable lines that this kind of material cries out for.

If the filmmakers had gone full-on, one way or the other, and made it funnier or nastier, ‘Attack the Block’ might have achieved cult classic status. As it is, there’s tonal dichotomy that never reconciles. Still, Cornish delivers a hoodie horror movie where the hoodies aren’t the monster, so I guess that’s something.

*Pay attention to place names – they add up to a beautifully sustained in-joke that proves to be the single cleverest thing in the movie.

The Looking Glass War

2012-01-05T22:19:00.004Z

The great John le Carre adaptations – Martin Ritt’s ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’, Fernando Meirelles’s ‘The Constant Gardener’ and Tomas Alfredson’s ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ – work to such great effect because their directors inherently understand the novels. Ditto such second tier work as John Boorman’s ‘The Tailor of Panama’ – he gets the absurdist humour.

But what of an adaptation that fundamentally misses the entire point of the novel? Are novel and film tied into a relationship so osmotic that the latter is automatically consigned to failure? Or can you step back enough to evaluate the film as a stand-alone work?

The answer to that one is simple enough, I guess. If you’re unfamiliar with the novel, then the film by that very definition exists unto itself and can only be evaluated according how successfully it works in that medium. A similar rule of thumb applies if you saw the film first. (Example: I’d seen Alexander Payne’s ‘Sideways’ at least half a dozen times before I read Rex Pickett’s novel, and I was decidedly underwhelmed by the book.)

Frank Pierson’s ‘The Looking Glass War’ retains a fidelity to the novel in its early scenes: inexperienced field agent Taylor (Timothy West) collects a roll of film from an airline pilot (Frederick Jaeger) who has completed a risky flyover of a suspected East German military installation of the pretext of being blown off course during bad weather. Taylor is killed in a hit and run shortly after the pick-up. Back in London, Taylor’s boss LeClerc (Ralph Richardson), head of an intelligence department known only as The Department, assumes his death to have been suspicious, the disappearance of the film even more so, and decides that these factors constitute corroboration of an inconclusive photograph which might - might - suggest that a rocket base is being installed near the East German border. Roping in his colleagues Adrian Haldane (Paul Rogers) and John Avery (Anthony Hopkins), LeClerc petitions the Undersecretary of State (Ray McAnally) to sanction an over-the-wire mission to obtain conclusive proof. All the while, he is determined to keep rival department The Circus out of the loop.

There is only one brief scene, where LeClerc gleefully suggests that “we send a man over”, which in any way captures the aesthetic of le Carre’s novel. ‘The Looking Glass War’ was the author’s follow-up to ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ and is, if anything, even more bleak, cynical and angry at the stupidity of political machinations than its predecessor. Le Carre painstakingly builds up a picture of The Department as a mainstay of British intelligence during the war, but now reduced to trading on its former glories even as the Treasury puts a stranglehold on its budget and The Circus do the real work of Cold War espionage. LeClerc is what Michael Moore would call a “stupid white man”, obsessed with trying to live out the old days, all old school tie and cricket club morality, without having the vaguest idea of how crucially the theatre of operations has changed two decades on.

The novel charts LeClerc’s petty stupidities, his transparent lies to The Circus, his pointless rivalry with Haldane and his almost embarrassing attempts to establish himself as a mentor to Avery. Essentially, ‘The Looking Glass War’ is a novel about how LeClerc sacrifices an operative purely to bolster his ego. A more vehemently anti-spy-story spy story I have yet to read.

Pierson makes one fleeting nod to all of this, then completely ruins the novel’s aesthetic by changing LeClerc’s operative Leiser (Christopher Jones) from the middle-aged former WWII agent desperate for one last shot at self-worth to a youthful immigrant blackmailed into a potentially suicidal operation in return for overlooking his absent passport. First problem: anyone in their right mind would offer LeClerc his middle finger, invite him to spin and get repatriated rather than go over the wire. The Leiser of the film is robbed of motivation. Moreover, the inexplicably top-billed Jones plays him as a narcissistic misogynist with whom it’s impossible to empathize. The entire second half of the film follows him after his border crossing (as opposed to the 54 pages of a 273 page novel which deal with this section of the story), lummoxing the viewer with 50 minutes in the company of a complete knob-head of a protagonist.

Evaluated without reference to the novel, the film still frustrates. Quite apart from how unlikeable Leiser is as a main character, we have character actresses par excellence Anna Massey and Maxine Audley similarly saddled with thankless “wifey” roles, as well as Susan George wasted in a nothing role while the female lead – billed with depressing objectification as The Girl – is essayed by the terminally unemotive Pia Degermark.

There are a handful of terrific moments, though. The training sequence, in which Avery gives Leiser some pointers in hand-to-hand combat, is well choreographed and executed with dry humour. The border crossing itself is properly tense and Pierson achieves an almost Hitchcockian level of suspense. Also, the downbeat ending with its bitterly ironic punchline, are as bleak and corrosive as anything in the novel, but are left to function without the novel’s cleverly established critique of old school stupidity.

It’s an okay – but not great – film. Watchable and, to an extent, entertaining enough. Familiarity with the novel just deep-sixes it. Familiarity with the novel tips you off as how good it could have been.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

2012-01-03T21:12:00.006Z

Richard Burton was always at his best playing men who were at war with the world and everyone it in, or at war with themselves. Martin Ritt’s bleakly brilliant adaption of John le Carre’s career-defining novel ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ gave him the role of a lifetime – this is something I do not say lightly – as Alec Leamas, a man at war with himself who is despatched by Control (Cyril Cusack) to undertaken a mission, the full convolutions of which are hidden from Leamas himself, in which he needs to adopt the persona of a bitter, broken, hate-filled former agent. A failure. A little man. A man at war with the world and everyone in it.

Le Carre wrote the novel in less than six weeks while still on the British Embassy staff. “It was the Berlin Wall that had got me going, of course,” he recollected in the afterword to the latest Penguin Modern Classics imprint; “I had flown from Bonn to take a look at it as soon as it started going up … I felt nothing but disgust and terror, which was exactly what I was supposed to feel: the Wall was perfect theatre as well as a perfect symbol of the monstrosity of ideology gone mad.”

He wasn’t exactly impressed with the West’s response and, as I seem to recall him stating in an interview, the novel was le Carre’s way of saying “a plague on both your houses”. This bitterness and anger is certainly there in the book. It practically scorches itself into the pages. The ending is one of the most wrenchingly bleak in modern fiction – and yet Leamas achieves a small redemption. At a huge cost.

Ritt’s film is no less unflinching. I don’t think I’ve ever seen black and white cinematography so stark. The seedy, shabby, emotionally retarded world of espionage is rendered just as starkly. That’s the thing about black and white: it shows up the shades of grey. “ What the hell do you think spies are?” Leamas snaps angrily in the film’s key monologue. “Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not! They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives.” Watch Burton deliver these lines and the macho posturing of five decades’ worth of would-be tough guy actors pales into nothing. Burton’s disaffection is authentically terrifying.

His performance is balanced in a perfect fulcrum against the almost bored placidity of Cusack as Control, and the inscrutability of Rupert Davies – albeit in a very small role (like film, like book) – as George Smiley. To Davies the distinction of giving us the first onscreen incarnation of Smiley, and while he doesn’t personify the owl-like intelligence of Alec Guinness’s portrayal or the “Smiley waiting patiently to explode” (le Carre’s words again) of Gary Oldman, he’s certainly physically closer to the Smiley of the novels.

Just as distinguished are Oscar Werner as the philosophical Fielder, one of several Communist agents from whom Leamas is passed during his journey further and further behind the Iron Curtain; Peter van Eyck, giving a chilling performance as brutal intelligence head Mundt; and Clare Bloom as the heartbreakingly innocent Nan Perry, the socially-conscious librarian who Leamas gets involved with and who is played as pawn, ruthlessly, by both sides.

Even the lower echelons of the cast list read like a Who’s Who, with Sam Wanamaker, Robert Hardy, Bernard Lee, Michael Hordern, Esmond Knight and Niall MacGinnis doing sterling work. Oswald Morris’s cinematography gives the film a grim, gritty, realistic look which utterly captures the aesthetic of le Carre’s novel. Kudos, too, to Sol Kaplan’s appropriately melancholy score.

Le Carre’s fiction has always been about the ugliness of espionage, the corruption of power and the treachery of those corrupted by it. I’ve not read all of his work (although I fully intend to rectify that), but I have yet to read a le Carre novel that has anything even remotely resembling a happy ending. ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ certainly doesn’t. And yet his work is often sprinkled with humour, albeit of the blackest variety.

There’s a cynical pleasure to be had in watching the petty little power games that unfold around Leamas’s pseudo-defection: how he’s approached by Ashe (Hordern), only for Ashe to be drubbed out as soon as Carlton (Robert Hardy) takes over as Leamas’s handler, shortly after which he’s just as summarily dismissed when Fielder enters the picture, only for the most spectacular powerplay of all to occur when the villainous Mundt makes his final-reel appearance.

Ritt gets it: the novel is about stupid men given too much power playing essentially silly little games where the stakes are other people’s lives. It’s a despairing vision of humanity, rendered with equally vicious efficiency in both media: it’s one of those rare occasions where the film is every bit as good as the book.

And we'll take a cup o' kindness yet ...

2012-01-01T12:56:00.003Z

Happy New Year to all who read these pages.

Traditionally, the New Year's Day post on The Agitation of the Mind is a setting out of the stall: a delineation of what my intentions for the year are with the blog. I don't have quite as rigorous a game plan this year, but I can tell you this:

Ten Films That Changed The World won the vote for 2012's major summer retrospective. So between June and August I'll be taking an in-depth look at ten films which can justifiably be said to have had a demonstrable cultural effect. I haven't decided on all of them yet, or the running order, so if you want to lobby for any particular favourites, hit up the comments box and make suggestions.

On the subject of favourites, I started the Personal Faves project a stupidly long time ago and it's kind of fallen by the wayside. Time to get it back on the freeway, methinks, and moving towards completion.

Shots on the Blog will probably be floating around sometime during the summer months, and it just wouldn't be the season of good cheer if I didn't round off the year with the Winter of Discontent.

Finally, I'll be having the odd week away from Agitation now and then while I work on other projects, so don't give up on me if there are a few periods where you don't see any new content.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Tucker and Dale Vs Evil

2011-12-31T17:25:00.000Z

A group of college kids, travelling through hillbilly country on vacation, stop off at a gas station for fuel and beer. Two dungaree-clad good ol’ boys regard them with silent suspicion. Shortly afterwards, one of them approaches the kids. He’s carrying a scythe and grins as he asks them, “You kids goin’ campin’?”, following up the query with an edgy laugh.

Later, under the impression that these selfsame individuals have kidnapped one of their number – psychology student Alison (Katrina Bowden) – they surveil the ramshackle cabin in the woods to which the titular twosome have repaired. One of them draws the short straw and is elected to creep up to the shack for a closer look. As he does, Tucker (Alan Tudyk) comes running from around back, screaming himself hoarse, waving a chainsaw all over the place, wreathes of petrol fumes spilling out behind him. The kid flees, Tucker following at an uncomfortable distance.

There are perfectly innocent and reasonable explanations for both of these incidents and at its best – i.e. in its first half – ‘Tucker and Dale Vs Evil’ wrings maximum comedic potential from a series of misunderstandings which invariably leave Tucker and his well-meaning but chronically insecure buddy Dale (Tyler Labine) looking like a pair of psychos of the highest order.

And not just to the college kids. Two scenes featuring a curmudgeonly sheriff (Philip Grainger) see the lawman’s perception of Tucker and Dale alter from gay couple to serial killers.

It’s a fine joke, and writer/director Eli Craig and co-writer Morgan Jurgenson sustain it brilliantly for about 45 minutes. I have to give credit where it’s due before the reluctant bit of criticism enters this review. For most of those 45 minutes I was laughing out loud. The chainsaw sequence, and its inappropriately hilarious punchline, had me in tears of laughter. I had to pause the DVD for a few moments.

It’s great when a film gives you so much of a kick. And while it was giving me that kick, I absolutely, wholeheartedly loved ‘Tucker and Dale’.

In the second half, sadly, it goes off the boil. Maybe because they were unable to sustain the joke, maybe because they felt the story needed a bona fide villain and a conventional final act, Craig and Jurgenson abandon the central conceit, jettison the laughs and deliver a boilerplate and increasingly laborious deranged killer finale. Just as bad, they contrive to split Tucker and Dale up, robbing the film of Tudyk and Labine’s marvellous interplay in order to incorporate a particularly unconvincing romantic subplot.

That ‘Tucker and Dale’ works so well to begin with is not because it spoofs the conventions of a horror movie, but because it’s not a horror movie. ‘Tucker and Dale’ is a comedy of errors which cleverly adapts the “waiting in the wings” concept of Tom Stoppard’s ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ and relocates it to the deep south. Deciding, in the latter stages, that oh, actually, this IS a horror film after all is an aesthetic u-turn that comes depressingly close to sinking the movie entirely.

Fortunately, enough grace notes find their way into the second half – most notably a stand-off that turns into an impromptu therapy session – that it’s not entirely squandered. The direction is attentive and David Geddes’s cinematography exploits the backwoods setting well. Tudyk and Labine are terrific, clearly relishing the roles, while Bowden – very easy on the eye – makes for a sympathetic heroine.

In all, a flawed but fun movie. Can’t help thinking, though, that as a 40-minute short it could have been a masterpiece.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Hatchet

2011-12-29T22:16:00.003Z

Genius. Pure genius.

I refer, of course, to the marketing of the film. (Of the film itself … well, all in due course.) “Old school American horror” snarls the DVD sleeve, following up this assertion with “it’s not a remake, it’s not a sequel and it’s not based on a Japanese” – a not particularly literate but certainly effective stiff middle finger to a decade or more’s worth of mainstream genre flicks.

Effective, that is, until you look at the two statements in a little more detail. “Old school American horror” suggests traditionalism: recognizable tropes, characters and imagery; whereas “it’s not a remake, it’s not a sequel and it’s not based on a Japanese” implies originality. Already there’s something of a dichotomy going on.

I’m going to make an assumption that writer/director Adam Green was intending to make a throwback to 70s/80s slasher flicks, on an appropriately low budget. The opening credits, set during Mardi Gras, demonstrate a fratboy aesthetic (beer, boobs and boorishness) unapologetically in tune with a less reconstructed time. While this kind of thing isn’t necessarily a negative, certainly for a horror film (the genre isn’t meant to be PC), there’s a kind of desperation to the way Green stages it. We’re not far off the tedious for-the-camera cavortings of a Girls Gone Wild video here.

The tits-out-but-no-actual-sex business continues as we’re introduced to our protagonists, two of whom – Misty (Mercedes McNab*) and Jenna (Joleigh Fioravanti) – are participating in just that kind of video under the direction of sleazoid Doug (Joel Murray**).

The rest of the gang comprise such ~~finely drawn characters~~ ciphers as Ben the dweeb (Joel David Moore), Marcus the cool kid (Deon Richmond), Marybeth the tough chick (Tamara Feldman) and Jim and Shannon the old couple (Richard Riehle and Patrika Darbo), all of whom set out for a bayou ghost cruise under the woefully incompetent stewardship of tour guide Shawn (Parry Shen).

En route through the murky, misty and atmospheric swamp (or at least it would be if Will Barratt’s cinematography wasn’t so flat and uninteresting), Marybeth recounts – as a corrective to Shawn’s half-arsed rambling – the legend of the deformed, spurned and resultingly psychotic Victor Crawley (Kane Hodder, he of Jason fame). Guess what happens next? The boat gets holed and sinks, our happy bunch find themselves stranded, and the hatchet-wielding Crawley comes raging out of the night to make mincemeat of them.

Anyone who hasn’t, by this point, identified the final girl and figured the black guy as expendable obviously hasn’t watched enough horror movies.

It takes Green half of his short (80 minute) running time to get to the blood and gore, but when he does he lets the broad comedy (the bitchy interplay between Misty and Jenna is cattily hilarious) take a backseat while the effects team deliver some decently visceral stuff in the face of what must have been a highly restrictive budget. There’s death by hatchet, death by shovel, death by handle of shovel, and mortal wounding by industrial sander (which, even allowing for the genre’s long-standing fascination with improperly used tools, is something I’ve not seen elsewhere). There’s also faces ripped open and limbs torn off, all of it accompanied by geysers of blood.

For all the “not based on a Japanese one” braggadocio, the OTT levels of blood-letting are entirely in keeping with the likes of ‘Machine Girl’, ‘Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl’, ‘Hard Revenge Milly’ et al. The presence of horror icons Kane, Robert Englund (a pre-credits cameo as a hillybilly) and Tony Todd (memorable but utterly wasted in a nothing role) point to more homegrown influences, and every situation the gang blunder into has its provenance in another, better, movie.

With more emphasis on the humour, ‘Hatchet’ could have been a piss-taking cult classic. Stripped of its pratfalls and leering douche-bagginess (amazingly, Word hasn’t underlined douche-bagginess, therefore it must be a legitimate expression – fuck me!!!), it could have been the down ‘n’ dirty throwback it was conceived as. However, it doesn’t go all out for either of these and therefore not only falls between two stools, but rips its own entrails out in doing so.

*McNab is still probably best known as the priggish Amanda in ‘Addams Family Values’.

**Bill Murray’s brother, believe it or not.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Hard Revenge Milly: Bloody Battle

2011-12-27T21:19:00.001Z

A veritable epic compared to its predecessor, ‘Hard Revenge Milly: Bloody Battle’ clocks in, staggeringly, at almost an hour and a quarter. Okay, one hour ten allowing for an opening credits sequence that basically recaps the earlier film.

‘HRM: BB’ takes place an unspecified time after ‘HRM’ – long enough, it would seem, for Milly (Miki Mizuno) to develop enough of a reputation that Hura (Nao Nagasawa), a woman mourning the brutal death of her lover, seeks her out to ask her assistance in gaining revenge; but with earlier events still recent enough that the Jack Brothers’ associates Ikku and Hyuma* – themselves brothers – have only just picked up Milly’s trail in their quest for revenge.

Milly, living in heavily armoured isolation, is initially resistant to Hura’s request. No sooner has Hura arrived, though, than she is injured in an attack on Milly’s stronghold. Milly sees off her antagonists and takes Hura to a surgeon she knows at a fortified bazaar called Land where, it seems, everything is available – from medicine to weaponry to body art – if you’ve got the requisite amount of no-questions-asked cash.

The one element of its set-up that ‘Hard Revenge Milly’ failed to exploit beyond the odd moody visual was its implied post-apocalyptic setting. In ‘Bloody Battle’, wastelands and decayed cityscapes are the order of the day. With Land, there’s a sense of an edgy new society establishing itself. Enough ideas and images pattern the film to suggest that with a better budget and a little more depth to his scripts writer/director Takanori Tsujimoto might create something truly iconic. He certainly has an intriguing enough character in Milly (here given some pertinent backstory) and an athletic and strikingly attractive actress in Mizuno. And it has to be noted that Mizuno shows much greater facility in the fight scenes in this instalment.

Tsujimoto doesn’t quite up the villainy on this one, however, with Ikku and Hyuma coming on a bit like Laurel and Hardy if Oliver Hardy were gay. The fact of Ikku’s sexuality is questionable. On one hand, it’s refreshing to see the grubby old woman-in-peril scenario curtailed by Ikku grinding the would-be rapist’s face into a corrugated wall and grumbling about bisexuals. His assertion that he’d “convert” Hyuma if only the lad weren’t his brother, while wrong on many levels, is an unexpected moment of jaw-dropping bad taste humour in Tsujimoto’s otherwise po-faced script. Elsewhere, however, there’s a tang of homophobia that never quite goes away.

Although Ikku’s physicality is never in question – he almost defeats Milly in a manner no-one in episode one even came to close to – the film lacks the sheer arbitrary threat that the Jack Brothers brought first time round. This is absence is compensated for, though, by the ambiguous allegiances of Hura. Pretty much the only person in the whole farrago to get a character arc, Tsujimoto seems to be setting her up for a meaty role in the next instalment. (Though having said that, ‘Bloody Battle’ ends, unlike its predecessor, without a post-credits pointer to the next chapter.)

