Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice

‘Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice’ is no classic. Let’s be completely honest about that. It’s as flawed as ‘Man of Steel’ was. Some of it works and some of it doesn’t. The things that don’t work – in particular matters pertaining to Lex Luthor – are hugely awful. The things that do work – in particular matters pertaining to Diana Prince – are as iconic as any fanboy could wish for. The film is a mishmash, and narratively wonky. But does it deserve the outpouring of hatred that the critics have almost unanimously delivered? In my humble opinion, no.

Which isn’t to say that, having emerged from the cinema with a general feeling of I enjoyed that more than I thought I would, I’m going to fashion this review into not just an apologia for ‘B vs S’, but reappraise it as a misunderstood classic of the genre. No, sir. It would be remiss of any reviewer to gloss over the film’s problems, just as it’s lazy of the majority of them to join in the hurling of brickbats.

In the interests of objectivity and balance, let’s acknowledge the faults. First and foremost, the characterisation of Lex Luthor is terrible, partly because Jesse Eisenberg is miscast but mostly because the script (a) gives him some of the most thankless dialogue any actor could find himself saddled with, and – more problematically – (b) fails in establishing any credible motivation for his increasing sociopathic behaviour. And, no, his oft-repeated variations on a theme of man’s victory over God doesn’t really cut it since there’s no moment in his character arc that leads him to this mindset. In fact, he doesn’t even have a character arc. It’s as if the first script conference settled on Lex Luthor as villain based on the rationale that everyone knows he’s the villain anyway so let’s just wheel him onstage and give him villainous things to do and we won’t need to bother with any of that tedious exposition business.

Likewise, the titular Batman/Superman conflict is predicated on very little. Sure, there’s the effective opening sequence where the finale of ‘Man of Steel’ is restaged from Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck)’s perspective as he navigates rubble-strewn and dust-choked streets in an attempt to facilitate his employees’ evacuation while Superman (Henry Cavill) and General Zod twat each other in an orgy of city-wide destruction and wait a fucking minute, since when exactly was Wayne Industries based in Metropolis? So, yeah, the ultimate superhero anti-hero, a man who was wreaked his fair share of havoc in order to take down bad guys, suddenly goes all antagonistic on Superman because he wreaked havoc in order to take down a bad guy. 

Meanwhile, Clark Kent pursues a media campaign against Batman for little other reason that it gets him off the sports desk. Though why he spends his time at the office getting all moody and embittered when he’s shacked up with the uber-foxy Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is anybody’s guess. Ditto why Lois continually puts her life in danger chasing down stories when she’s just as loved-up herself.

Finally: the flashbacks/dream sequences. They’re piss-poor, on both a conceptual and aesthetic level. Really, really piss-poor.

And if you took ‘B vs S’ on the 500 words above, the critical kicking would be easy to understand; in fact, you’d probably feel like grabbing a burning touch and allaying yourself with the village lynch-mob. But said course of behaviour would leave one blind to the pleasures of the film. To whit:

Ben Affleck as Batman. I’ll cop a guilty plea, right here and right now, to face-palming and groaning when I heard the news of Affleck’s casting. And by the same chalk I’ll hold my hands up and admit that I was wrong. Trudging through the metaphorical treacle of a script that can’t even establish a fundamentally plausible motivation for his character, Affleck nonetheless knocks it out of the park in his portrayal of a Batman who is middle-aged, world-weary and descending into an embittered psychosis. This is a not just a Batman who, prior to the titular stand-off, has to force himself through a masochistic training regime and build an armoured suit that it’s effortful even to walk in (in fact, there’s something about seeing the un-suited-up Bruce Wayne pounding at a truck tyre with a sledgehammer that presents an anti-iconography: the training montage actually strips a superhero down to a new personal low), but Affleck is just as acute in his characterisation of Bruce Wayne, showing a jaded multi-millionaire going through the motions of what society expects of him; even the playboy lifestyle and womanising seems forced, to the point where Alfred sneers at him that there’s little hope for a next generation. 

Subject of whom: Jeremy motherfuckin’ Irons. Hot on the heels of his fantastic turn in ‘High-Rise’, he reinvents Alfred to his own specifications within seconds of appearing onscreen. Retaining the Jeeves-like pragmatism of the character’s previous incarnations, Irons adds a level of barbed irascibility and the result is magnificent. In fact, I’d give Irons the Agitation of the Mind “man of the match” award if it weren’t for …

… Gal Gadot as Diana Prince/Wonder Woman. Introduced in oblique fashion, with much of her narrative arc and motivation remaining enigmatic for most of the running time, Gadot isn’t given much to do but look slinky and seductive as Prince and wield a sword in menacing fashion as Wonder Woman. Given the script’s total inability to treat a female character as anything other than a plot device, Gadot could easily have come adrift in the melee, her character mere eye-candy in the CGI-driven morass of the final act. But, by God, a former model who I wouldn’t have previously credited as having any claim to cinematic iconography doesn’t just make something out of nothing, she creates bona fide moments of mainstream cool.