The downside of backstory, character arcs and other such subtleties is, of course, that ‘Bloody Battle’ is a slower, talkier affair. During the early scenes in which Milly wrestles with the decision to assist Hura or not, there are so many pregnant pauses that I wondered if a few pages of Harold Pinter hadn’t got mixed up with the shooting script. Maybe it’s a harsh comparison, given that the original is essentially a short rather than an actual feature, but the fact that, at just under an hour and a quarter, ‘Bloody Battle’ feels somewhat padded has to be counted as a flaw. It doesn’t help that while Tsujimoto’s cast look cool, none of them quite have the acting chops to carry to the non-smackdown business.

I can’t help thinking that if you took both Milly films, chopped about fifteen minutes out, and edited them into a single feature, you’d have something that equaled the sum of its parts.

*Again, a combination of unsubtitled end credits and sketchy IMDb information leaves me with no performers’ names beyond those of the leading ladies.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Hard Revenge Milly

2011-12-26T19:54:00.005Z

A note on the title: both IMDb and the subtitles on the print I watched have it as ‘Hard Revenge, Milly’; likewise the indigenous title (‘Hâdo ribenji, Mirî’) retains the comma. Which makes it sound like a comment, addressed to the eponymous Milly, regarding the nature of hard revenge. Rendering it, however, as ‘Hard Revenge Milly’ attributes the vengeful business to the protagonist – which makes a lot more sense to me. After all, you wouldn’t refer to Big Bad John as “Big Bad, John”, would you?

So: ‘Hard Revenge Milly’. At just 44 minutes (or 38 if you skip the credits, which I wouldn’t advise as there’s a Marvel-stylee post-credits coda which pretty much sets up the sequel), writer/director Takanori Tsujimoto’s gleefully excessive feature sometimes feels like a fleshed-out showreel and sometimes like the second half of a feature twice the length.

Here’s the plot: Milly (Miki Mizuno) reminisces, while driving to a run-down bar, about the weekend drives she took with her family two years ago. There’s a flash-forward where she cuts a guy in half with a sword and she muses that things are different now. The girl has a talent for understatement! At the bar, Milly speaks with former sword-maker Jubei* (shades of ‘Kill Bill Vol 1’ here) and gets kitted out.

Then she visits the gentleman we met in the flash-forward. We don’t get to make his acquaintance for much longer this time around.

Turns out he’s part of a gang, led by the loathsome Jack Brothers (insert ~ off, ~ shit, or I’m all right ~ fuck you gag here), responsible for murdering Milly’s family. (Flashbacks provide the gory details. And I do mean gory. There’s even a moment of baby conflagration that, notwithstanding the venal filth I’ve waded through during two years of Winter of Discontent, comes across as just a tad unnecessary.) Milly snaps a pic of the dismembered corpse, sends it to the Jack Brothers, waits for their arrival and protracted gunplay, swordplay, hand-to-hand combat and improper use of a teddy bear ensues.

Seriously: keep an eye on that teddy bear.

As a revenge thriller, ‘Hard Revenge Milly’ contains absolutely nothing it doesn’t need to. Even the motive behind the Jack Brothers’ attack on Milly’s family is immaterial (“they were just there when we wanted to kill someone”). There’s almost a purity to it: someone gets fucked over; they dole out a brutal fucking over in return. Job done. End of.

While considerably less silly than, say, ‘Machine Girl’ (Tsujimoto maintains, for the most part, a grimy, punkish aesthetic and makes good use of some post-industrial locations), it’s still as OTT in the blood-letting department and boasts some slapstick (if grotesque) moments, such as Milly impaling a corpse through the head to make him sit up, and one of the Jack Brothers taking a pratfall as he trips over a severed head. Or the perplexed manner in which a gang boss examines the conflagrant remains of a henchman.

The payoff to all this viscera requires an effect that is obviously beyond the production’s budget, hence its depiction as a piece of shadow-play. However, this last-minute revelation of Milly’s capabilities is less likely to leave you in a state of open-mouthed OMG-ness than make you wonder why she didn’t use it earlier and save herself a lot of pain during the climatic smackdown. Speaking of which, the over-foleyed thwack sounds do very little to disguise the fact that the combatants’ fists and bodies are demonstrably several feet apart during much of the shoddily edited hand-to-hand.

But this kind of thing exists in its own filmic universe and serves purely as a delivery system for tough chick iconography and massive gouts of blood. Mizuno fits the bill and then some as regards the former (in fact she’s second only to Christina Lindberg in ‘Thriller – A Cruel Picture’ when it comes to looking kick-ass and full-on vengeful in a floor length leather coat) and the amount of times gouts of blood spatter the camera lens is a testament to the latter.

Right, then. Off to watch the sequel!

*Apart from the leading lady, don’t ask me for any of the cast’s names. The closing credits were in Japanese and IMDb doesn’t marry up the actors to their characters.

'Tis the season to be jolly ...

2011-12-24T20:30:00.005Z

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Island of Death

2011-12-21T23:14:00.005Z

I’m taking a wild guess here, but I very much doubt that Nico Mastorakis’s ‘Island of Death’ was bankrolled by the Greek Tourist Board.

Unless, of course, they wanted a 102-minute advert that basically says: “Come to the island of Mykonos, where the locals are friendly, sexually promiscuous and easy to kill if you decide their loose morals are an affront to the Lord God. Mykonos teams with wildlife, so if rampant goat-fucking before breakfast is the ideal start to your day, then don’t delay – book now. Mykonos, where life is cheap and the cops are remarkably ineffectual. Visit your travel agent today. Ask about special discounts for misogynists, homophobes and racists. Don’t forget to pick up our glossy, full-colour, blood-red brochure.”

Let’s meet the charming couple who have been the first to take advantage of the “see Mykonos and die” package deal. Christopher (Bob Belling*) is a handsome devil (nah, not really) who hates gays and foreigners and enjoys having sex with his consort in a phone booth while making a long-distance call to his dear old ma back in London. I use the term “consort” since Celia (Jane Ryall) is variously identified by Christopher as his wife and his niece. Truth be told, she’s neither, although they do turn out to be related. Less said about that, the better.

Christopher and Celia are on the run from an English detective of Caribbean heritage named Foster (Gerald Gonalons) – or, as Christopher wincingly describes him “that funny n*gg*r who thinks we’re killers”. Turns out, boys and girls, that actually they are killers. Although Celia’s not enjoying the carnage as much as she used to; neither is she too keen at being pimped out to a predatory drug-addicted lesbian barmaid just so that Christopher can convinced himself that said individual is lacking in virtue and therefore deserves to have her face burned off.

Oh, it’s a nasty little number, all right, is ‘Island of Death’. In addition to the above mentioned sexism, xenophobia, bestiality and a demonstrable absence of equality and diversity training, Mastorakis offers up a melange of rape, voyeurism, urolagnia, beatings, shootings, stabbings, hangings and incest. He also contrives to get his leading lady naked as often as possible, to the point where even a low-key scene of Christopher and Celia playing dimp-the-cigarette requires Celia to be outfitted in this ensemble:

While I’m tarnishing the already tattered reputation of this blog with images from this rancid piece of celluloid, it’s perhaps worth remarking that ‘Island of Death’ is the kind of film in which gay couples look like this …

… a lesbian seduction is depicted as thus …

… convenient murder weapons are just left lying around …

… and a retributive attack on two hippies who try to rape Celia concludes with this example of unsophisticated iconography:

These images, dear reader, may have hinted to you that ‘Island of Death’ is somewhat grubby piece of work. Alas! – the truth is far worse. Many, many things conspired to make this film one of the worst you will ever see. With almost reverse serendipity, these aesthetic failures – each of them ranging from noteworthy to utterly staggering on their individual merits – meshed together like the finely calibrated components of a huge and terrible machine.

Take Jane Ryall’s blank reading-off-a-cue-card performance. It could have killed any movie stone dead. Or the manic overuse of the fish-eye lens during most of the kill scenes. Or the offings themselves, shot with absolutely no flair or frisson and designed purely to provoke controversy. Or the last minute twist that completely obviates the religious dementia element and seems to have been incorporated for no other reason than to offend what few remaining masochists (or curious cinephiles – I’m still debating which category to place myself in) are still giving this POS their attention come the end credits.

Or take the unbelievably inappropriate score. That Mastorakis manages – within the same work – to prove himself staggeringly inept in three disciplines (writer, director, composer) is a jaw-dropping feat that all but demands respect … albeit in an Edward D Wood Jnr kind of way.

Now blend all of these elements into an hour and three quarters of tired, shoddy and desperately attention-seeking filmmaking. The result is something that, while it deserves both its bad reputation and its sojourn on the “video nasties” list, is more likely to induce tedium or a profound sense of depression than actively corrupt or deprave.

*i.e. Robert Behling, who appeared in ‘Smile’, ‘The Enforcer’ and ‘Cujo’ before committing suicide in the early 1980s.

Agitation of Arabia

2011-12-21T21:35:00.002Z

In December 1919, while changing trains at Reading station, T.E. Lawrence mislaid the thousand-page manuscript of ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’. His reaction? He re-wrote the whole thing from memory.

In December 2011, while sitting at a computer desk in Nottingham, Neil Fulwood kissed goodbye to a half-written review of ‘Island of Death’ when his laptop crashed and the auto-recovery function decided not to work because the file was corrupt. His reaction? Swear, open another beer and start rewriting. Expect review at some point in the next few hours.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

2011-12-19T22:49:00.000Z

As I mentioned in my review of ‘Mardi Gras Massacre’ a couple of weeks ago, those bastions of public morality and censorial hyberbole the BBFC and the DPP drew up their “video nasties” hit list based on little more than dodgy-sounding titles and lurid VHS cover artwork; therefore anything from the terminally dull and chronically inept (the aforementioned ‘Mardi Gras Massacre’) to challenging arthouse oddities (‘Possession’) found themselves rubbing shoulders as the slavering UK press decried them as depraved filth that needed banning.

Tobe Hooper’s ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ – a harrowing and brilliantly visceral cinematic experience that exploits its grainy film stock, gauche performances and low-budget aesthetic to unforgettable (and, indeed, uncomfortable) effect – has the words “chain saw” and “massacre” in its title.

You don’t really need me to spell this one out, do you?

The biting irony is that ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ contains exactly two onscreen deaths, neither of which are courtesy of said power tool. Which is hardly a massacre in anybody’s book. One less and it’d be ‘The Texas Didn’t-Actually-Use-a-Chain-Saw incident’. A couple more and you might get away with ‘The Texas Non-Use-of-a-Chain-Saw Spree’. But two? What the fuck kind of title does that give you? ‘The Texas Double Homicide, No Evidence of a Chain Saw’?

You see, BBFC and DPP people, the title is a hook. It’s designed to get people to hand over their spondoolies at the box office and park their posteriors on a movie theatre seat.

So, putting aside the hype and allowing that “chain saw” and “massacre” are more a tag line than an actual précis, how come Hooper’s most (in)famous film remains one of the 1970s’ most gruelling and unnerving works? Quite simple: it throws an ominous, doom-laden shadow over its protagonists from the outset and sends them deeper and deeper, with each passing scene, into a primal landscape (both geographical and emotional) where intellectual and civilized retardation reach a point of brutal mockery where the concepts of family and home are exploded and reimagined as something out of Hieronymous Bosch.

The film starts with brother and sister Sally (Marilyn Burns) and Franklin (Paul A Partain) journeying with a couple of friends to the isolated cemetery where their grandparents are buried. Reason for the trip: concern that the graves have been vandalized (i.e. the first hint that we’re entering cinematic territory where moral concerns and civilized behaviour are not to be relied upon). They pick up a hitchhiker who works at a nearby slaughterhouse (cue an unflinching montage of almost documentary precision which demonstrates exactly how cows are turned into hamburgers), who proceeds to whip out a knife and go beserk.

This is merely the prelude. Our already freaked-out group soon encounter Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen), and Hooper shifts things up a notch, the second half of the film playing out as (by turns) poetic, surreal, disturbing, exploitative and ludicrously amusing. Nominally based on the life and crimes of Ed Gein, ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ pays homage to its twisted muse in an especially eerie sequence where Sally, prowling nervously through the Leatherface household, comes upon a room filled with strange bone sculptures and clumps of feathers. The effect is more chilling than any amount of blood and gore. Elsewhere, the emphasis is on the comedy of the absurd, as in a character managing to escape when Leatherface’s geriatric father – given the job of dispatching them – proves unable to grip his weapon of choice (a hammer), and the implement keeps slipping from his fingers.

It’s a damn shame that ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ owes much of its reputation to the “video nasties” witch-hunt. It’s a much better, much more genuinely scary movie than its title suggests. It lingers in the mind, it reminds you how anodyne many modern horror films are (even as they cut loose with the blood and guts like there’s no tomorrow), and it makes you wonder why the hell Tobe Hooper never went on to make anything even remotely as good.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

2011-12-17T20:09:00.002Z

Man, this one started unpromisingly! Imagine you’re the writer of a ridiculously successive pair of novels featuring an iconic, kick-ass heroine. You sit down to start work on volume three. What do you do: have your iconic, kick-ass heroine taking the fight to the various individuals who have conspired against her throughout her life, or have her laid up in a hospital bed while a rumpled middle-aged reporter pursues the same kind of plodding investigation he undertook in the previous books?

Me, I’d have gone with the former. Larsson – and director Daniel Alfredson – opt for the latter. Thus, the first half of ‘The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest’ has Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) even more backgrounded than in the previous instalments, recovering in hospital prior as the public prosecutor puts together a case against her courtesy of those pesky fingerprints on Bjurman’s gun from ‘The Girl who Played with Fire’, while Mikael Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist) unravels an ever-wider-reaching conspiracy against her.

The next problem is that the nature of the aforementioned conspiracy is detailed in endlessly boring scenes of old men in suits sitting around in blandly anonymous rooms talking in hushed tones. Imagine a third-rate John le Carre homage delivered with all the dynamism of a party political broadcast and that’s basically how the first half of ‘The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest’ plays out.

A double-assassination attempt at the hospital and some mounting pressure against the staff at Millennium (Blomkvist is racing against time to publish a special edition blowing the lid off it all before the powers that be can have Lisbeth sectioned again) enliven things slightly, but the absence of Salander as a pro-active character drains the life out of the proceedings.

As the second half got underway, with the trial looming, I could feel my will to live evaporating. Full disclosure: with the exception of a couple of Sidney Lumet films, I can’t stand courtroom dramas. By their very nature, they make for a static and visually uninteresting drama.

My surprise was palpable, then, when things pepped up no end, the legal shenanigans juxtaposed with an official investigation against the conspirators. The courtroom scenes, while betraying an absolute lack of realism (so much new and illegally obtained evidence introduced at the last minute without the judge batting an eyelid? are they really that liberal in Sweden?), benefit from Salander’s powers of photographic and verbatim recall. Her reduction of the prosecutor to bamboozled idiot is beautiful to behold, as is the arrest of a key prosecution witness, hauled out of court on child pornography charges.

A coda wrapping up the almost obligatory loose end finally gives Salander the chance to kick out the jambs in the action stakes. All told, though, ‘The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest’ is as big a plod as it’s immediate predecessor, and a not a patch on the watchable (but hugely overrated) ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’. Here’s to David Fincher giving things a shot in the arm!

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The Girl who Played with Fire

2011-12-14T20:48:00.001Z

The only instalment of the trilogy whose English title is anywhere near an accurate translation from the Swedish, ‘The Girl who Played with Fire’ is even more disappointing than its predecessor in backgrounding the fascinating Lisbeth Salander (played to perfection by Noomi Rapace) in favour of a plodding journalistic investigation undertaken by the hangdog Mikael Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist). It also disappoints in that Daniel Alfredson’s direction isn’t a patch on Niels Arden Oplev’s and the entire production betrays its made-for-TV roots so shabbily that it makes ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ look like ‘Lawrence of Arabia’.

The next problem requires me to hoist the jolly SPOILER ALERT for a paragraph.

‘Dragon Tattoo’ ended with the much-misused Lisbeth fiscally benefiting from the downfall of Blomqvist’s corporate nemesis and sunning herself in the Caribbean on the proceeds. Which, after all the shit she’d gone through, seemed only fair (if a tad deus ex machina-ish). Thus ‘Played with Fire’ opens with some extended and not particularly interesting business regarding her return to Stockholm, her acquisition of property, and her loaning out of an apartment to a lesbian entrepreneur who owns a sex shop (cue graphic and narratively pointless – but, if I’m being honest – still very watchable girl-girl scene). She also checks up on the loathsome Nils Bjurman (Peter Andersson) in a tortuously contrived sequence, the only purpose of which is to get her prints on a gun.

(Lower the jolly SPOILER, first mate!)

Meanwhile, Millennium magazine have hired wannabe crusading journalist Dag Svensson (Hans Christian Thulin) who wants to blow the lid on a prostitution ring uncovered by his girlfriend Mia (Jennie Silfverhjelm) whilst researching her thesis. Dag and Mia are trying to track down the shadowy “Zala”, reputed to be the sex trade kingpin; Blomqvist throws in his tuppence-ha’penny worth by confronting some of the men who have availed themselves of Zala’s service.

No sooner does Blomqvist discover a link to Lisbeth than Dag and Mia are murdered. Blomqvist hurriedly tries to make contact with Lisbeth, unaware that their parallel courses are about to … yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah.

‘Played with Fire’ desultorily sketches out two narrative arcs that are so depressingly derivative that it’s almost impossible to care by the time the overwrought and laughably ludicrous finale roles around. (How ludicrous? Imagine the “lonely grave of Paula Schultz” sequence from ‘Kill Bill Vol 2’ redone without Tarantino’s knowing sense of irony, throw in a Bond villain type cipher who’s blond, Aryan, built like a brick shithouse and incapable of feeling pain, then have Blomqvist walk manfully into the middle of the whole farrago as if he were Clint Eastwood.)

If ‘ Dragon Tattoo’ was little more than bad Agatha Christie with rape scenes, then the touchstone for ‘Played with Fire’ is more along the lines of ‘The Empire Strikes Back’. If I’m spoiling anything by referring to this as the “Lisbeth, I am your father” episode, then I make no apologies whatsoever. There is one standout scene, dealing with Lisbeth’s clinical take-down of a couple of bikers, and it’s pretty cool to watch Rapace capitalizing on the victim-turned-angel-of-vengeance personification of Salander from the first movie and turn her into an authentic kick-ass action heroine.

That said, I’m not holding out much hope for ‘The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest’.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2011-12-12T21:37:00.000Z

I have an inverse-ratio reaction to hype. The more the masses are clamouring to read something or watch something, the less my inclination to approach that work. Mainly it’s because I recognize my own capacity for disappointment, partly because I’d rather wait till all the fuss is died down, and not a little bit because I’m because a contrary old bugger.

I steered clear of Stieg Larsson’s ‘Millennium’ trilogy while it was pitching its tripartite tent on the higher slopes of the Times bestseller list and beating off all competition with a stick. I’d heard various opinions, from “riveting if not particularly subtle thrillers” to “second-rate Agatha Christie with some nasty anal rape”. I still haven’t approached a single volume.

The film versions bypassed me on the big screen. They were truncations of Swedish TV productions, each three-hour adaptation shorn of about forty minutes’ for its big screen release to conform to a more commercial running time. I had it on good authority that if you weren’t familiar with the books, you’d be in for a lot of head scratching.

Then the trilogy in its uncut nine-hour epicness hit the shelves in a stupidly cheap box set and – finally – curiosity got the better of me.

The title is something of a misnomer*, indicating that Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) – she of the oriental-themed ink-work – is the protagonist. Actually, she’s pretty much second fiddle (although a pretty bloody essential second fiddle, particularly in the last act) to Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a crusading journalist for radical magazine Millennium who, as the story starts, is facing a three-month custodial sentence after a major corporation take him to court over an article. It soon becomes apparent that Blomkvist was set up.

With six months until he has to serve his sentence, Blomkvist accepts an assignment from Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), the octogenarian senior partner in a major manufacturing company. Vanger wants him to investigate the disappearance, forty years ago, of his niece. He is convinced she was murdered and that one of his family is the killer.

Salander, initially hired by the corporation responsible for prosecuting Blomkvist to hack him, becomes drawn to his investigation. She has a troubled background, having torched her abusive father as a girl (the backstory is a tad sketchy, though the image of a man in flames plunging out of a BMW is certainly memorable!) and is currently paroled under the supervision of a “guardian”. This, ahem, “gentleman” is Nils Bjurman (Peter Andersson), a controlling sadist who blackmails her into sexual services, then assaults and anally rapes her. Salander’s revenge on him, somewhere around the mid-point, is a textbook exercise in “an eye for an eye”. Or in this case a – … actually, I’ll just let you find out for yourselves.

The “eye for an eye” aesthetic is apposite, since Salander twigs to a Biblical clue in Blomkvist’s investigation and the two become unlikely allies. Once again, Blomkvist finds himself up against corruption in big business, ties to Sweden’s pre-war Nazi sympathy movement, and a sadistic antagonist with a Fritzl-like prison/torture chamber basement conversion.

It’s to director Niels Arden Oplev’s credit that he doesn’t let this miasma of fascism, corruption, degeneracy and misogyny descend into the lurid depths it could so easily have plumbed. In fact, the thing that struck me most about ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ was its portrayal of evil as something bland and almost desultory. There’s nothing gothic or grotesque about the villain’s basement, even when he opens a cabinet the inner surfaces of which are decorated with photographs of his victims at point of expiration. Au contraire, it’s a utilitarian and rather mundane set-up, as if Ikea had designed a range for the psychopathic rapist on a budget.

The made-for-TV origins of the project leave a few other scenes looking unintentionally bland, as well (which is why I’m looking forward to seeing what a great visual stylistic like David Fincher will do with the remake), with only Blomkvist and Salander’s connect-the-dots dash around Sweden as they revisit old murder scenes and clues fall into place, breaking out into a truly cinematic sequence.

It’s a curious piece of work, all told, and I’m tempted to approach the books now, just to see if the same dichotomy is present. There’s a sense that a real socio-political statement on twentieth century Sweden is being striven for – one, moreover, that’s wrapped up in an indictment of misogyny – and yet the plot points, narrative tropes and dramatic set-pieces employed to reach it are pure pulpy hokum.

Still, it benefits from solid performances all round, with Nyqvist convincingly essaying a world-weary but idealistic protagonist and Rapace – in her breakout role – fucking owning the film as the tattoo’d, leather-jacketed, studded-collar-wearing angel of vengeance that is Lisbeth Salander. A heroine of our vicious times.

*Both book and film in their indigenous language go by the title ‘Men Who HateWomen’.

At the touch of a button, my arse

2011-12-11T21:04:00.003Z

When my internet connection decides to run at a speed slightly sprightlier than a snail with an anvil strapped to it, therefore enabling Blogger to upload a mere three screengrabs in significantly less time than it takes for a new planet to come into existence, terraform itself and support life, normal service will be resumed.

I'm hoping tomorrow, but I'm not putting any money on it.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Rubber

2011-12-09T21:28:00.001Z

Imagine two scenarios, both involving a writer/director and a producer discussing ideas for a movie project. In the first scenario, both individuals are out to make a quick buck from a down ‘n’ dirty exploitationer. They’re drinking beer at 10am while they discuss the project and smoking dope. In the second, at least one of these gentlemen is of European extraction, they’re discussing the project over lunch at a pavement café and drinking mineral water.

Scenario 1: “Dude, I’ve got this great idea,” says the writer/director; “Horror movie set in the back of beyond, where we can film on the cheap and not worry about permits. We’ve got a sheriff who’s a little bit edgy, a seedy dude who runs a motel, some hot French chick in a soft-top and a killer on the loose. We can shoot it in a coupla weeks for chump change, play the festivals and turn a decent profit on DVD.” The producer likes the sound of this but opines, “It’s kinda been done before. We need a hook. Something different.” The writer/director tokes some maryjane: “Dude, I’ve got it. The killer is a tyre!”

Scenario 1: Scenario 2: “You see, the basic concept is a mise en scene drawn from the tropes of American low-budget horror cinema – therefore we have the world weary sheriff, the twitchy and secretive owner of an isolated motel, and we have a role for Roxane Mesquida as a mysterious woman to whom the antagonist is drawn. But instead of ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ or ‘Vacancy’, we deconstruct the material into a surreal anti-narrative which juxtaposes the narrative conventions of the road movie with a philosophical discourse on the nature of illusion and the role of the audience in the story’s development.” The producer lights a Gitanes and nods appreciatively. “Tell me about the antagonist.” The writer/director smiles: “Ah, he is the key to the entire film. His name is Robert and he is – how you say? – un pneumatique.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is about as close as I can come to doing justice to ‘Rubber’. It is either an arthouse masterpiece or a piss-take of the highest order. Either way, you should absolutely make the time to see it.

Christina Lindberg

2011-12-06T23:41:00.004Z

Exploitation icon and star of the gruellingly unforgettable 'Thriller - A Cruel Picture', the stunning Christina Lindberg celebrates her 61st birthday today.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Deadgirl

2011-12-06T22:05:00.004Z

In this charming romantic comedy, our affable heroes Ricky (Shiloh Fernandez) and JT (Noah Segan) – two fine upstanding college lads – make an intriguing discovery during a field trip and learn value life lessons about the value of friendship, the innocence of youth and how the love of a good woman just plain clinches the deal.

Meanwhile, back in reality and here on The Agitation of the Mind, Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel’s thorny and cynical ‘Deadgirl’ concerns the edgy friendship between the moderately douchey Ricky and his full-on douchebag best bud JT, a friendship which is tested and found wanting when they cut class and head for a decaying and abandoned building that used to be a mental hospital.

Before you can say ‘Session 9: Douche Babies’, they’ve chugged some beer, tossed around some cuss words and smashed the place up a bit. Next stop: the basement. ‘Tis hear they discover the eponymous dead girl. Although ‘Undeadgirl’ would be a more appropriate title. Or even ‘Undeadnakedgirl’.

You see, our teenage twosome come across a woman (Jenny Spain) with the body of a model, the snarl of a wolf and the guttural communicative style of something Neanderthal; she’s manacled to a gurney and, of most pressing interest to JT, she’s stark naked. Deciding from the off that a naked, chained and (given the length of time the institution has been shut down) forgotten woman presents opportunities of the own-personal-sex-slave variety, JT gets in touch with his inner rapist.

The slightly more responsible Ricky reasons that they should just let her go, adding that they might go to jail if they keep her in captivity and force her into non-consensual sexual acts. Acute grasp of the law, this lad. An argument erupts and JT demonstrates a capacity for violence. Ricky slinks off, cowed, and goes back to his dead-end home life, his mom working all hours God send while his loser stepfather scrounges off them and taunts him about “acting like a man”. He tries to re-engage with his studies while carrying a torch for willowy redhead Joanne (Candice Accola), the girlfriend of jock asshole Johnny (Andrew DiPalma). But gradually he gravitates back into JT’s orbit, only to find that JT has reconfigured the asylum’s basement into a bona fide fuck pad and cut loudmouthed slacker Wheeler (Eric Podnar) in on the action.

Wheeler’s tendency to talk when he should be listening attracts the unwelcome attention of Johnny and his fellow jock asshole pal Dwyer (Nolan Gerard Funk) who insist on muscling in. They discover a morbidly transformed and dangerously purposeful JT, who eggs on Johnny to an act of fellatio. I’ll use the term “gag reflex” and leave it there. Johnny, injured right where it hurts, soon finds he has a much bigger problem than penile trauma when it becomes apparent that the dead girl is carrying some kind of infection. JT’s already disturbed mind leaps to the conclusion that he can use the now considerably-past-her-best dead girl to create other undead sex slaves.

Does it sound sickeningly exploitative, all this? The kind of thing that might send you running back to ‘Strange Circus’, ‘The Candy Snatchers’ or ‘Thriller – A Cruel Picture’ just to top up on something lighter and more life-affirming?

‘Deadgirl’, for all that it sounds like a horrible conflation of ‘Porkys’ and ‘Frankenstein Created Woman’, is pretty well-made film with some intelligence behind it and a definite and unflinching agenda. It’s about misogyny, misconceptions and how terribly easy it is to simply be complicit. JT emerges as the villain of the piece straightaway, in no small part thanks to Segan’s smirkingly convincing performance; but it’s Ricky who is proved a moral coward, a silent accomplice and, finally (SPOILER) the keeper of JT’s legacy (SPOILER ENDS).

Some scenes are truly despairing, and surprisingly they’re often the quieter, least explicit moments: JT’s heartlessly casual remarks about needing to invest in lubricant (“bone dry down there”); a picture cut from a porno mag placed over the dead girl’s face after she sustains extensive bruising; Ricky fantasizing about Joanne in a series of dreamy soft-focus tableau while he tries to put the dead girl’s ordeal at JT’s hands out of his mind; Wheeler stringing Christmas lights around the basement, presumably to create a more romantic ambience. And there’s also a scene of politically incorrect hilarity where JT and Wheeler attempt to kidnap a heftily built good-time girl only to discover that a tyre iron to the back of the head not only fails to incapacitate her, but provokes a humility ass-whupping by way of a counterattack.

It treads a fine line, does ‘Deadgirl’, and its denouement sails very close to outright melodrama. But the directors, working from a script by Trent Haaga keep the focus on character, situation and the ambiguous no-man’s-land of Ricky’s moral conflicts. The result is a film I’d be surprised if anyone enjoyed but which makes its point without pulling its punches.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Bloodrayne

2011-12-04T16:37:00.004Z

Has anything good ever come out of the movies-based-on-videogames subgenre? Is Uwe Boll’s reputation as the man who does for cinema what Jack the Ripper did for escort agencies actually deserved? To try to answer these two questions, I watched ‘Bloodrayne’.

Fuck my life.

The answer I’ve arrived at regarding the first question is: only if you’re a thirteen year old boy and the idea of Lara Croft being incarnated by Angelina Jolie, Alice from the ‘Resident Evil’ games by Milla Jovovich or Bloodrayne by Kristanna Lokken is enough to give you a stiffy without even watching a single frame of the resulting productions. Let’s face it, only a thirteen year old boy besieged by hormones and obsessed with video games could possibly feel any stirring of excitement over these largely sexless opuses.

So kudos to Uwe Boll for at least putting one sex scene in ‘Bloodrayne’, even if it is utterly joyless and perfunctory.

Are any more kudos due to our much-hated German director? Well, let’s spend a little time with the movie and attempt an answer.

‘Bloodrayne’ is about a vampire called Rayne (Lokken) who is first introduced in captivity, being paraded as a sideshow freak. Um. No. Let’s back up a tad. Rayne is sort-of vampire. A damphyr (I’m guessing at the spelling) – in other words, a product of a vampire/human union. The union in question being the rape of her mother by sadistic patriarchal vampire Kagan (Ben Kingsley).

Yes. Ben Kingsley. Sir Ben Kingsley. The guy who played Gandhi. In a Uwe Boll film.

Fuck my life part two.

Anyway, Rayne’s out for some payback against Kagan, while Kagan is more concerned with protecting his fiefdom against the ministrations of the Brimstone Society. This organisation is headed up by Vladimir (Michael Madsen), a man who comes across as a somewhat podgy Van Helsing with a haircut redolent of Bon Jovi circa 1986. Vlad’s retinue include Sebastian (Matthew Davis) and Katarin (Michelle Rodriguez). Katarin’s loyalties to the Brimstone Society are compromised by her relationship with her manipulative father Elrich (Billy Zane).

Vladimir and his team are seeking to destroy Kagan, Elrich has his own agenda, and all of the various parties have a vested interest in Rayne. Despite an attraction to Sebastian, Rayne’s own agenda – the simple, powerful and unambiguous desire for vengeance – dictates her choices, and she embarks on a quest for three talismanic items guaranteed to vouchsafe her an audience with Kagan. The risk is considerable, however, since to reunite the purposefully scattered talismans could provide Kagan with his passport to true immortality and absolutely power.

All of which sounds promising, ja? Vampires, vampire hunters, court intrigue, Machiavellian power plays … throw in swordplay, explosions, nudity and intense people galloping full tilt across rugged landscapes on horses, compress it all into a 90 minute running time and surely this has got to emerge as some kind of ballsy, fast-paced guilty pleasures and never mind the 2.8 IMDb rating. I mean, surely?

Wrong.

‘Bloodrayne’ is quite frankly dull. Boll clearly has no idea about pacing, characterization or simply engaging with his audience on even the most basic level. Some of the blame has to be laid at the door of screenwriter Guinevere Turner – virtually every line of dialogue is stilted and unconvincing. Not that Boll (yup, we’re back to the main offender) even tries to get more than the most lackadaisical line reading out of his cast. And anything approaching an actual performance – fuhgeddaboutit! Lokken, not the greatest thespian talent to begin with, handles the swordplay decently and looks hot in a leather waistcoat, but remains a bland heroine. Madsen is embarrassingly miscast. Rodriguez, always one of my favourite tough gals in the movies, looks cool but is given sod all to work with. Only Meat Loaf – deliberately hamming it up as a dissipated nobleman …

… and Billy Zane, who tosses off his few scenes with all the glib sarcasm the production deserves, emerge as memorable. It is better that we do not speak of Ben Kingsley. I will assume he had severe gambling debts, desperately needed the work, and not speak of his involvement in an Uwe Boll film again.

Every aspect of the film is perfunctory, as if Boll had a checklist that read: hot chicks, swashbuckling, neck-biting, crossbows, tits, blood; and randomly threw one or more of these elements into whatever scene he was currently filming. As a result, what should be trashy is tedious. What should be exploitative ends up an exercise in ennui. What should be a blood-drenched, decadent hour and a half seems to last twice as long. No joke, I can’t remember looking at my watch this often during any film I’ve seen in the past few years. Nor did I hit pause so many times to slope off for a pee, pour another drink, make some toast, watch cars passing on the street below or check Facebook. Somebody had posted a picture of their Christmas tree. It made for more entertaining viewing.

Amanda Seyfried

2011-12-03T16:24:00.002Z

The very glamorous Amanda Seyfried - on whose account I could actually consider watching 'Mamma Mia' - is 26 today. She shares a birthday with Julianne Moore. There's a scurrilous joke about a certain Atom Egoyan movie in there somewhere, but I'll simply lift a glass to the lady in question and not lower myself ...

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Switchblade Sisters

2011-12-01T19:21:00.002Z

Meet the Dagger Debs, a girl-gang who are the de facto consorts of the Silver Daggers, a leather jacketed crew of high-school greasers. The Debs are led – rather implausibly – by Lace (Robbie Lee), a whiny pipsqueak with a lot of attitude but the kind of physicality that would see her defeated by your average Women’s Institute Committee member. Her right hand ~~man~~ woman is Patch (Monica Gayle), so named after her eye-patch, which she wears for no discernible reason other than ‘Switchblade Sisters’ came out a year after Christina Lindberg made the look iconic in ‘Thriller – A Cruel Picture’.

One day the Debs are happily terrorizing people at burger bar when new kid on the block Maggie (Joanne Nail) decides not to take Patch’s shit and effortlessly gets the drop on her. The cops break up the scene and Maggie finds herself in the slammer with a group of potential nemeses. A bull dyke (apologies to my lesbian friends, I’m simply mirroring the unreconstructed stereotypes the film trades in) warden gives Maggie a hard time and, putting their differences aside, the Debs intervene on Maggie’s behalf.

Later, when Maggie is released, she agrees to pass a message to Lace’s boyfriend, Silver Daggers supremo Dominic (Asher Brauner). Yes, folks, we’re watching an exploitation film where the gang leaders are called Lace and Dominic. But fear not – this isn’t the Noel Coward drive-in movie. As is immediately proved by Dominic’s decision that he kind of likes Maggie: he makes an overture by way of forcing his way into her house, forcing himself on her and terrifying her parents. Understandably, Maggie isn’t overly impressed with Dominic; nonetheless, she finds herself inducted into the Debs and part of the fight when Dominic’s high-school supremacy is threatened by the arrival of a new, politically motivated, gang headed by the sartorially-challenged Crabs (Chase Newhart).

Crabs and his boys come off more like a Morris dancing troupe with behavioural problems than an actually badass gang, but then again Dominic and Silver Daggers all look about a decade too old to be in high school, so who’s counting when it comes to verisimilitude? Besides, the real star of the show is director Jack Hill, already an exploitation veteran by the time he shot ‘Switchblade Sisters’, having already chalked up ‘Spider Baby’, ‘The Big Doll House’, ‘The Big Bird Cage’, ‘Coffy’ and ‘Foxy Brown’. Any man who can lay claim to directing not one but two Pam Grier blaxploitation classics is a director worth celebrating.

Hill brings his blaxploitation credentials to the table big stylee after an attack on Crabs’ boys goes tits up, Dominic’s followers are decimated, Lace is injured and Maggie responds to her inherited leadership of the Debs (now renamed The Jezebels) by hooking up with militant Afro-American girl-gang leader Muff (Marlene Clark) and her highly trained and motivated crew. In the film’s best sequence, the girls take it to the streets and royally kick the arse of their male counterparts. Think grindhouse version of ‘Battle of Algiers’ and you’re on the right track.

Hill could direct the hell out of an exploitationer, no question about it. ‘Switchblade Sisters’, with its touch of ‘Othello’ (think Patch as Iago and reverse engineer it from there), its plentiful action set-pieces and its cheerful amorality is never less than entertaining. And there are touches – such as a knife fight played out in balletic silhouette – that demonstrate a cinematic talent as laudable as any of his 1970s peers.

If there’s a criticism to be made it’s that no-one in the cast demonstrates as iconic a presence as Pam Grier in ‘Coffy’ or ‘Foxy Brown’. Lee never really convinces, Nail gives the impression of a girl-next-door trying to be badass, Gayle leaves you thinking she might have been pretty awesome if given more to do than lurk in background scowling, and not only do Crabs and co. more than earn the above insult but the other gentlemen of the cast project so little physical danger that they’d get their arses handed to them on a plate in a straight fight with the Dagenham Girl Pipers.

Still, if it’s trashy fun you’re after, ‘Switchblade Sisters’ definitely entertains.

Just in case I haven't blogged a "fuck Twilight" post yet ...

2011-11-30T00:30:00.001Z

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Seven Women for Satan

2011-11-29T20:57:00.005Z

A hunting dog stares moodily into the middle distance. A man on horseback thunders across a misty field. A naked woman runs like hell. From these elements, director Michel Lemoine fashions a not particularly suspenseful three and a half minute opening sequence. Then pulls the rug. It’s a daydream, which our protagonist Count Boris Zaroff (Lemoine, starring as well as directing) snaps out of as his secretary asks him to sign some papers. The day’s business done, Zaroff drives home to his newly acquired castle, picking up attractive hitchhiker Stephanie (Maria Mancini) en route. She rather naively tells him that she’s left home for no particular destination and that no-one’s expecting her. Hands up anyone who rates Stephanie’s chances of making to the end credits alive. Anyone? Anyone?

Advertised upon its release as “the French film banned in France” (it wasn’t), ‘Seven Women for Satan’ is the English-language market retitling of ‘Les week-ends maléfiques du Comte Zaroff’. The original title makes it sound like a slab of gothic; the English moniker like a giallo. Both assumptions are way off base. With its largely plotless noodlings, the architecture porn of its soft-focus castle setting, and its dichotomous aesthetic of nudity aplenty but little actual sex, the closest point of comparison is the work of Jean Rollin.

And there are moments where Lemoine very nearly captures that Rollin feeling: a woman disappearing into a lake as billows of mist drift across the screen; a woman enraptured by her reflection, turning away from a wall of mirrors and drawing back the gauze around a four poster bed only to be confronted with herself lying there supine and seductive; a couple waltzing through a deserted stables, a small drop of blood appearing on the back of the woman’s dress, the wound soaking through the material more and more each time her partner whirls her back into frame.

There are, unfortunately, just as many moments where the hand of Jess Franco or Joe D’Amato could easily have been the guiding force. Moments of utter crassness (the African statue that comes to life – racial stereotypes ahoy!) and/or complete ineptitude (a supposedly tense moment where someone is mauled by a dog, only it’s pitifully evident that the dog is actually nuzzling them in the friendliest manner imaginable). There’s an extended scene where a victim-in-waiting tries to persuade their partner that they’ve witnessed a murder only for the evidence to disappear; it plays out like an Abbott and Costello sketch but without the comedic talent. There are also two scenes where the victims are so complicit it’s impossible to root for them, including that most frustrating of cinematic lapses of logic: a character on foot, being chased by someone in a car, who runs desperately alongside a glade of trees without it ever apparently crossing their mind that simply veering into the trees would prevent their antagonist from running them over.

The narrative suffers, too, from a wooden protagonist in the form of Lemoine’s Zaroff, a man who looks like Cliff Richard’s evil twin …

… and is imbued with all the emotional complexity of a particularly short plank. A man whose idea of a chat-up line is “Would you like some champagne to help you dream pleasantly? Or would you rather that I pour it over your body and sip it slowly as if your substance were of crystal?” (The following scene, where he wastes a perfectly good bottle of champers and doesn’t sip it so much as slurp noisily whilst contorting himself into uncomfortable looking positions, is utterly unerotic. If you’re after a sex/alcohol combo, the J&B/Silvia Dionisio’s navel set-piece from ‘Waves of Lust’ is where it’s at.)

Then we have Zaroff’s Machiavellian manservant Karl, played by the eternally creepy Howard Vernon, a man blessed with the singular ability to deliver an over-the-top performance without actually doing anything. Whether it be staring bug-eyed off camera or walking in crab-like manner from point A to point B, there was always something forced, something unnatural about Vernon. Here, he plays a character who is trying to assuage the guilt of his father for the sins he committed as Zaroff’s father’s partner-in-crime by driving Zaroff Jnr to similar psychotic excesses. The logic behind this fails me, but as the film progresses Karl discovers that Zaroff’s obsession with his dead wife Ann (Joelle Coeur) is a more destructive force than any of his machinations.

This, more than anything, is where ‘Seven Women for Satan’ goes off the rails. If it had just been about Zaroff’s grief-stricken crack-up, it could have been a minor T&A classic. The nonsensical Karl-related subplot, which resolves in a groaningly hackneyed last-minute “twist”, is as perfunctory as it is unnecessary. Oh, and as far as the title goes, I make it six women and not a single reference to Satan.

Ken Russell

2011-11-28T21:59:00.003Z

“Reality is a dirty word for me, I know it isn't for most people, but I am not interested. There's too much of it about.”

i.m. Ken Russell, 3 July 1927 – 27 November 2011

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Mardi Gras Massacre

2011-11-25T21:18:00.000Z

It’s never been definitively proved, but it’s a fairly safe assumption that a lot of the so-called “video nasties” ended up on the Department of Public Prosecutions’ radar for no other reason than their titles or their packaging. The process was probably as arbitrary as this:

SCENE: the back office of a government building. Several SELF-RIGHTEOUS OLD FARTS sit around a table drinking weak tea, smoking cigarettes from long silver holders and flicking ash off the arms of their tweed jackets.

SROF 1: Well, chaps, we’ve had another haul of those new-fangled video cassette thingies and I supposed we’d better decide if they’re fit for the hoi-polloi, what?

SROF 2: Watched any of them, old boy?

SROF 1: Oh, heavens no. Can’t even work the Beta-what’s-its-name machine. Don’t think I’d want to either. Not my cup of tea at all.

SROF 3: You can tell a lot by what they’re called.

SROF 1: Quite. And by the, ahem, “art work”. Right then, we’ve got quite a few with the word ‘Cannibal’ in them. Any thoughts.

SROF 3: Filth. Ban the lot of it.

SROF 1: Good show. Add the ‘Cannibal’ ones to the list, Miss Carruthers.

MISS CARRUTHERS: Very good, sir.

SROF 1: Something called ‘The Beast in Heat’ next.

SROF 2: Wildlife documentary, is it?

SROF 1: Hardly think so, old chap. Picture of a concentration camp and a young lady in a state of undress on the cover.

SROF 3: Bad show! Thought we’d seen the last of that kind of thing when we beat the Hun. I say we ban it.

SROF 1: Quite right, too. Pop it on the list, Miss Carruthers.

MISS CARRUTHERS: Very good, sir.

SROF 1: Hmm. Something called ‘Mardi Gras Massacre’. Looks a bit bloody unpalatable this one, excusing my language, Miss Carruthers.

SROF 3: Not keen on the sound of ‘Massacre’, what?

SROF 1: Not at all. But we might have a slight problem here, chaps.

SROF 2: How so?

SROF 1: Those BBFC wallahs gave the nod to something called ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’. American drivel, don’t you know? Don’t think we can ban ‘Mardi Gras Massacre’ just on the title. Damned shame, really.

SROF 3: I say, pass around the box, would you? I rather think the cover illustration pushes the boundaries somewhat.

SROF 1: Ladies present, old chap. I shall have to ask Miss Carruthers to wait outside a moment. Don’t mind at all, do you, my dear?

MISS CARRUTHERS: Not at all, sir. Thank you very much, sir. God bless you for preserving my delicate English sensibilities.

(Exeunt MISS CARRUTHERS. The video case is passed around eagerly.)

SROF 3: Oh really. Just look at this. Young woman, very revealing costume, kneeling on a bed. Kneeling, I say. Sexual pose, don’t you know? Submissiveness, what? Hands bound behind her back, terrified look on the poor dear’s face. Then we have this hooded chappie in the background, bloody great knife in his hands. Damn it, man, this is filth of the highest order. We need every copy of this seized and pulped! Bloody disgraceful, begging no-one’s pardon, no ladies present and all that.

(There is a knock at the door. TARQUIN, the junior clerk, enters.)

TARQUIN: Sorry I’m late, gents. Delayed on the Tube.

SROF 1: Apology accepted, young man. Do take a seat. We were just debating the merits of this insalubrious piece of work.

TARQUIN: ‘Mardi Gras Massacre’, eh? Watched it with some university chums last night. Pretty shoddy affair, all told. Quite laughable, really.

SROF 3: Laughable?

TARQUIN: Wooden acting, murky photography, the story’s tedious and even at less than an hour and a half it’s got more padding than a feather cushion. The effects work is just appalling. The murder scenes are tired and repetitive. You’ll spend more time with your finger on the fast-forward control than you will being outraged. If I may take the liberty, gents, the only outrage this film will cause is that you paid good money to rent it.

SROF 3: But damn it, Tarquin, look at the cover! Filth, pure filth.

TARQUIN: Oh, there’s nothing like that in the movie. True, the antagonist kills young women, but none of it is remotely believable. Really, fellows, this presents no moral danger to the masses. None whatsoever.

SROF 1: Eloquently said, Tarquin. Good show. About time we had some common sense and objectivity on this committee.

TARQUIN: Thank you, sir.

SROF 1: Now, what say we ban this piece of rancid pabulum anyway?

SROF 3: I second that!

SROF 1: Carried. Add it to the list, Miss Carruthers. (Pause) Miss Carruthers? … Miss Carruthers?

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Rolling Vengeance

2011-11-23T19:05:00.002Z

Still unavailable on DVD – presumably because it’s largely crap, although that hasn’t stopped a bunch of other largely crap movies blighting the good name of the digital versatile disc – the VHS cover of ‘Rolling Vengeance’ boasted the awesomely awful tag line “use the right tool for the job”. The job, in this case, being the despatching to redneck hell of some, well, right tools.

Here’s the set-up: Big Joe Rosso (Lawrence Dane) has just made his son Joey (Don Michael Paul) partner in his trucking business. Joey spends his spare time working on a rig he’s customizing for a forthcoming monster truck show. He spends a bit less time with his socially conscious girlfriend Misty (Lisa Howard). Misty is part of a Mothers Against Drunk Drivers action group who are targeting a titty bar run by the loathsome Tiny Doyle (Ned Beatty) and his equally loathsome sons. There’s friction between Joey and Misty given that Rosso & Son make deliveries for the Doyles.

(Anyone pegged the scriptwriter as a big fan of ‘The French Connection’ yet?)

One day, Big Joe’s wife Kathy (Susan Hogan) and the younger Rosso children are driving into town when Doyle’s sons, barrelling along in a pick-up truck and thoroughly intoxicated, start playing cat-and-mouse with her. Things end in tragedy as they force Kathy’s car in front of a truck driven by Joey’s sometime pal Steve (Barclay Hope). Kathy and the kids are killed outright. At the inquest, the whole thing’s declared a misadventure and Doyle’s eldest son Vic (Todd Duckworth) is given a paltry fine. Not happy with the outcome, Big Joey and Joey head over to Tiny’s bar and start a fight.

In retaliation, the brothers Doyle pull a dangerous stunt dropping breezeblocks from a freeway bridge which ends up with Big Joe’s truck written off and Big Joe himself hospitalized. Joey responds by customizing his monster truck as a huge-tyred armour-plated crushing machine and lays waste to Tiny’s car dealership (quite the entrepreneur is our Tiny). When Misty gets caught in the crossfire and assaulted by a couple of the Doyles, the stakes are raised and Joey goes all out for vengeance. Rolling vengeance. Yeah, baby!

Steven H Stern’s by-the-numbers revenge thriller was made in 1987 and every frame attests to it. Ditto the soundtrack, a motley collection of soft rock ballads, one of which chugs away over the inevitable montage. Here, it’s a montage of Joey wandering around a scrapyard and welding things together. Remember that scene in ‘The Full Monty’ where a supposedly terpsichorean study of ‘Flashdance’ turns into a critique of Jennifer Beals’s welding technique? Well, Jennifer Beals uses an arc welder like a Tyneside ship-builder compared to this flop-haired wannabe tough guy.

The Doyle clan – lorded over by Ned Beatty in turn that goes beyond scenery-chewing and into the realms of outright production design cannibalism – are one-dimensional losers. Beatty’s bouffant back-comb is perhaps the only genuinely terrifying thing about them. And even that’s put unequivocally in the shade by Lisa Howard’s fright-perm.

The narrative is an exercise in unimaginative tit-for-tat: the Doyles fuck over the Rossos, Joey cuts loose with the monster truck; the Doyles rape Misty, Joey goes on the rampage with the monster truck; Big Joe takes a turn for the worse in hospital, Joey drives the monster truck through the titty bar. Now, I’m not suggesting that there isn’t a certain guilty pleasure in watch shit get crushed by a monster truck, particularly when buck-toothed rednecks are included in the catch-all description “shit”. What I am suggesting is that said guilty pleasure wanes a tad in the face of repetition. Nor does it help that the monster truck itself looks like the bastard offspring of a portable toilet and one of those fuck-off big dump trucks they use in quarrying.

In other words, there are myriad scenes where someone exclaims, “Jeez, what the hell is that?” before trying to outrun it, a look of naked fear painted across their face, when the more realistic response would be to laugh like hell and enquire of the driver whether he’s overcompensating for something. After all, the right tool for the job and all that. Throw the industrial sized auger that comes whirling out from between the two front wheels (a device which has all the sophistication of Q Department headed by a thirteen year-old heavy metal fan) and there’s probably an academic study to be written on ‘Rolling Vengeance’ as a study in penis envy. Either that, or it just means the film’s a load of old cock.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Strange Circus

2011-11-21T21:56:00.002Z

There are films that pull the rug in the first reel. The credits roll, the narrative begins, things get very weird from the outset; the protagonist’s situation seems to be spiralling out of control; imagery and logic twist in upon themselves. Then – bang! – the whole thing’s revealed as a false start. A dream sequence. Or the main character’s imaginings.

Then there are films which bide their time, patiently and subtly fool the audience, then pull off that eleventh hour rug-pull, that head-fuck twist-in-the-tail that forces the audience to re-evaluate everything that’s gone before. Inferior films do this and send you stomping out of the cinema in disgust. Superior ones – case in point, Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Prestige’, leave you itching to watch them again, convinced there are a myriad clues you should be watching out for.

And yet other films blend reality (i.e. their internal reality), fiction (i.e. an admission that what is onscreen is a creation/manipulation) and meta-textuality to such effect that the boundaries become blurred, the narrative planes intertwine and the writer/director is revealed as some kind of prancing Machiavellian sprite, happily pulling the strings (including those of the audience) on any number of levels.

And – more rarely – there are films which tick all of the above boxes. These films are usually by Alain Resnais or David Lynch. Today’s offering, ‘Strange Circus’, is by Shion Sono, and it’s brilliant, accomplished, intellectual and despicably cynical in roughly equal measures.

‘Strange Circus’ starts with a performance by the grand guignol troupe of the title. A young girl is invited on stage to be guillotined. Her voiceover suggests that she was doomed to die the moment she was born. This scene is filmed subjectively, so that the circus-mistress’s implorations for a volunteer are seen from the girl’s point of view. When she reluctantly allows herself to be led onstage, the POV remains: the effect is akin to her stepping out from the audience, through the fourth wall, and into the fabric of the film. It’s the first of Sono’s many distortions of perspective.

The girl is Mitsuko (played by Rie Kunawa and Mai Takahashi are various stages of her girlhood, and Masumi Miyazaki as an adult). As she’s led towards the guillotine, she wakes up screaming. Five minutes in, and we’ve made the transition from dream sequence to narrative proper. Or have we? Awakened, Mitsuko hears violent noises from her parents’ room and investigates. She witnesses her father Gozo (Hiroshi Ohguchi), a headteacher, sexually dominating her mother Sayuri (also Miyazaki). Gozo punishes her by subjecting her to similar treatment.

Okay, then. Incestuous paedophilic rape. Still with me? Gozo also forces Mitsuko to watch his sexual domination of Sayuri from the confines of a cello case (I am not making this up), an ordeal Mitsuko gets through by imagining her mother is her place. During the actual incest, Mitsuko copes by imagining she has become her mother. So: throw in voyeurism and troilism on top of the incest/rape business.

Still with me?

Forty minutes in, Sono reveals that everything we’ve just seen is the embryonic plot of a novel by crippled pornographic author Taeko (Miyazaki once more), an elegant eccentric who surrounds herself with admirers and hangers-on. Or is it? And is Taeko genuinely conjuring her tale from the ethereal realms of imagination, or do her venal musings have their roots in reality?

‘Strange Circus’ – with its taboo subject matter, jarring imagery, and commendably sick sense of humour – is a walk on the cinematic wild side that can only be described as the bastard offspring of Chan-wook Park and Alain Resnais if they’d got loaded on peyote, watched a fuckton of Jean Rollin movies and decided to collaborate on a remake of ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane’ by way of the Adrian Lyne version of ‘Lolita’. But without the tact or restraint.

Now is the winter of our discontent, made exploitative by this son of the blogosphere

2011-11-20T10:35:00.001Z

Kicking off a tad later than anticipated – thanks to a combination of (a) social engagements, (b) illness and (c) the vagaries of my internet service provider – 2011’s Winter of Discontent starts here.

Assuming the dearth of (a), the forbearance of (b) and the cooperation of (c), we’ll be seeing out the year on The Agitation of the Mind with a smorgasbord of horror, controversy, violence, filth, revenge and general nastiness, every bit of it selected to demonstrate the bilious depths of man’s inhumanity to man and the reprehensible lengths that a film crew, a masochistic cast and a zero budget are willing to go in order to prod their audience into howls of protest.

In other words, welcome back.

Tomorrow, we’ll be get things started in fine style with a look at a particularly fucked up work of Japanese cinema, redolent in incest, troilism and a demonstrable reality/unreality dysfunction.

THE SILLITOE PROJECT: latest news

2011-11-18T20:13:00.003Z

Karel Reisz’s classic film version of Alan Sillitoe’s ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ is the subject of two articles by Kimberly Lindbergs: one on the indispensable Movie Morlocks, the other on her equally essential blog Cinebeats. Myself and David Sillitoe, Alan’s son and the Chairman of the Alan Sillitoe Committee, were interviewed by Kimberly and the resulting article is a terrific appreciation of a great work of post-war British cinema that also glances behind the scenes and considers Alan’s input in this and the other film adaptations of his work.

In other news, thanks to everyone who contributed when we held a collection at the Nottingham Contemporary/LeftLion event 'Gunpowder, Treason and Pot' on 4th November, and special vote of thanks to musician and composer John Aram who, with his band, performed his ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ inspired jazz suite in Arnold, Nottingham, last month and supported the statue fund to the hilt.

The next event is on Thursday 1st December at The Maze, Mansfield Road, Nottingham, and features three great local bands playing in support of the fund.

For more information, or to make a donation, please visit The Alan Sillitoe Website.

Virginie Ledoyen

2011-11-15T22:35:00.001Z

Virginie Ledoyen, already an Agitation of the Mind poster girl courtesy of her beautifully underplayed turn in ‘Saint-Ange’ …

… is 35 today. A large glass of rioja is being raised at chez Agitation and a triptych of deluxe cheesecake shots are being posted on this blog.

Bon anniversaire, madamoiselle.

Spotswood

2011-11-13T20:32:00.004Z

Heard the one about the Anthony Hopkins-Toni Collette-Ben Mendelsohn-Russell Crowe movie about a time and motion expert called in to fuck over the workforce of a small family-run business, directed by the guy who made ‘The Man Who Sued God’, that’s arguably one of the best movies you’ve never seen?

No joke. I saw ‘Spotswood’ at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema – the East Midlands’ beacon for independent and arthouse cinema – on its first release in the early 1990s. Time robbed me of any definitive recollection of the movies, except for an hilarious extended set-piece based an a slot-car race, but I always remembered that I’d enjoyed it.

A couple of decades have passed and I’d got used to mentioning the film to people only to be met with quizzical expressions. Or responses along the lines of “Anthony Hopkins and Russell Crowe in the same movie? Nah, you must have dreamed. I’d have remembered that!” My assertions that, actually, not only did the movie exist but Crowe played a greaser in a hotrod with ambitions to become a corporate sell-out tended to meet with excuses being made and the other party swiftly departing.

I found ‘Spotswood’ for £2.49 on Amazon recently. A panned-and-scanned print that looks like a transfer – albeit an unnaturally good one – from VHS. But what the hell? I got to see it again. And it holds up. It holds up and then some.

Hopkins plays Errol Wallace, an efficiency expert who has just completed an exhaustive study of a major car manufacturer and whose report recommends the lay off of 480 workers. The MD (the film is set the late 1960s, before Managing Directors disappeared up their own rectal passageways and started calling themselves Chief Executive Officers) prevaricates, leading to Wallace’s partner engaging in underhanded practices in order to force the issue.

Meanwhile Wallace takes the reins on the next project, an assessment of Ball’s moccasin factory, a stuck-in-the-50s enterprise whose MD (Alwyn Kurts) is secretly selling off assets in order to keep his full complement of workers employed. Amongst these individuals are up-and-coming salesman Kim Barry (Crowe); good-natured but cringingly naïve despatch boy Carey (Mendelsohn); Wendy (Collette), Carey’s co-worker whose romantic overtures he blindly overlooks; and Cheryl (Rebecca Rigg), Ball’s daughter – temping at the firm prior to embarking on “a full-time modelling career” – for whose affections Kim and Carey find themselves unlikely rivals.

The story arc is predictable: things turn ugly at the auto-plant while Wallace re-engages with the human side of things at Ball’s ailing factory, eventually coming through with the business plan that revitalizes the business and safeguards the workforce’s jobs. I make no apologies for not throwing up a spoiler alert. ‘Spotswood’ is so whimsical and guileless, it’s up there with ‘Local Hero’ as the closest anyone has come to making an Ealing comedy in the last half a century.

The performances are pitch perfect, Mark Joffe’s direction is commendably underplayed (there’s barely a scene in this film that you can’t immediately imagine being utterly ruined and drowned in schmaltz by a Hollywood director), Ellery Ryan’s cinematography effortlessly evokes a time and a place, and there are some inspired and yet unforced musical cues on the soundtrack. Subject of which, the (deliberately) awful garage band cover of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ over the opening credits is toe-curlingly hilarious.

If you’ve never seen ‘Spotswood’ before – or, as seems to be the cultural denominator, even heard of it – I guarantee you’ll benefit from seeking it out. Not only do you get Hopkins and Crowe sharing the screen, but it’s the only movie that features a slot-car race as tense, gripping and imbued with everything-to-play-for desperation as the final bout in ‘Rocky’ or any of the green baize duels in ‘The Hustler’.

A brief word of apology

2011-11-11T19:53:00.002Z

Dear Everyone on my Link List

I have been checking out your blogs. I have been enjoying your reviews. I haven't been ignoring you. I haven't fallen out with you. If I haven't been leaving comments anywhere near as frequently as I used to - if, in point of fact, I've barely left a comment on anyone's blog in the last couple of weeks - it's not for anti-social reasons.

I recently got my mojo back for writing fiction and have been working on a couple of projects. There's also been my ongoing work for the Alan Sillitoe Statue fund. Some exciting new events are coming up - please keep checking our website for details. I've also been hooked on some terrific books recently: James Robertson's masterpiece-in-waiting 'And the Land Lay Still', Michelle Paver's atmospheric ghost story 'Dark Matter', Niki Valentine's equally effective chiller 'The Haunted' and John le Carre's 'Our Kind of Traitor', an elegant and cynically incisive work that sees him on his best form since 'The Constant Gardener'.

Throw in the requirement that I present myself at the office eight hours a day purely to safeguard the income which I immediately pass on to my mortgage provider, and there's very little time left in the day.

Yours apologetically,

Neil

PERSONAL FAVES: The Constant Gardener

2011-11-09T20:29:00.002Z

Posted to coincide with Fernando Meirelles’ 56th birthday

Reviewing ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ got me thinking about how well-served John le Carre has been in terms of adaptations. The seven-part TV adaptation of that novel, starring Alec Guinness, is one of the small screen’s finest achievements. It’s big screen counterpart is arguably a classic-in-waiting. Martin Ritt’s ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ is one of the bleakest, most compelling cinematic renderings of the spy story, with a blistering performance from Richard Burton – one of his best.

Even the second tier of le Carre adaptations – Fred Schepisi’s ‘The Russia House’, George Roy Hill’s ‘The Little Drummer Girl’, John Boorman’s ‘The Tailor of Panama’ – are perfectly accomplished and entertaining films. There’s no reason to suspect that Anton Corbijn’s ‘A Most Wanted Man’ – currently in pre-production – will be anything less than a class act.

But above all of these – albeit only by a very short head where ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ and ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ are concerned – is Fernando Meirelles’ ‘The Constant Gardener’, a riveting thriller, a humanitarian manifesto and a j’accuse against corporate greed and political chicanery. A beautiful and emotionally devastating work of cinema.

An opening scene peppered with lacunae gives us a deserted stretch of African coastal road, an overturned vehicle, men piling out of a jeep. The next scene has junior diplomat Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) learning of the death of his wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz) from his seemingly avuncular superior Sandy Woodrow (Danny Huston). Tessa was quite the humanitarian – aid worker, activist; the kind of person it would be easily to mislabel a bleeding heart liberal except that the woman had the tenacity of a particularly stubborn bulldog. As well as an unfortunate tendency to rub Justin’s British High Commission colleagues up the wrong way.

The nature of how this extremely unlikely couple got together is the subject of an extended flashback. And as unlikely as their romance is, Meirelles’ portrayal of it is natural, convincing, unforced. It helps, of course, that Fiennes and Weisz – two actors who have never given a bad performance – are on absolute top form here. Weisz’s Academy Award was one of those stand-up-and-applaud moments of Oscar getting it right.

With the murder mystery element in place, and genuine emotionalism underpinning it, Meirelles begins to unravel – unhurriedly but with a palpable sense of tension – a complex web of deceit, secrecy, underhandedness and naïve political allegiance. In one of the most telling moments, a morally compromised but jingoistically indefatigable politico weighs the unholy alliance between government and pharmaceutical corporation in terms of 1,500 British jobs. Murder, conspiracy, malpractice and the violation of a depressed country’s already beleaguered human rights. But 1,500 British jobs, so what ho chaps?

Le Carre’s novel – his best, for my money – is that rarest of beasts: a literary thriller that powers through its narrative with balls-out ferocity; and an incredibly elegant piece of writing that nonetheless seethes with righteous outrage. And so it should. From the existential despair of Alex Leamas in ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ to the moment of almost unwitting complicity on which his latest novel ‘Our Kind of Traitor’ turns, John le Carre has, throughout his career, transcended the inherent cynicism of the espionage drama and grappled with the thorny moral conundrums at the heart of his characters’ tarnished lives.

If, however, le Carre approaches the material from the perspective of an Englishman sick of the snobbery and the bullshit and the old school tie network and all the sneaky nasty little things that are done by the establishment supposedly for the good of all, then Meirelles brings to the table the authenticity and immediacy of his breakthrough film, the magnificent ‘City of God’. With these two movies – ‘The Constant Gardener’ was his follow-up – Meirelles took shaky-cam to an art-form. The African scenes are vibrant, alive, as gorgeous as they are harrowing. Elsewhere, though, he knows when to step back from the action, when to frame his actors in long-shot. When to hold a shot and just let it play out, an all too rare capacity in contemporary filmmaking. Simply put, every frame of ‘The Constant Gardener’ contributes to its whole.

Two other things to mention: the film was produced by Simon Channing Williams, who died two years; le Carre’s latest novel is dedicated in memoriam. Whilst filming on location in Nairobi, the cast and crew were so appalled at the levels of poverty that they established The Constant Gardener Trust (go here and be amazed at what the Trust has achieved), of which le Carre, Meirelles, Weisz and Fiennes are patrons.

One great work of literature; one great work of cinema; one awe-inspiring humanitarian organisation. That’s a pretty good batting average.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

2011-11-07T19:54:00.002Z

Possibly the hardest challenge an actor can face is to take on a role already synonymous with someone else. ‘The Prisoner’ with Jim Cavaziel instead of Patrick McGoohan, for instance – it just didn’t work for me. It was as unthinkable as Inspector Morse not being played by John Thaw or Rumpole essayed by anyone other than Leo McKern.

So, despite the glowing reviews it opened to (glowing? incandescent, more like!), I approached ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ with a certain degree of trepidation. A George Smiley who wasn’t Alec Guinness? Even an actor as accomplished as Gary Oldman? Hmmmmm.

I needn’t have worried. After ten minutes, my brain had stopped trying to impose Alec Guinness’s face over every scene. By the end of the film, I was convinced that Oldman was the George Smiley (big screen version) as definitively as Alec Guiness was the George Smiley (small screen version). In fact, walking back to the car afterwards, me and Mrs F solidly raved about Oldman’s performance and didn’t stop till we were back home.

Every rave review you’ve read is on the money: Oldman really is that good. And he’s not starved for supporting talent either. John Hurt is perfect as ‘Control’, the outgoing spymaster whose position is being jockeyed for by several slippery characters who have their own agendas, one of whom is a mole: Bill Hayden (Colin Firth), Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds) and Toby Esterhase (David Dencik).

Bulking out an already heavyweight cast, we have Tom Hardy as Ricki Tarr, the ‘in from the cold’ field agent whose allegations kick start the plot; Mark Strong as Jim Prideaux, a former agent who may or may not hold the key to uncovering the traitor; and Benedict Cumberpatch as Peter Guillam, Smiley’s right hand man.

The plot is labyrinthine, but Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan’s screenplay is an effective distillation of John le Carre’s novel, finding a narrative throughline, effortlessly handling the shifts between the various timelines and keeping things pacy even though the film is essentially a 127-minute thinking-caps-on job.

Kudos, as well, to director Tomas Alfredson, following the wintery 1970s-set ‘Let the Right One In’ with an equally atmospheric period piece. ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ boasts not only a pitch-perfect evocation of run-down 70s London, but Alfredson achieves the style, pacing and edgy existentialism of 70s cinema.

So, any gripes at all? Save for an opening sequence that seems curiously artificial (although I think this might have been a stylistic choice on Alfredson’s part, since the scene details at set-up), and a moment towards the end which seems to pull its punches in the way the novel doesn’t, there’s not a single thing here to criticize. ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ is confident, intelligent and incredibly satisfying filmmaking.

The opera box or the peanut gallery?

2011-11-03T22:15:00.001Z

Taking a short break from the blog till next week while I put the finishing touches to a new short story and attend this event at the Nottingham Contemporary tomorrow night.

In the meantime, a friend of mine asked if I was going to start reviewing “normal” films again, pointing out that between Black Valentines, Giallo Sundays, Summer of Satan, 13 For Halloween and the forthcoming Winter of Discontent – and with Video Nasties in the lead for next year’s big retrospective – Agitation is in danger of turning into a repository for sex ‘n’ violence exploitationers.

So I’m throwing it open. The poll still has 58 days to run and if you’d like to see Agitation square up to a more refined viewing list, then please hit up the sidebar and vote for something that doesn’t have “video” and “nasties” in the description. If, however, you do want to see a continued consideration of filmic filth and cinematic seediness on these pages … well, then, business as usual!

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #13: Halloween

2011-10-31T18:01:00.001Z

The problem with writing about a film as influential, much-imitated and downright iconic as ‘Halloween’ is trying to find something to say about it that hasn’t already been said. I could probably jot down a quick bullet-point checklist along the lines of:

The subjective, prowling POV of the opening scene
Dean Cundey’s cinematography
Carpenter’s own score (minimalism at its eeriest)
Pre-David Lynch Lynchian small town vibe
Now you see Michael, now you don’t (repeat to increasingly nerve-shredding effect throughout the film then roll out as a horribly inevitable coda)
Authentically buttock-clenching scare scenes
The old ‘supposedly dead person out of focus in the background suddenly sits up’ routine done better than anywhere else in the history of scary movies
The final girl sequence par excellence

… and it’d suffice. It’d certainly tick half a dozen or so of the boxes that make ‘Halloween’ a classic. But it wouldn’t touch on any of the things that make the film work on a primal level. Such as how much of it takes place in darkness, from Dr Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) being driven through the grounds of an asylum in a nocturnal deluge, the wash of headlights illuminating the shambolic figures of inmates roaming around on the loose, to Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) fleeing the house she’s babysitting at into a street so deserted and devoid of sanctuary that it seems like she’s in a ghost town. Both of these scenes are shot through with the fractured and panicky immediacy of a nightmare.

Or the juxtaposition of the wide pavements and long avenues of Haddonfield with the tight interiors, characters continually trapped with the framework of doorways, windows, stairwells, corridors and – in one of the film’s most justifiably famous moments – a closet. And in both of these milieus, the implacable and seemingly unmotivated Michael Myers. A presence, a threat, a great hulking white-masking thing. Other horror movie antagonists benefit (or suffer, this latter usually exacerbated by sequilitis) from a personality, or at least some defining characteristic – from the overt theatrics and cheesy one-liners of Freddy Krueger to the grungy backwoods psychosis of Leatherface. Michael Myers – in this film at least; the sequels make the mistake of plumbing his backstory further than the simple act of childhood evil that kicks off Carpenter’s original – is basically a faceless, emotionless, unstoppable killing machine. Who thinks nothing of digging up his mother’s gravestone for use in a macabre little tableau.

And for this reason, Michael Myers is one of the great horror icons. He disturbs even when he’s doing nothing. Dude steps out silently behind a hedge to watch the retreating form of Laurie. Goosebumps. Dude stands motionless outside a window watching a girl disrobe. Hairs on the back of the neck moment. Dude drives past a school, driving real slow, keeping pace with a young boy walking home on his own. Squirmy sense of agitation. And when he does start getting his homicidal funk on, the absolute detachment he acts with is genuinely unsettling. Having knifed someone so viciously he leaves their body pinioned against a door, he stands there turning his head from side to side as if trying to figure out the meaning of a particularly obscure art gallery installation.

Best of all, though, is John Carpenter’s intuitive sense of pacing, his canny handling of the material. He knows to strip away everything from the narrative that’s extraneous. To keep things utterly simple. To set up a handful of characters, let them plan out their Halloween celebrations (whether they’re earning a little extra money babysitting or taking the opportunity to cop off with their dates) and then send Michael Myers on his unhurried but bloodily purposeful way right into the centre of their lives.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #12: White Light: The Noise

2011-10-30T12:38:00.000Z

Full disclosure: I’ve somehow never got round to seeing the original ‘White Noise’. I saw ‘White Noise: The Light’ at the cinema because Mrs F was keen on it and it starred Nathan Fillion, who I’d liked a lot in ‘Serenity’ and ‘Slither’. I watched it again a couple of nights ago (it’s a staple of Mrs F’s DVD collection – she also likes Nathan Fillion, which is kind of understandable: dude has the same initials as yours truly and the same kind of rumpled je ne sais quoi; but having said that, keep your hands off my woman, Nate).

‘WN: TL’ kicks off with Abe Dale (Fillion) and his wife Rebecca (Kendall Cross) celebrating their anniversary. Over breakfast at a diner, their son Danny (Joshua Ballard) complains of feeling unwell. Seconds later, Rebecca appears to have some kind of fit. Seconds after that, a total stranger by the name of Henry Caine (Craig Fairbrass) enters the diner, pulls a gun and shoots Rebecca and Danny before turning the pistol on himself.

As you’d imagine, Abe’s life goes to hell. A few months later, unable to come to terms, he attempts suicide. Due to the intervention of best bud Marty (Adrian Holmes) and a calm-under-crisis medical team, Abe is brought back from the brink of death. Literally.

Dr Karras (William MacDonald), who specializes in near death experiences and precognition, takes on Abe as his patient. Meanwhile, widowed nurse Sherry (Katee Sackhoff) is drawn to Abe. Dr Karras – and if the character name strikes you as heavy-handed horror movie in-joke, consider the Biblical connotations of having the Dale family named Abraham, Rebecca and Daniel, and their antagonist being called Caine – seems to fulfil the purpose of delivery-system-for-expository-dialogue, the audience’s guide to the weird shit that starts happening around Abe, he’s abruptly killed off and Abe realizes the significance of the aura he saw emanating from Dr K during their consultation.

Abe realizes that he can identify people who are about to die. After a couple of initial hesitations and a failed attempt at saving a wino crossing a railway line from death-by-goods-train, Abe gets into his groove and – essentially – starts playing God. As good as he feels about saving the due-to-die, he’s perplexed by the accusatory visitations he experiences from the already-dead.

Halfway through, a decent story about a man’s grief leavened by his ability to save (the kind of thing you’d imagine the restrained M. Night Shyamalan of the early part of his career doing) barrels off in a different direction when Abe discovers that Caine had earlier interceded in his wife and son’s life to their benefit, saving them from a potential automobile accident. Abe investigates why Caine turned from saviour to killer … and this is where things get a bit wobbly.

On one hand, director Patrick Lussier and writer Matt Venne deliver a conceptually interesting morality tale on the dangers of playing God, with Abe’s ostensible acts of charity going spectacularly wrong when those who were supposed to die but didn’t become the vessels of something less than holy on the third day of their faux resurrection. And yes, the Biblical malarkey and the whole “tria mera” idea is incorporated quite effectively. But – and here comes the “on the other hand” bit – this is how the three people Abe saves were supposed to die: crushed under a vehicle while trying to effect a repair courtesy of a speeding motorist; kicked to death by a gang of oiks while trying to protect his girlfriend; and dragged into a van by a rapist/murderer in an underground car park.

Now, it’s one thing to suggest that someone whose time is due shouldn’t be saved, and that by saving them Abe has monkeyed with God’s grand design. But Abe’s terrible responsibility in having to set things, ahem, right kind of loses its moral string when you reflect that God’s grand design includes agonising and unnecessary deaths, not least in the latter case where it’s implied that brutality and sexual assault, for an indefinite period of time, would be the order of the business prior to riding the night train to the big adios.

Granted, one of the key aspects of the horror genre is its admixture of catharsis and schadenfreude, i.e. while all this bad shit is happening to someone else, it’s not happening to you therefore you breathe a sigh of relief, kick back and enjoy having the piss scared out of you. But there’s something about ‘White Noise: The Light’ that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. The breakdown of internal logic (why doesn’t Abe turn bad on the last day given that he’s essentially been saved against his will? in fact, why isn’t everyone successfully discharged from the emergency ward similarly effected?) isn’t helped by two last-minute narrative cheats designed to give Abe redemption and Caine damnation, even though they were essentially victims of the same cosmic quandary.

Or it could just be that, as James Coburn puts it in ‘Cross of Iron, “God is a sadist and probably doesn’t even know it.”

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #11: Shaun of the Dead

2011-10-29T12:47:00.001+01:00

“You’ve got red on you.”

Let’s consider the comedy horror sub-genre. Perhaps the most easy kind of movie to fuck up. Make a straight horror film that doesn’t work and you’ve achieved the comedy unintentionally. Set out to make a horror film that’s funny and you already run into two potential – and oh-so-often blundered into – pitfalls. Either it’s not funny enough, or not dark/horrific/nasty enough.

If that’s not enough of a challenge, you then have to factor in how buggardly difficult it is to be funny, period. Bad comedians? Ten a penny. The likes of the Goons, the Monty Python team, Dave Allen, Bill Hicks or Billy Connolly – the defining comedic talents? Once a generation, pretty much. Lame, stupid, by-the-numbers movies advertising themselves as comedies? There’s probably four or five playing at a multiplex near you right now. Something that really hits the ball of the park and makes your sides hurt even while the intelligence behind the rib-tickling is actively challenging you as a viewer? ‘Four Lions’ was probably the last thing I saw that ticked all the boxes.

So: comedy horrors. Fuck loads of ’em. And some come very close to nailing it. ‘Slither’ only just misses out because of it’s mean-spirited and utterly unamusing first half hour. ‘Zombieland’ has a shedload of good ideas and intermittently hits the heights, but tries too hard. ‘Dead Snow’ mines some belly laughs out of promising material but never goes as crazy and satirical with it as you so desperately want it to. Those that get it right? The ‘Evil Dead’ films, ‘Tremors’, ‘Eight Legged Freaks’ and the absolute best of the bunch: the king of comedy horror, the monarch of mordant mockery, the sultan of scary spoofery, the god-emperor of graveyard humour: ‘Shaun of the Dead’.

‘Shaun of the Dead’ works, primarily, because everyone involved in it knows how to be funny. That’s “knows how to” in the same way that Bernard Haitink knows how to conduct, Iain Banks knows how to write novels, Slash knows how to play the guitar and the gentlemen at the Talisker distillery know how to make whisky. Co-written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, and directed by Wright, these fellows were two of the three talents behind ‘Spaced’ (the third, Jessica Stevenson, cameos in ‘Shaun of the Dead’ to terrific effect), which I’d dare anyone to argue otherwise as regards the proposition “best British sit-com” of the last twenty years.

‘Shaun of the Dead’ takes the outbreak of revivified corpses/mass panic/small group of survivors holed up against superior (undead) numbers narrative checklist of every zombie film since a certain George A Romero made a low-budget indie called ‘Night of the Living Dead’, transports them to a blandly realistic London and demonstrates how two adult males who have never truly left adolescence behind deal with the crisis. Let’s meet our heroes. Shaun (Pegg) is pushing thirty, stuck in a dead-end job and just about, as the film opens, to be given the Spanish archer (El Bow) by his long-suffering girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield). Ed (Nick Frost) is Shaun’s unemployed and terminally irresponsible best mate who’s been crashing at Ed’s shared accommodation for so long that he’s long since incited the wrath of Shaun’s prissy flatmate Pete (Peter Serafinowicz).

Battling rank insubordination at work and Pete’s anti-Ed rhetoric at home, as well as nurturing resentment against his stepfather Phillip (Bill Nighy) while trying to keep things on an even keel with his mother Barbara (Penelope Wilton), Shaun prioritizes his biggest challenge as getting Liz back. And no pissy little zombie epidemic is going to get in his way!

The cleverest thing – in a movie chock-full of inspired moments – that ‘Shaun of the Dead’ does is treat the zombie threat, in its early stages anyway, as a minor irritant in Shaun’s rapidly unravelling life. The reason for the dead rising is not so much explained as turned into a brilliantly edited satirical comment on the attention-deficiency of the TV/infotainment-addled channel-hopping generation. In fact, Pegg and Wright go one step further and suggest that since cultural zombification is pretty much a state of mind for an entire cross-section of the populace (as evidenced in the low-key but conceptually brilliant opening sequence) an actual zombie attack might not be as easy to recognize as you’d imagine.

Hence the first scene in which Shaun and Ed realize that there’s something untoward about their fellow Londoners and start fighting back. I refer, of course, to the scene in the garden where they raid the shed for items to fling at the zombies’ heads in order to incapacitate them. They come upon Shaun’s collection of vinyl LPs and this ensues:

Ed: Purple Rain?
Shaun: No.
Ed: Sign o' the Times?
Shaun: Definitely not.
Ed: The ‘Batman’ soundtrack?
Shaun: Throw it.
Ed: Dire Straits?
Shaun: Throw it.
Ed: Stone Roses?
Shaun: Uh, no.
Ed: Second Coming?
Shaun (sheepishly): I like it.
Ed: Sade?
Shaun: But that’s Liz’s.
Ed: Yeah, but she did dump you.

It’s the first scene in which ‘Shaun of the Dead’ lays down the gauntlet as to what the comedy horror movie can truly achieve. And then spends another hour and change more than living up to it. Take the scene where Shaun and his mates fend off their newly zombified barman with pool cues, leaping around him in some weird parody of a maypole dance with the jukebox blasts out Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’. I’ll put that up with anything Scorsese, Tarantino or Richard Kelly have pulled off in the marriage-of-music-to-imagery stakes. Or the appropriation of their favourite pub (The Winchester)’s mascot – the eponymous rifle – to fight off a zombie attack. Shaun proves spectacularly useless as a marksman until Ed talks him through it as if they were playing a video game. Or the two bands of survivors who meet whilst heading in opposite directions – a sublime visual joke that not only provides one of the many ‘Spaced’ in-jokes, but niftily references co-star Dylan Moran’s wonderfully subversive sitcom ‘Black Books’.

Or the proliferation of horror movie homages, from Fulci’s Italian restaurant (Shaun’s first choice when he tries to make an eleventh hour booking for an anniversary meal) to a supermarket chain called Landis (both a nod to John Landis and a spoof of British supermarket chain Londis) to Shaun’s disapproval of Ed using “the z-word” (a sneaky allusion to Danny Boyle’s insistence, at the time ’28 Days Later’ was released, that it wasn’t a zombie film). More subtle still, Shaun works for “Foree Electrics”, a tip of the hat to Ken Foree, the iconic actor in Romero’s ‘Dawn of the Dead’ who memorably delivered the “when there is no more room in hell…” line. (And delivered it to equal effect in Zack Snyder’s remake.)

All of which is an extended way of saying that in addition to being a funny, clever and often genuinely suspenseful film in its own right, ‘Shaun of the Dead’ is a treasure trove for the genre aficionado. It trades in a brand of deadpan observational humour that is archetypically British, but seasons it with a thorough knowledge of (chiefly American) genre movies. And it handles the tension and the gore as rigorously as it does the comedy of embarrassments.

Contributions, creepy movies and cool dudes

2011-10-28T18:28:00.000+01:00

As if the Second Annual 13 For Halloween round-up and my contribution on Fulci’s ‘The Beyond’ to the Italian Horror Movie Blogathon hosted by Hugo Stigltiz Makes Movies weren’t enough!

I’m included in a mammoth post on The Film Connoisseur today which brings together four bloggers with a love of horror movies: yours truly, the Film Connoisseur himself Francisco Gonzalez, Shaun Anderson of The Celluloid Highway and Brian Bankston of Cool Ass Cinema. Shaun considers supernatural films from Britain, while I look at similarly themed works from America; Brian takes a walk on the wild side with some HK/Japanese tales of terror, and Francisco unearths some fascinating fear-fests from the silent/b&w era. Head over to The Film Connoisseur and check it out.

From tomorrow, I’ll be blogging the last three of 13 For Halloween reviews here on The Agitation of the Mind, and taking part in Shane Briant Appreciation Day on Facebook.

ITALIAN HORROR MOVIE BLOGATHON: The Beyond

2011-10-26T20:25:00.006+01:00

Posted as part of Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies’ 2nd Annual Italian Horror Movie Blogathon

I don’t have any hard and fast rules when it comes to reviewing a film. In terms of style, content, structure and word length, it’s pretty much a case of however I’m feeling when I sit down at the computer and start typing. Sometimes I start with a plot synopsis, sometimes a contextual remark on the film’s place in the director’s canon, sometimes a personal recollection of the first time I saw the film, and sometimes a bit of straight-up unapologetic sarcasm.

With ‘The Beyond’, I really want to start with a comment along the lines of “this is one of the most gorgeous horror movies I’ve ever seen”. Only it seems a slightly inappropriate description for a movie featuring multiple face meltings, excessive eyeball trauma (what was it with Fulci and the introduction of sharp implements to the vitreous humor?), a chaining, a crucifixion, and some anti-social behaviour from the natural world, viz. a guide dog completely abandoning the job description and a protracted scene where some big-ass spiders eat a guy’s face. (Any arachnological issues one might have with the veracity of said set-piece will, I guarantee you, be swiftly dispelled by the sheer ickiness of it.)

And yet … ‘The Beyond’ is never less than handsomely mounted and often outright beautiful (not as potent a piece of cinematic eye-candy as Argento at his most visually florid but still more enough to turn the head of a DoP groupie), and nowhere more so than in the sepia toned 7-minute pre-credits sequence. There’s a note-perfect analysis of this scene in Tim’s review of ‘The Beyond’ at Antagony & Ecstasy, which I’d urge you to read. This sequence – set in 1927 – is a mini-movie which moves elegantly from painterly imagery to brutal narrative without ever sacrificing its aesthetic (kudos to cinematographer Sergio Salvati).

A group of townsfolk converge, by boat and car, on a dilapidated hotel where Schweik (Antoine Saint-John), a painter reviled as a warlock, is staying. They enter the premises and burst into his room. During what follows, Schweik attempts to reason with them, revealing that the hotel is built over one of the seven gateways to hell and that he has specialist knowledge which can ensure the portal is never opened … the kind of dialogue which, today, would earn him a fast-tracked referral to a mental health facility. The kind of dialogue which, in 1927, earns him the attentions of a lynch mob.

Incidentally, those dozen words: “the hotel is built over one of the seven gateways to hell”? That’s your plot synopsis, right there.

The story – i.e. the remaining 80 minutes during which property heiress Liza (Katherine MacColl) and general practitioner Dr John McCabe (David Warbeck) find out what the audience already know – recommences in 1981 with the hotel even more dilapidated. Liza, unexpectedly finding herself the new owner, decides to renovate and reopen it. Discovering a flooded basement and an incipient leak even though the water is turned off, she hires Joe the plumber (Giovanni di Nava) to fix the problem. Not only does the luckless Joe not fix the problem, he exacerbates it by way of opening the door to the undead. Fucked up and generally unpleasant set-pieces ensue; a nastily cynical coda kicks you in the balls; roll end credits.

As a work of narrative coherence, ‘The Beyond’ is up there with ‘Suspiria’. In fact, coming three years after Argento’s masterpiece of anti-narrative and just a year after his equally free-form follow-up ‘Inferno’, Fulci’s opus invites comparison to the Three Mothers mythos. If Argento’s concept was of three houses of evil, one for each of his triumvirate of demonic dames, one can only imagine where Fulci’s imagination might have taken him if he’d chosen to explore the other six entrances to the underworld. (Although an argument can be made for ‘City of the Living Dead’ and ‘The House by the Cemetery’ as companion pieces which use their settings to similar effect.)

But coherence isn’t what ‘The Beyond’ needs. No matter the weird feeding habits of spiders, the libraries and bookshops which are repositories of weirdness, the hospital in which a family doctor can happily conduct his own post-mortem or a grieving widow wander unaccompanied into an autopsy room; never mind the concept of Liza inheriting two staff members along with a hotel that hasn’t been open to the public in half a century, two staff members who can’t be much older than their late 30s; pshaw to idea of Dr McCabe, a man who (one presumes) has taken an oath to preserve life, grabbing a six shooter from his desk drawer and cutting loose like Harry Callahan the moment some weird shit goes down; and pshaw plus VAT that he routinely manages ten or twelve shots from said six shooter between fumbled reloadings.

‘The Beyond’ transcends logic and narrative coherence. All Fulci is interested in is generating an atmosphere of mounting terror. From the outset, before we’ve even got to the faces dissolving in acid or the gouged-out eyeballs, there’s a sense of something off-kilter. A handful of early manifestations – a painter startled by a figure in an unoccupied room; a service bell buzzing from an equally empty room – suggest a haunted house story in the classic tradition. Then Fulci ramps things up with Joe the plumber’s unfortunate transgression. After which – pardon the pun, but it really is the most apposite expression – all hell breaks loose. From hereon in, all bets are off. We’re in a fractured and disturbed cinematic space in which anything can happen.

Which isn’t to say that ‘The Beyond’ is simply a chaotic frenzy of gruesome set-pieces, one piling up against the other like a train wreck or a multiple-vehicle smash up. The craftsmanship behind the film is too artful and attentive to detail. The opening sequence sets up visual motifs which are revisited throughout the film:

Likewise, a striking shot of the mysterious blind girl Emily (Cinzia Monreale) and her guide dog standing stoically in the middle of a deserted highway is echoed in the existentially shattering final scene where Liza and John find themselves on a pathway of an entirely different sort.

‘The Beyond’ is a film better experienced than analysed, even though I do say so after expending a thousand words on it. In his rejection of logic and conventional narrative, Fulci achieves the illogical but inescapable fragmentary narrative of a dream, one palpitating onrush of primal horror or revulsion lurching into the next, one grotesque image supplanted by another until they sear the mind with a sort of visceral poetry, the entire nightmare suffused with enough pointers towards the corporeal world to make you wonder whether you’re not in fact dreaming and the bottom has simply dropped out of reality.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #10: R-Point

2011-10-23T21:59:00.001+01:00

Vietnam, 1972. A South Korean army base in Nah-Trang receives a static-heavy radio transmission from a platoon pinpointing their whereabouts as R-Point, a barren tract of no-man’s-land marked by a dilapidated temple and a makeshift graveyard. Military intelligence are disconcerted: the platoon went missing, presumed dead, six months previously. The sole surviving member, his face swathed in bandages and still confined to a hospital bed, is interviewed about the occurrence. He immediately degenerates into a screaming fit.

Thus the first three or four minutes of Su-chang Kong’s ‘R-Point’, a film that blends the innocence-under-siege war movie aesthetic of ‘Platoon’ with everything you know and love about J-horror, from the insidious and unseen evil creeping inexorably into the protagonists’ lives and consciousness to the contractually obligatory appearance of a ghost girl with long black hair.

Following the interview with the survivor, a team is assembled – ostensibly under the command of Lieutenant Choi (Woo-seong Kam) – to conduct a detailed search of R-Point and either determine whether or not the missing platoon are still alive. “Ostensibly” being the operative word, since Choi and Sergeant Jin (Byung-ho Son) are at odds from the outset. The tension between them threatens to develop into an all-out power struggle, except that the rest of the team are less interested in siding with one or the other than finding a set of dogtags – just a single set – that would allow them to document their predecessors as definitively lost and go home and take advantage of some long-delayed leave.

Events are taken out of their hands, however, when they reach the temple. This is where Kong plays his hand and what started out as a fairly generic men-on-a-mission flick (with even the ghostly radio message at the start functioning more as a McGuffin than a balls-to-the-wall scare tactic) gradually being subverted into the realms of horror. “Gradually” being the operative word, with the sequence of events progressing from elliptical glimpses of the aforementioned ghost girl to a tense whittle-down-the-numbers finale reminiscent of ‘The Thing’, by way of the sucker punch revelation that Choi and Jin’s team includes a dead man.

Kong’s sleight of hand in pulling off this particular bit of narrative trickery is as confident as it is audacious. It’s certainly the high point of the film, a pièce de résistance worthy of comparison to Dario Argento giving you the killer’s identity pretty damn early on in ‘Deep Red’ and banking on his audience remaining blind to it. The brilliance of it is perhaps, ever so slightly, to the film’s detriment, since many other elements of ‘R-Point’ seem generic – arguably derivative – by comparison.

Still, there is much to enjoy in this still-underrated entry in the J-horror canon. The characters are a bunch of average joes forced into the theatre of conflict and trying to deal with as best they can, rather than the macho grunts depicted by so many American mainstream movies of this ilk. Kong practically drenches the movie in atmosphere: a shot of the temple at sunset is striking and unsettling; likewise a previously overlooked field full of crosses, suddenly illuminated by lightning, is as creepy as any of the outright supernatural scenes.

Even if it doesn’t quite hit the heights of ‘The Ring’ or ‘A Tale of Two Sisters’ (for me, the A-list of J-horror), then it misses only by a short head. ‘R-Point’ is grittily shot, energetically directed and gives you the creeps as effortlessly as it blends genres.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #9: Hocus Pocus

2011-10-21T19:04:00.002+01:00

Real life kind of got in the way today, so here’s a short piece of fluff about a short piece of fluff, just to keep 13 For Halloween on track. There’ll be something better after the weekend … honest!

There are three genuinely terrifying things about ‘Hocus Pocus’:

1. Bette Midler’s hairdo.*

2. Kathy Najimy’s facial expressions.**

3. Realizing that, pre-‘Sex and the City’, Sarah Jessica Parker was actually quite fanciable.***

The story centres around three Salem witches – played by the above named ladies – who are hanged for kidnapping a child and draining her of her lifeforce in order to reverse the ageing process. As a peripheral casualty, the girl’s brother tangles with them prior to the arrival of the lynch mob and is cursed to eternal life as a black cat.

Fast forward 300 years and we’re in the early 90s (and boy does it show!) New kid in town Max (Omri Katz) bitches about giving up life in LA, tangles with two of the least threatening bullies ever brought to the screen – Jay (Tobias Jelinek) and Ernie (Larry Bagby) a white rapper wannabe who prefers to be addressed as ‘Ice’ – and is smitten by teen princess Alison (Vinessa Shaw). Meanwhile, all Max’s kid sister Dani (Thora Birch) wants to do is go trick or treating.

In an attempt to impress Alison, Max sets out to pooh-pooh the legend of the Sanderson sisters (Midler and co) but inadvertently brings them back to life. Max, Dani and Alison abscond with the sisters’ book of spells, which contains the conjuration they need to restore life fully (otherwise they’ll turn to ash come sun-up) and the three Sandersons set off in hot and decidedly supernatural pursuit.

That’s it, plotwise, apart from some business involving a zombie summoned from its grave to assist in retrieving the book and a talking cat who provides helpful exposition and – tying with the then 11-year old Thora Birch – gives the best performance.

Midler and co ham it up to the nines (although Parker generates some genuine giggles with her boy-crazy ditzy blonde turn), while brother and sister directors Garry and Penny Marshall turn in hilarious cameos as a suburban couple whose Halloween party is mistaken by the Sandersons as a Satanic ritual. This scene, playing brilliantly on the modern concept of Halloween as a subversion of everything the witchy sisters stand for, could have been the template for a much funnier and more roisterous film. However, the Disney banner and the family-friendly rating took precedence. ‘Hocus Pocus’ could have been bittersweet Halloween candy; as it is, it’s cheesier than a month-old chunk of gruyere.

*The dentistry came a very close second.

**Seriously, she does so much gurning that I spent the movie thinking ‘Kathy, quit it – if the wind changes you’ll stay that way and you aren’t going to be able to change back. You’re only playing a witch.’

***To SJP’s lawyers: I didn’t write this. Someone hacked my account and wrote this whole post without my knowledge. Really! I mean, c’mon, do you honestly think I’d review something like ‘Hocus Pocus’? It’s the blog equivalent of getting fraped.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #8: The Reaping

2011-10-20T11:05:00.002+01:00

According to Exodus (chapters five to eleven inclusive) ten plagues were visited upon Egypt. The Egyptians assumed that God was a mite pissed off at them.

According to Katherine Winter (Hilary Swank), an erstwhile minister who now debunks religious phenomena, “In 1400 B.C., a group of nervous Egyptians saw the Nile turn red. But what they thought was blood was actually an algae bloom which killed the fish, which prior to that had been living off the eggs of frogs. Those uneaten eggs turned into record numbers of baby frogs who subsequently fled to the land and died. Their little rotting frog bodies attracted lice and flies. The lice carried the bluetongue virus, which killed 70% of Egypt’s livestock. The flies carried glanders, a bacterial infection which in humans causes boils. Soon afterwards, the Nile River Valley was hit with a three-day sandstorm otherwise known as the plague of darkness. During a sandstorm, intense heat can combine with an approaching cold front to create not only hail but also electrical storms which would have looked to the ancient Egyptians like fire from the sky. The subsequent wind would have blown the Ethiopian locust population off course and right into downtown Cairo. Hail is wet; locusts leave droppings. Spread both on grain, and you’ve got mycotoxins. Dinnertime in ancient Egypt meant the first-born child got the biggest portion which in this case meant he ate the most toxins, so he died. Ten plagues. Ten scientific explanations.”

Katherine has been asked by university colleague Doug (David Morrissey) to visit his hometown of Haven, a smiley and slightly-too-polite little place in the Louisiana Bible belt where an intolerant redneck mentality bubbles away just beneath the surface. It’s here that Loren (AnnaSophia Robb), the creepy daughter of a local outcast, is at the centre of a series of inexplicable events that are shaping up into a contemporary re-enactment of the plagues. Doug’s worried that Haven will invite the wrong kind of publicity and trusts to Katherine and her research assistant Ben (Idris Elba) to unearth a rational explanation.

They arrive to a river whose waters have turned red. Lab result: blood. Ben witnesses a fall of frogs from the sky. Lice and flies attack a barbeque at the run-down colonial house where Doug is putting up Katherine and Ben, and where a mutual attraction is simmering away between Doug and Katherine. But before things can get too lovey-dovey, more plague-like activity is taking place, livestock keeling over and dying even though DNA samples indicate there’s nothing wrong with them. Katherine experiences strange dreams/hallucinations, as well as flashbacks to her disastrous experience as a minister in Africa, the fallout from which led her to turn her back on the church. Then there’s some spooky business involving her former mentor, Father Costigan (Stephen Rea), who comes to believe that Katherine is in danger.

Met with inexplicable indifference on its release, Stephen Hopkins’s ‘The Reaping’ is a gripping and atmospheric chiller that wrings maximum atmosphere from its small town setting (Haven has a David-Lynch-in-the-bayou kind of vibe) and benefits from a cluster of solid, understated performances. Swank plays Katherine as a skeptic with a margin for ambivalence, her logical and reasonable outlook skewed just enough by the vulnerability of her personal experience that she comes off as a rounded and sympathetic character rather than the Agent Scully clone she could easily have become in lesser hands. Rea’s hangdog look is employed effectively, his world-weary priest stumbling onto something cosmically bigger than he is equipped to deal with. Elba is also very good, conveying the calmness which belies Ben’s violent past; Elba plays what is essentially a character created for expositional purposes with a dignity that made me think of Morgan Freeman. I’ve seen little else of his work, but damn that needs rectifying!

Regarding AnnaSophia Robb: The Agitation of the Mind Award for Creepy Kid is in the mail. ’Nuff said.

Actor/writer brothers Carey and Chad Hayes deserve a mention for a screenplay that incorporates the ten plagues and Satanic cults without descending into abject cliché or hysteria and keeping things focused and slow-burn almost until the end. Which is where things almost – almost – tip over into parody. The plague is a well-effected and skin-crawling set-piece, only to be superseded by the fire from the sky part of things, which reminded me of nothing else than ‘The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse’. There were a few moments where I was thrown out of the film by the expectation of Papa Lazarou turning up and rasping “It’s my apocalypse now, Dave”. Or Hilary Briss agreeing a knock-down price for the dead cattle.

Fortunately, Hopkins is canny enough to not overplay his hand, and this sequence runs only as long as is necessary. The actual denouement is quieter and darker in its implications. Overall, ‘The Reaping’ works well. In the canon of supernatural-themed films which debate the existence, implications of and conflict between good and evil, most fixate on the chief players in the battle – the demon and the exorcist, the Satanist and the priest, the force of evil and the force of good. ‘The Reaping’, while paying its dues to the devil and the angels, never loses sight of the mortals caught in the middle.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #7: Prince of Darkness

2011-10-19T14:34:00.003+01:00

The key to John Carpenter’s underrated ‘Prince of Darkness’ is the pseudonym under which he took credit for the screenplay: Martin Quatermass. Carpenter cheekily alleged in the press notes that this personage was no less than the brother of renowned scientist Bernard Quatermass.

This latter Quatermass, of course, was the brainchild of Nigel Kneale whose fiendishly inventive and cleverly constructed ‘Quatermass and the Pit’ was an acknowledged influence on Carpenter. ‘Prince of Darkness’ can easily be read as a variation on ‘Quatermass and the Pit’, with a sprinkling of other Kneale homages – most specifically ‘The Stone Tape’ and ‘The Road’ – thrown in to intriguing effect.

On another level, ‘Prince of Darkness’ is also pure Carpenter, from Gary B. Kibbe’s geometrical cinematography which evokes Dean Cundey’s previous work for the director, to the incessant rhythms of the Carpenter/Howarth score; from the presence of Donald Pleasance (‘Halloween’, ‘Escape from New York’) to the narrative conflation of supernatural (‘The Fog’ etc) and siege (‘Assault on Precinct 13’) elements.

In an opening credit sequence that runs a couple of seconds shy of ten minutes, an elderly priest dies and the key to a dilapidated church passes into the hands of his colleague (Donald Pleasance); Professor Birack (Victor Wong), a lecturer at Kneale University, engages his students in sub-atomic theory; two unlikely-to-hook-up members of the student body – mustachioed He-man type Brian (Jameson Parker) and earnest intellectual Catherine (Lisa Blount) – find themselves on course towards hooking up; and the priest contacts Birack with a view to a scientific investigation of the McGuffin his predecessor – a member of the so-called Brotherhood of Sleep – was hiding in the church basement.

Intrigued, Birack corrals a group of his colleagues and his students into helping out. They haul their apparatus into the old church and set up shop there. Meanwhile, news broadcasts are full of the new discovery of a supernova, insects are multiplying and swarming everywhere and a group of homeless people suddenly turn all zombie-like and lay siege to the church. The McGuffin in the cellar turns out to be a huge glass vial full of swirling green fluid that looks like some weird version of a slushy maker that’s been filled with crème de menthe instead of orange juice. It’s secured by a seemingly impenetrable locking mechanism that, as one of the students discovers, can only be opened from the inside.

It contains something very ancient, very dangerous and very ready to embark on its comeback tour.

For its first hour, ‘Prince of Darkness’ moves and grooves quite nicely, getting its science vs superstition funk on in fine stylee. Carpenter keeps the tension on the backburner, gradually bringing the atmosphere inside the church to boiling point. The homeless (and now, presumably, soulless) amass outside to sinister effect and an early sequence that veers into outright horror boasts the genuinely unsettling image of a crucified bird followed by the almost-funny-but-not-quite image of a secondary character buying the farm in a bizarre death-by-unicycle set-piece.

Aye, for virtually two-thirds of the running time, Carpenter pulls off a virtuoso high-wire act between white-knuckle genre thrills and thinking man’s extrapolation of the age-old good vs evil conflict filtered through the logical perameters of scientific enquiry.

At which point Carpenter remembers he’s supposed to be making a horror film and it’s balls to the wall Satanic zombies from hereon in. Heads lopped off, see you at end. This, coupled with the functionality of the characters (for the most part they exist as expositional/theoretical mouthpieces rather than as fully rounded people whom we might actually give a shit about), pretty much boots ‘Prince of Darkness’ out of the first tier of John Carpenter’s filmography. And there are those who would kick it down even lower.

Still, for all that the acting performances range from bland (Parker) to phoned-in (Pleasance) to doing what she can with the material (Blount), ‘Prince of Darkness’ retains enough of the intelligence and intrigue of its first hour – particularly with regard to the authentically creepy dream sequences – to compensate for the slightly ropy pay-off. It’s given short shrift in the Carpenter canon, but it deserves better.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #6: P2

2011-10-17T20:18:00.001+01:00

Meet Thomas (Wes Bentley). Clean cut lad, a bit nerdy, but polite and thoughtful. Steady job as a security guard in the underground car park of a high-rise office building. Likes Elvis, dotes on his rottweiler Rocky, and gets a little blue at being on his own at Christmastime. Oh, and he’s a got a bit of a thing for career-focused businesswoman Angela (Rachel Nichols).

A bit of an unhealthy thing, actually.

This becomes sickeningly apparent to Angela at the end of a really crap last day at the office before the holidays. Christmas Eve, in fact. The office party – at which she only just managed to fend off the drunken advances of Jim (Simon Reynolds), a married colleague – is over, and everyone’s gone home but Karl (Philip Akin) the concierge and Thomas. Angela’s still putting the finishing touches to an important contract. Her relatives ring, wondering why she’ll be joining them. Eventually, the contract completed, Angela takes the lift down to parking level two where he car refuses to start. Thomas offers assistance, but when his charger makes no difference to the battery, Angela insists on going back up to the foyer to wait for a cab. Thomas asks her to spend Christmas with him, but she politely refuses. Upstairs, the cab finally arrives only to drive unceremoniously away again when Angela finds the main doors locked. So it’s back down to the underground parking area again and this is where things turn nasty.

Thomas’s Christmas celebrations involve a chloroform-soaked handkerchief, a chain that shackles Angela’s foot to his desk and a cleavage-revealing little white dress that Angela, awakening groggily, finds that he’s dressed her in having divested her of the business suit. But, y’know, he’s laid on dinner as well.

What follows, except for the sundry fates of the lecherous Jim and the luckless Karl, is a claustrophobic two-hander. Thomas’s delusions of romancing Angela, evidenced by his “gee whiz” persona and almost fawning attentiveness, give way to incrementally more threatening behaviour. For all his initial insistence that he won’t harm her, Thomas loses his cool when Angela defends Jim’s drunken mistake as just that while Thomas insists that he should be taught a lesson for treating her disrespectfully (I’ll leave you to work out his score in the Double Standard Olympic event yourselves). Later, when she escapes the confines of his office for the only marginally less prison-like environment of the four parking levels, the gloves are off and Thomas sets out to win back the maiden fair by means of ~~flowers, chocolates and poetry~~ CCTV, a Taser and a rottweiler.

When Angela takes the fight back to him, she uses ingenuity and survival instinct. And an axe. A fucking big axe.

Co-written by director Franck Khalfoun and producers Alexandre Aja (he of ‘Switchblade Romance’, the ‘Hills Have Eyes’ remake and latterly, uh, ‘Piranha 3D’) and Gregory Levasseur, ‘P2’ arrived in 2007 at the tail end of a glut of “torture porn” flicks. Sequels ‘Hostel Part II’ and ‘The Hills Have Eyes 2’ had opened to lacklustre reviews, while the ‘Saw’ franchise was up to its fourth instalment. Roland Joffe’s ‘Captivity’, released a few months prior to ‘P2’, had been roundly drubbed, the controversy generated by its advertising campaign doing it few favours in terms of box office takings. To put it mildly, ‘P2’ wasn’t in good company and it met with critical indifference and a small audience. Which is a deal shame. Because, for all its formulaic set-up and reliance on established tropes, ‘P2’ is a cracking little movie.

Khalfoun cares enough about character to give over 20 minutes to establishing his heroine and her Christmas Eve catalogue of bad luck, and then almost another 20 minutes to developing Thomas beyond me snarling psycho, before cutting loose with the nasty stuff. Even then, he doesn’t rely on violence and gore alone to carry the second act (although he throws around the red stuff liberally enough on a couple of occasions). At its best, ‘P2’ is an old-school cat ‘n’ mouse thriller, the shadows and brutal concrete architecture of the car park throwing slabs of menace across each frame. Khalfoun, in his directorial debut, ratchets up the tension like a pro.

There are also some nice touches of humour, such as Thomas miming to ‘Blue Christmas’ and doing a little boogie with a giant teddy bear. Bentley gives a memorable performance, slowly peeling away the layers of Thomas’s mania from reticent but smitten nerdy type to vengeful nutcase, while Nichols makes for a feisty protagonist who avoids all the potential pitfalls of clichéd scream queen histrionics. Despite the plunging neckline.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #5: Event Horizon

2011-10-16T10:28:00.003+01:00

The horror movie in space is a dodgy concept. Occasionally, a movie comes along that gets it right. That movie is called ‘Alien’. The rest of the time we get things like ‘Hellraiser: Bloodline’ and ‘Jason X’.

Paul W.S. Anderson’s ‘Event Horizon’ falls between two stools. It’s a quantum leap from the abject pieces of dross epitomized by Pinhead-beyond-the-stars and Jayce-in-space. But it’s still a good few parsecs away from presenting any real competition to Ridley Scott’s classic.

Ironically, the main flaw is also its biggest plus point in terms of it being a guilty pleasure. ‘Event Horizon’ is derivative. Hugely. And not in a “hmmm, I reckon we can sneak this through without anyone noticing” kind of way. ‘Event Horizon’ is derivative in a way that can only be described as a cross-between ‘Wacky Races’ and ‘Supermarket Sweep’ populated by plagiarists. “Mwuhahahahah! I am going to steal this and this and this and this!”

The film starts with the crew of the rescue ship Lewis and ~~Morse~~ Clarke going into suspended animation prior to a little jaunt out to the far side of Neptune. They’re joined by the standoffish Dr Weir (Sam Neill), a man who is troubled by visions of the wife he lost to suicide. Before you can say ‘Solaris’, they’re at Neptune and Dr Weir is briefing them. Eight years previously, an ftl ship he designed (the eponymous Event Horizon) disappeared, with the loss of its full crew. Now it’s reappeared. The Lewis and Clarke’s captain, Miller (Laurence Fishburne) isn’t too happy about this, the Event Horizon having something of a reputation as a ghost ship, and neither are his crew.

Quick pause to meet the ~~shreddies~~ crewmembers. We’ve got medical technician Peters (Kathleen Quinlan), chief medical officer D.J. (Jason Isaacs), the feisty Lieutenant Starck (Joely Richardson), and disposable grunt types Smith (Sean Pertwee) and Cooper (Richard T. Jones). Smith is notable for scowling a lot and saying “faakin’ ’ell“ in an East End brogue that suggests he fancied his chances in a Guy Ritchie production but turned up at the wrong audition.

Anyway, no sooner do the Lewis and Clarke group instigate docking procedures with the Event Horizon than Weir is seeing manifestations of his dead wife while Peters is being haunted by glimpses of her son. This particular lad is given to popping up in the background, a dwarf-like figure in a hooded coat, finally luring Peters into a nasty encounter. Before you can say ‘Don’t Look Now’, our heroes turn up some footage that indicates the previous crew, isolated and lost, died in spectacularly gory fashion. And before you can say ‘The Thing’, it becomes apparent that the Event Horizon itself is a malignant entity, possessing those who roam its endless corridors. And before you can say ‘The Shining’, one of the characters has gone bonkers in the worst possible way – lacerations all over his face, mind polluted with sybaritic evil and babbling about the wonderful and terrible things he has seen. And before you can say ‘Hellraiser’ … well, you get the picture.

‘Event Horizon’ doesn’t have a single original idea in its airlock. Even the set-design puts you in mind of other films: the needle-like mid-section of the Event Horizon has a very ‘2001’ vibe, while the interior of the Lewis and Clarke, bizarrely, put me in mind of ‘Red Dwarf’. What ‘Event Horizon’ does have going for it is a decent build-up to the horrors the demon ship launches on its unwary interlopers, a pacy second half, a cast who bring some quality to the proceedings and – best of all – a well-realized concept of the titular ship. Corridors are the shape of eyes, guardrails and steel-mesh walkways crisscross the superstructure like a skeleton, and the ftl device rumbling darkly at the core of the ship has a retro-industrial look, something that could conceivably have been forged in one of Blake’s “dark Satanic mills”.

Style over substance, then, but I’m not going to complain when it’s as darkly stylish as this (a shot, very near the start, where the camera slowly glides out through a portal and threads its way through the architecture of a space station which recedes to a speck as it drifts into the depths of space, is enough to make you stand up and applaud), or when the 18-rating gleefully justifies itself in the full-blooded finale.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #4: The Unborn

2011-10-15T12:00:00.002+01:00

As with ‘Giallo’ a couple of weeks ago, I approached this knowing that it had been roundly peed on by the critics, only to spend the first half wondering why they were being so down on it and relishing the prospect of writing a corrective review.

As with ‘Giallo’, the second half demonstrated exactly why it had got peed on and another promising “hey, wow, you really need to check this out” write-up turned to ash and blew away in the cold October wind like so many leaves gusting forlornly through a cemetery.

Saving graces? Well, the first half ain’t bad, there’s some reasonably effective (if derivative) scares, and leading lady Odette Yustman has a pleasing touch of the young Jennifer Connelly about it. (Believe me, such things can be the saving grace of an average movie.)

Yustman plays Casey Beldon, an average all-American high school student with a hunky boyfriend, Mark (Cam Gigandet) and a loyal best friend, Romy (Meagan Good). Her mother’s suicide a few years ago is the one dark moment in her otherwise fairly privileged life (yup, this is one those films where all the characters live in houses bigger than the freakin’ office building I work in), but her dad’s the supportive type and the future’s looking bright. This being a horror movie – and a Platinum Dunes horror movie at that – you just know this isn’t going to be the case for long.

A word about the Platinum Dunes connection. Regular readers of the blog will know that I rank Michael Bay only a few places below Satan in the league table of forces working to perpetrate hideous evil in this world, and that I once described Platinum Dunes as “less a film production company that a serial rapist lurking down the midnight streets of ’70s cinema”, I approached ‘The Unborn’ with trepidation. The only plus point seemed to be that at least it wasn’t another remake.

Or is it? The longer ‘The Unborn’ unraveled in front of me – which isn’t that long: it clocks in at 85 minutes, nearly ten of which are the end credits – the more I was convinced it was a remake in all but remake, or at the very least a patchwork quilt of heavy-handed influences. Kind of a “greatest hits” package of the films that Platinum Dunes would like to remake but know they don’t have a cat in hell’s chance.

Principally ‘The Exorcist’.

But we’re jumping ahead a little. Back to the plot synopsis. The movie starts with Casey troubled by visions of a child’s glove dropped in the middle of lonely street; a young boy appearing behind her, his face grey and eyes lifeless; and a jar of formaldehyde buried in the woods, contents: one foetus. There’s an incident while she’s babysitting, a small child holding a shard of glass over his infant sibling. Then Mark notices a strange pigmentation in one of Casey’s eyes. A minute or so of medical exposition suggests she’s a twin, a fact she contests: she’s an only child.

Then her father drops the bombshell: her twin brother died in the womb, throttled by Casey’s umbilical cord. This, as you can well imagine, is the kind of revelation that can blow a person’s blow right open. And writer/director David S Goyer does a commendable job, for the first half hour anyway, of keeping the creepy stuff low key and playing on how much of what follows is in Casey’s mind and how much is actually an invidious and age-old evil working its way ineffably into her life.

So far, so watchable. Then comes the time for explanations and this is where the locomotive of ‘The Unborn’ lurches around a blind curve and threatens to derail. Casey’s Jewish ancestry comes to light (because, yeah, you’d reach the age of nineteen without knowing you were Jewish) and Holocaust survivor Sofi Kozma (Jane Alexander) pops up to give it some more exposition. Turns out everything centres around a dybbuk which came into being after Sofi and her twin brother were the victims of Nazi experiments in Auschwitz.

Riiiiiiight. A demon out of Jewish folklore that had its Casey-specific genesis in the concentration camps. This takes us out of hokey but entertaining horror movie territory and gives the filmmakers two options: total lurid exploitationer or horror as catharsis in which the legacy of Hitler’s attempt at racial extermination is dealt with responsibly (or at the very least with some purpse). ‘The Unholy’ doesn’t really do either, and this is where the derailment occurs. The film wants to say something about the nature of evil; wants to say something about possession; wants to say something about how the shadows of the past are always creeping through the waning sunlight of the present. But it never quite functions on any level above mainstream narrative simplicity tinged with the imagery and editing tricks of J-horror.

And so we arrive back at ‘The Unholy’ as a template for what an ‘Exorcist’ remake would look like if Platinum Dunes ever got to have their wicked little way. Granted, Gary Oldman brings some gravitas to what is basically the Max von Sydow role, but a rite of exorcism in Hebrew just doesn’t cut it in comparison with “the power of Christ compels you”. Nor do the climactic exorcism or the painfully transparent last moment twist invite any comparison to the primal power of Friedkin’s classic.

A blatant piece of self-promotion

2011-10-14T19:22:00.003+01:00

In non-film related news, my short story 'The Assistant' - joint winner in a recent competition - has been published on the LeftLion website. There's an Alan Sillitoe theme, which makes me even more proud of it.

A brief word from the ouija board

2011-10-13T20:57:00.002+01:00

This is happening on 28th October. Some seriously cool bloggers are participating. And me.

Captain Howdy would really appreciate it if you could be there.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #3: Saint Ange

2011-10-11T20:31:00.001+01:00

Psssst. Wanna see a vile, vehement and vitriolic outpouring of hate against a film? I mean a real, full-on hatchet job, the critical equivalent of a murder suspect spending half an hour in a windowless room with a James Ellroy protagonist and a telephone directory?

Then just head on over to IMDb and read the user reviews for Pascal Laugier’s ‘Saint Ange’ (you’ll find it under the blandly generic US release title ‘House of Voices’). You will find Laugier impugned (“he is a pseudo-director and an even worse writer”), tales of antagonistic screenings (“people here fell asleep or walked out of the movie”), aspersions cast upon the film’s overall aesthetic (“pure crap and tastelessness”), and controversy over the denouement (“the end is just rubbish put together to wrap the film up and when the credits appear you feel robbed”).

Actually quite liked it, me. While being able to appreciate just why it would piss a lot of folk off. Short of ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’ and its half time crime-thriller-to-vampire-flick transition, I can’t think of another film that changes horses in mid-stream to quite such contrapuntal effect. True, there are plenty of films out there which hurl narrative curveballs at you with demonic glee – James Mangold’s ‘Identity’ for example, or Laugier’s own ‘Martyrs’ – but precious few that ascend to the diving board of one genre only to gracefully swandive (or messily bellyflop, depending on the eye of the beholder) into the deep end of another.

‘Saint Ange’ starts with a couple of children – a boy and a girl – exploring by torchlight the corridors of the creaky old orphanage where they live. This place is the province of stern-looking nuns, dusty classrooms and dilapidated communal bathrooms. It’s into the bathroom that our pre-pubescent protagonists of the moment sneak. The boy hauls himself up onto a sink the better to peer into a grimy mirror. He sees something and rears back, startled.

Cut to the aftermath of the incident. It’s 1958. The orphans are herded onto buses which will take them to their new foster parents. The orphanage is effectively mothballed, left to the caretaking of a skeleton staff, while the relevant authorities investigate the accident, review the quality of care provided and decide upon the future of the facility. Anna (Virginie Ledoyen) is employed to assist Mathilde (Virginie Darmon) in the upkeep of Saint Ange. One of the residents – the adult but still somewhat infantile Judith (Lou Doillon) – has remained behind and gradually forms an attachment to Anna.

Anna is hiding a pregnancy – an elliptic flashback and a smidgin of dialogue (the film is rich in suggestion and allusion but almost totally free of exposition) heavily imply that the pregnancy is a result of rape – and the almost deserted Saint Ange is the ideal place to hole up until the child is born. Anna’s only there a short time, though, before her decidedly non-maternal feelings are in conflict with her increasing need – her obsession – to unravel the enigma of the fate of a number of children sequestered at Saint Ange during the war.

The first forty minutes are so slow-burn that it would only be partially inaccurate to say that bugger all happens. Narratively, there are some suggestions of a haunting. Hints – very, very nebulous ones – are dropped about Anna’s past, Judith’s emotional/mental state and the history of the orphanage. In terms of character study, however, Laugier’s turning up the heat by almost imperceptible degrees.

Then, roughly around the halfway mark (just like what ’e bleedin’ went ‘n’ done in ‘Martyrs’, guv’nor), Laugier pulls the rug, throws the switch, loops the loop and generally headfucks the audience in cavalier fashion. I’m not giving anything away; suffice it to say that what follows (certainly in terms of mise-en-scene) points the way towards ‘Martyrs’, while anticipating, viscerally, the dark vision of maternity arrived at Fabrice du Welz’s ‘Vinyan’.

The crunchiest bone of contention – at least in the cross section presented by the IMDb user reviews – is that this climactic section is both oblique in its meaning and stylistically at odds with everything that has gone before. The shadowy corridors and eerie imagery that earlier marked out ‘Saint Ange’ as a classic period-set haunted house movie are replaced by something more akin to contemporary horror, or even possibly sci-fi. The implication, at least in my reading of the film, keys into the spectre of Nazi-ism that is inevitably conjured when Anna’s determination to find out what happened to the billeted children stirs up memories of the war. Just how much of her final discovery is manifested supernaturally and how much by a mind besieged by its own traumas remains the film’s central, insoluble enigma.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #2: Cigarette Burns

2011-10-10T20:42:00.001+01:00

As ‘Jenifer’ and ‘Pelts’ provided a surprise (albeit small screen) return to form for Dario Argento, so ‘Cigarette Burns’ for John Carpenter, one of his two contributions to the TV series ‘Masters of Horror’.

Kirby (Norman Reedus), a film collector and owner/programmer of a run-down independent cinema, is hired by the effete but sinister Bellinger (Udo Kier) to track down the one existing print of a French art film so notorious that its only public screening incited sociopathic behaviour in its audience. ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ (trans. ‘The Absolute End of the World’) is a film Kirby’s always been curious about, but apprehensive of. He recognizes in Bellinger an obsession with it that borders on addiction. Kirby knows all about an addiction. He’s a recovering drug addict (his wife – to whose antagonistic father he owes a fuckton of money invested in the cinema – was a victim to his lifestyle). He knows Bellinger and ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ spell trouble, particularly when he’s shown an, uh, “artefact” from the film as part of Bellinger’s private collection. But the money that’s being offered – more than enough to bale out the cinema – sways him.

Carpenter structures the first half of ‘Cigarette Burns’ almost as a slow-burn detective story with Kirby tracking down film historians and critics associated with the production and its disastrous debut, a trail that leads him from America to France and the troubled daughter of the film’s quixotic director. En route, Kirby is plagued with visions/recollections of his wife, disturbed by the subject matter of ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ (I don’t want to spoil anything so let’s just say it contains material that pretty much fits the definition of unholy), warned off by those with a vested interest in the film, and – albeit unwillingly – made complicit in the actions of certain parties who are perversely inspired by it.

“All this filming,” alcoholic landlady Mrs Stephens (Maxine Audley) says in Michael Powell’s career-destroying controversy-fest ‘Peeping Tom’ – “it isn’t healthy.” ‘Cigarette Burns’ could easily serve as an hour-long exposition of this sentiment. Leo Mark’s script for ‘Peeping Tom’ focused on scopophilia, defined medically as the morbid desire to watch. Obsession; addiction. Bellinger’s desperation to see ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ owes to a desire to experience art – cinema – on a visceral and dangerous level. Bellinger wants something stripped of the obvious safety net of fiction/fabrication. Kirby’s motives are those of professional interest tipped slightly too far by an admixture of financial necessity and morbid curiosity.

And that, in a nutshell, is the appeal of ‘Cigarette Burns’: it’s a morality tale for the cinephile; a ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’ for every horror fan, obscurist or completist out there. If ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ existed, and its reputation was as tarnished by controversy and I had a copy within my grasp despite warnings against even thinking about watching it, would I walk away and always wonder, or sit down with a fearful tremor of anticipation and relish the possibility of reviewing it for The Agitation of the Mind?

No contest.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #1: Detention

2011-10-09T15:13:00.002+01:00

Welcome to this year’s 13 for Halloween. What say we kick off with some teenagers getting offed gruesomely in the very high school they’re generically emblematic of? Yeah? Cool.

‘Detention’ is an uber-low-budget outing by James D.R. Hickox, son of Douglas (‘Theatre of Blood’) Hickox and brother of Anthony (‘Waxwork’) Hickox. Keeping it in the family is all well and good, but JDR hasn’t yet demonstrated the surefootedness of his forebears. His output ranges from ‘Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest’ to the comedy thriller ‘Girls Gone Psycho’, whose tagline (“hell hath no fury like a woman porn’d”) is easily the best thing about it.

‘Detention’ is his most recent outing and, despite a couple of belly-laughs and a cast who are at least game in going along with the nonsense that’s asked of them, I can’t in all honesty pen a review of it without mentioning the small but important fact that, by even the loosest set of critical perameters, it’s hugely derivative and pretty dire. But it’s reasonably entertaining in a stumble-home-from-the-pub/watch-any-old-shit/laugh-it-up kind of way. It also features one of David Carradine’s last performances (the film is dedicated to him).

Many of its flaws – particularly the dodgy CGI and the we-broke-in-and-filmed-this-after-everyone-had-gone-for-the-night production values – can be blamed on the budget. The acting is variable. Carradine, sad to say, phones it in. Alexa Jago – whose biggest deal was a bit part in ‘Waterworld’ – confuses being co-producer with having a license to overact. The kids, however, aren’t bad at all. In fact, to say I watched this purely for the promise of obnoxious student types buying the farm, it almost pains me to admit that the kids are alright.

Let’s meet the little buggers. Paul (Preston Jones) is the sporty type with the hot blonde girlfriend. Lisa (Maitland McConnell) is said hottie. Jack (Billy Aaron Brown), Paul’s best bud, is a stoner who insists on calling everyone “mon” in a really bad Jamaican accent for most of the movie. Then we’ve got rich bitch princess Mimi (Rachel Stirling) and her nerdy wannabe boyfriend Sam (Michael Mitchell). Rounding out the ensemble are goth Sarah (Zelda Williams) and token black guy who turns in the best performance but gets killed off arbitrarily anyway because racism still calls the fucking shots even in this day and age T-Loc (Jonathan McDaniel). For various reasons, the septet end up in – you got it – detention (much to Paul’s chagrin as he’s missing a football game) under the less-than-watchful eye of Coach Littich (Thomas Calabro). There’s even some expository dialogue around why the motherfucking coach is overseeing the detention class instead of being at the game, but it was so tortuously and laboriously arrived at that my brain died part way through and for the life of me I can’t wrestle it into any semblance of coherent sense.

Anyway, Coach Littick is more interested in the MILF-like Miss Cipher (Jago) – if the name doesn’t give it away, then the film’s final act revelation will come as a genuine surprise and I’m very happy for you – who has taken to wandering the corridors by torchlight after a surprise storm knocks the power out. Clichés, much?

Let’s cut to the chase. Those selfsame corridors are the playground of bad CGI ghosts that swoop and dissipate and rematerialize and make you yearn for the old days of superimpositions or stop-motion. The student body (or at least its detention-doomed contingent) start dying graphically. Everything turns out to be connected to an incident back in the 70s where a kid died as the result of a nasty prank and a surprise storm.

I don’t need to labour the point: ‘Detention’ is a patchwork quilt of homages, mostly to equally no-budget but still way better 70s B-movies. In fact, ‘Detention’ is most noteworthy as a good point of comparison between horror back then and horror now. Crucial differences being that your average 70s high school horror would have an 18-certificate, the kill scenes would be infinitely more gruesome and the obligatory have-sex-and-die moment would feature actual nudity. No much to ask, you’d think. But ‘Detention’ fails to deliver in these areas, just as it fails to generate any actual scares.

Not so much bad as terminally indifferent, ‘Detention’ earns its eponymous spell after school.

A brief word from the pumpkin king …

2011-10-08T19:15:00.001+01:00

Ah, greetings.

Desist with that paring knife for a moment. There will be plenty of time to hack into my brethren, scoop out their seeds, carve the masques of horror into their orange flesh and light the ghoulish sockets of their eyes with candles.

Plenty of time for that, my friends.

Now, though, we commence the second annual 13 for Halloween mini-season on The Agitation of the Mind, that bastion of all things bastardly that burns bright and blights the blogosphere.

(Er, thanks, pumpkin king. – Neil)

But not content just to haunt your minds with rancid and repulsive reviews of thirteen tales of terror, your weird and worrying webmaster will be joining forces, during the last five days of the month, for a collaborative blogging event curated by Francisco from The Film Connoisseur which will complete the crazed and creepy countdown to the spookiest night of the year. More details nearer the time.

But for now, sheath that paring knife. There will be time aplenty to slice, slash, stab and sever. Instead join me from tomorrow as we waltz beneath a waning moon while the children of night make their sweet music.

(Yo, pumpkin king. Three things: (i) give me my blog back; (ii) leave the alliteration to me, I do it so much better; (iii) for an orange guy, your prose sure is purple.)

The horror, the horror

2011-10-07T21:57:00.001+01:00

Ladies and gentlemummies, guys and ghouls, thank you for your patience during a week of inactivity on The Agitation of the Mind. Tomorrow, there’ll be a brief introduction to 13 for Halloween, then we’ll be charging full-tilt through a month of horror movies like a headless horseman through a graveyard.

Before that, however, please head over here for details of the Kevin Olson’s Italian horror movie blogathon. I was pleased to participate last year and I’ll certainly be doing so again this time round. Be sure to check out the contributions during the run-up to Halloween and please give some sidebar space to one of Kevin’s gleefully gruesome banners.

A stunning example of journalistic integrity

2011-10-03T21:02:00.002+01:00

The Mail Online, 8.50pm today:

The Mail Online, 8.52pm today:

Your pre-written, pre-packaged news for today is brought to you by The Daily Fail.

Visual poetry: Footprints

2011-10-02T18:32:00.010+01:00

GIALLO SUNDAY: Footprints

2011-10-02T16:05:00.001+01:00

Alice (Florinda Balkan) is a translator living in a minimalist apartment in a soulless city dominated by high rise buildings. Rushing to complete a translation for a midday deadline, she turns in the document only to be met with accusatory hostility by her superior. It transpires that Alice’s deadline was three days earlier. Three days that Alice has no memory of. She’s frostily informed that she disappeared from a major astronautical conference after some kind of breakdown. Her job is now in the balance.

Already brittle, Alice is also plagued by dreams of an unconscious man being abandoned on the dusty surface of the moon as part of an experiment. She seems to think the dreams are a memory of a science-fiction film she saw many years earlier entitled ‘Footprints on the Moon’, a film she rushed out of before the end and has seemingly been disturbed by for much of her adult life.

In her apartment, she finds a dress with a spot of blood on it that isn’t hers, as well as a torn up photograph of an old hotel at a coastal resort. She can recall details about the hotel, such as an oriental room with a stained-glass window depicting a peacock, but cannot recall ever having been there before. Suspended from her job, she decamps to the hotel and tries to piece together the enigma of the missing three days.

Some of the townsfolk don’t appear to recognise her. Others cast suspicious glances. A little girl staying at the hotel, Paula (played by 70s cinema’s go-to girl for creepy kid performances Nicoletta Elmi), tells Alice that her name is Nicole, that she was staying at the hotel three days ago, and that she burned something out of fear that some unknown men were watching her.

So far, so mysterious. And in a more generic giallo a slew of murders would kick in at this point and Alice would doubtless be menaced by someone in leather gloves and a gender-disguising trenchcoat and hat. But director Luigi Bazzoni, adapting a novel by Mario Fanelli, plays his string out till the end, maintaining the enigma as he delivers a final-reel explanation that still leaves a few pieces for the viewer to try to manoeuvre into the bigger picture themselves.

Devoid of gore, chases, homicidal set-pieces and, indeed, pretty much anything you’d expect from a giallo, what ‘Footprints’ does offer is a genuinely intriguing mystery, off-kilter and hauntingly memorable imagery, and an incredible sense of atmosphere. It also has a glacially brilliant central performance from Bolkan, who plays Alice as buttoned-down and wound more tightly than a watch spring. With large tranches of the film consisting of Alice wandering the empty corridors of the hotel or adrift in the lonely environs of the resort town, staring out across the sun-dappled waters with a look of pensive melancholy, the closest point of comparison is Dirk Bogarde in ‘Death in Venice’.

Vittoria Storaro’s cinematography, effectively isolating Alice in scene after scene, points up the film’s art-house credentials, while Nicola Piovani’s achingly lonely score seals the deal. “Lonely” – I keep coming back to that word; and in fact that trailer for the Shameless DVD release I watched uses the phrase “the loneliest and most haunting giallo you will ever see”. I second that. As well as functioning as a thriller and a psychological character piece, ‘Footprints’ is also a study in disconnection, its protagonist gradually detaching from profession, home, landscape and finally identity.

SUMMER OF SATAN: post-retrospective analysis

2011-09-30T20:16:00.001+01:00

Friends, readers and fellow countrymen of the blogosphere, the Summer of Satan has reached its end. Now comes the autumn of all things pumpkin-shaped and ghoulish, as a large swathe of next month is given over to 13 for Halloween, and after that it won’t be long till the second annual Winter of Discontent.

In other words, no need to mourn the passing of our Satanic summer: plenty more reels of cinematic depravity will be flickering through the projection booth window here at The Agitation of the Mind before 2011 draws to its close.

After the next Giallo Sunday offering (I’ve got a true one-off lined up), I’ll be taking a week away from the blog to work on some other projects. In the meantime, though, here’s a quick look back at the eighteen Faustian films considered in this most reprehensible of retrospectives.

I didn’t quite cover all of the films I wanted – Bryce recommended ‘Petey Wheatstraw: The Devil’s Son-in-Law’, but my usual go-to resources failed me and the budget, after the recent death of my oven and microwave and a repair job on the car, didn’t stretch to ordering the DVD as an import. Still, I sat through a melange of dark and nasty productions, the quality control of which varied to an almost schizophrenic degree.

Here’s a complete list of the films and the lessons I learned from them:

‘The Brotherhood of Satan’ – do not mock Ernest Borgnine’s jumpsuit. Just don’t.

‘The Devil’s Rain’ – even William Shatner’s unorthodox diction cannot defeat the powers of darkness.

‘Race with the Devil’ – for God’s sake, holidaymakers, use a travel-guide-approved RV park. Setting up shop down that dirt track near the creek where the Satanists are conducting their human sacrifice is a real quiet-getaway deal-breaker.

‘Asylum of Satan’ – great title, shame about the movie.

‘Hard Ride to Hell’ – see ‘Race with the Devil’. Fuck’s sake, RV-ers, do you like the pain this much?

‘The Devil Rides Out’ – Hammer + Dennis Wheatley = goooooood.

‘Evilspeak’ – in which a computer in the nineteen-motherfucking-eighties manages, without modem, internet dongle, software downloads or advanced programming, to translate Latin texts, compute the requirements for a Satanic ritual, and conjure the devil. Seriously, Windows 98, what the fuck?

‘The House of the Devil’ – the 70s redux. Horror how it used to be. Somebody give Ti West a few million dollars and final cut. Right freakin’ now.

‘Lady Death’ – in which the devil’s daughter gets kitted out in a revealing little number that makes Vampirella’s costume look demure, avails herself of a bloody big sword, gets an army together and gives her old man what for. I’m down with this.

‘Messiah of Evil’ – the best ‘Twilight Zone’ episode never made.

‘Satan’s Children’ – in which the homophobic minions of the devil get their collective asses whupped by a nerd in white y-fronts. This is not a good advert for the Evil One.

‘Exorcismus: The Possession of Emma Evans’ – your priest uncle sucks cocks in hell. Oh shit, I think I might have given something away.

‘Damned in Venice’ – not the Dirk Bogarde one. Sooooo not the Dirk Bogarde one.

‘To the Devil – a Daughter’ – Hammer + Dennis Wheatley = baaaaaaad.

‘Antichrist’ – don’t fear the Reaper … fear Lars von Trier instead!

‘Alucarda’ – nuns, flagellation, vampirism, demonic possession, girl-girl shenanigans. ’Nuff said.

‘Drive Angry’ – in which the devil remains pretty much on the sidelines … but when the muscles cars are this cool, the chicks this tough and Ol’ Nick sends William fuckin’ Fichtner to do the job for him, who’s counting?

‘The Day of the Beast’ – El Bestia vs. a jumpy priest, a cerebrally-challenged heavy metal fan and an egomaniac TV presenter. Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.

SUMMER OF SATAN: The Day of the Beast

2011-09-29T20:17:00.001+01:00

Alex de la Iglesia made an inventive if somewhat frenzied debut with the sci-fi satire ‘Accion Mutante’. Rough and ready and with its set-pieces belying its budget, nonetheless the talent behind the film was evident.

His follow-up, again a genre film and again satirical in tone (at least in its early stages), proved that de la Iglesia was a filmmaker with full confidence in the medium and a wicked sense of the irreverent. The genre this time was horror.

‘The Day of the Beast’ begins with mild-mannered and very nervous priest, Father Curo (Alex Angulo) consulting his superior. He has cracked a code hidden in an abstruse text and determined that the son of the devil is to be born on Christmas Eve – a date just days hence. He confesses that he is now about to leave the church and commence sinning like it’s going out of style. By sinning he will be able to broker a pact with Satan (price: his soul) and thus discover the location of the Adversary’s birth. And then, hopefully, prevent it.

Curo’s superior warns him that the Evil One will attempt to foil him at every turn. Curo turns to take his leave. A massive fresco of the cross detaches itself from the church wall and flattens Curo’s compadre. De la Iglesia stages it as pure slapstick, a comic-book start to the movie that’s underlined by the graphic novel style title credit, a crucifix, a shadow and the silhouetted figure of the devil featuring prominently in the design.

For maybe half an hour or so, de la Iglesia keeps things simmering away at this level: Curo, determined to become a great sinner, curses a dying man and lifts his wallet while he’s meant to be giving absolution; refuses to behave charitably to a beggar; steals someone’s luggage; and blunders into a record shop specializing in heavy metal in search of the devil’s music. Said establishment is managed by Jose Maria (Santiago Segura), whose crotchety mother runs the grubby boarding house at which Cura ends up.

As an unlikely friendship develops between priest and metalhead, the latter points the former in the direction of TV celebrity, supposed medium and 100% charlatan Cavan (Armando De Razza) as a possible candidate to expedite Curo’s contact with Beelzebub. Curo seizes on the idea far too eagerly and what ensues is a melange of home invasion, proto-torture porn (Curo’s exposition speech, punctuate with whacks of a golf club to the forcibly restrained Cavan’s kneecaps is considerably funnier than it has any right to be), slapstick comedy (events are interrupted by the arrival of Cavan’s buxom girlfriend – played by Maria Grazia Cucinotta, a woman with an hourglass figure and a décolletage like a photo-finish in a zeppelin race) and Satanic shenanigans.

The ritual Curo and Jose Maria compel Cavan to undertake (which, apparently, was a genuine Satanic ritual – now there’s a commitment to the Method) proves all too successful and Curo and co. flee the powers of darkness.

This is where ‘Day of the Beast’ changes gear and I don’t want to go into much more detail. If you’ve not seen the film, I don’t want to spoil how subtly the tonal shift of the second half is effected. I’ll just observe that things get darker and more genuinely horrific the more the focus shifts from the gothic to the socio-political. The cinema of Spain, from the rediscovery of artistic freedom of speech in the mid-70s through to the emergence of genre-savvy talents like de la Iglesia in the 90s, is a cinema still informed by the shadow of Franco. Fascism and the arrogance of class is an important factor in the latter stages of ‘Day of the Beast’. The absurdist humour remains (even taking on a wistful tinge in the closing scene), but the aesthetic is darker and the effect more cutting, more bruising more acidic after the ritual.

Conjure something up, de la Iglesia seems to be suggesting, and its shadow remains. ‘The Day of the Beast’ is deceptively entertaining; its subtext breaks ground by the end and hits you like a sledgehammer. It’s a textbook example of laughter in the dark – the laughter is nervous and the darkness is pitch black.