Other plus points: Snyder’s commitment to a dark vision of the material – slammed by the critics for humourlessness – yields some genuinely striking moments: the film begins and ends with funerals (Snyder shoots funerals with the same quasi-pornographic delight that Argento at his best reserved for death scenes); Wayne’s contact with a Russian mobster takes place at a grungily ugly bare-knuckle boxing competition; Superman’s coercion into appearing at a congressional hearing is the culmination of a subplot about political showboating/careerism and is full-stopped by a hugely cynical punchline almost calculated to plug into contemporary America’s terrorism fear-factor. Snyder plays it equally dark and cynical in terms of classical allusions, throwing in Icarus, Parsifal and a painting in Luthor’s apartment that’s basically a combination of Gustav Dore and William Blake; there’s even a dream/hallucination sequence where Kevin Costner reappears as Clark Kent’s mortal step-father, staged in such a manner that short of inserting a title card reading “and my father on that sad height” the nod to Dylan Thomas couldn’t be more explicit.

And this is perhaps what ‘B vs S’ offers as an apologia for itself even in the face of its harshest critics. In an era where superhero movies – specifically those of the Marvel ilk – have come to define mainstream cinemagoing, Iron Man and Captain America might flirt around the edges of prescient storylines about the corrupting influence of power and the fear of the unknown, but you’re highly unlikely to stumble across a classical allusion or a debate on the very redundancy of heroism; whereas Snyder, carrying on the dialogue he established in ‘Man of Steel’, batters furiously and incessantly away at the very concept of the genre even as he embraces its most fetishistic excesses.

Man of Steel

Right then, I’ve steeled myself up (pardon the pun) and I’m going to see ‘Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice’ on the big screen later this week. There’s a certain car-crash mentality to this decision. I can’t even call it morbid curiosity, because curiosity suggests an open-mindedness, a spirit of inquiry rather a morbid confirmation of what one knew already. Yes, I know ‘BvS: DoJ’ is going to be downright flawed at best and an abject piece of shit at worst. But after a fortnight of reading reviews brimming with bilious hatred, I need to see it for myself. If only to experience the zeitgeist. The last time the collective critical consensus went against a major tentpole release – Gore Verbinski’s ‘The Lone Ranger’ – I opted out of seeing it theatrically. Two years later, I caught in on DVD and my immediate opinion was “yeah, whatever, not great, not terrible, nice train chase”; then, with a jolt of realisation and complete bewilderment, “wait a minute, the critics hated on it that much?”

So I’m going to tootle along to my local multiplex, lay my money down, invest two and a half hours of my life (three if you count the wanky ads for piss-weak foreign lager and aspirational lifestyle bollocks), and revel in the mangled wreckage and streaks of blood on the side of the highway. We’re talking schadefreude, folks, and you don’t need to speak German to dig it. Because tonight, thank God, it’s Zack Snyder and not me. 

But before I go and see ‘BvS: DoJ’ and before I hammer out my review of it in a Lagavulin induced haze, there is the necessary context of ‘Man of Steel’. So here goes.

Cards on the table: I liked Richard Donner’s ‘Superman’ with Christopher Reeve. The sequels were shabby, and got worse as the franchise lumbered on. Bryan Singer’s ‘Superman Returns’ was one of the dullest big-budget studio films I’ve ever seen, and I’m including the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ sequels in that, so nyah-nyah-naa-nyah-nyah. Innit?

Cards on the table part two: I’m not that keen on Zack Snyder. His ‘Dawn of the Dead’ remake was better than it had any right to be, but nothing else in his filmography has lived up to its promise. ‘Sucker Punch’ came closest, and at least had the feel of a work by an auteur, but I still came away from it with a feeling of “meh”.

So I didn’t have much hope for ‘Man of Steel’. And maybe that negative expectation worked in its favour when I finally got round to seeing it. There was the opening sequence with Russell Crowe as Superman’s dad and a nerdishly unholy dose of sci-fi porn – glitzy, borderline incoherent and thunderously unsubtle … but it did the job. There was the montage of Superman-in-waiting, from his childhood as stepson to a couple of all-American farmers (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane), to his troubled, peripatetic twenties – a welter of swaying cornfields, tornadoes, schoolkids in peril and oil rig fires … bludgeoningly obvious stuff, but all in context and effective enough. And. Then. Snyder. Went. Fucking. Apeshit. 

No stand-in for tarnished post-Nixon patriotism à la Donner’s classic; no heavy-handed Christ parable à la Singer’s snore-fest (although Snyder sneaks the odd visual metaphor for crucifixion). Nope: what we have in ‘Man of Steel’ is a superhero for a jaded, paranoid and politically compromised age where the entertainment value of superheroes is in stark contrast to the swathes of destruction they’d cause if you rooted them in an even remotely realistic scenario. This is the single greatest achievement of ‘Man of Steel’ and Snyder was given a kicking for it.

Hold that thought while we consider a heavily adumbrated précis of the film’s narrative: the infant Kal-El escapes Krypton in the midst of a putsch orchestrated by General Zod (Michael Shannon); he struggles to be accepted on Earth; the moment he discovers his lineage and truly embraces his powers as a force for good, Zod turns up looking for him and the US military first arrest and then cravenly hand him over to Zod in an attempt to avoid an intergalactic ass-whupping. When it becomes obvious that Zod is going to royally fuck over the planet and use its ruins as the basis of a new Krypton, Superman (Henry Cavill) saves mankind anyway because … well, actually, this is where the film loses me. Maybe because his step-parents were nice. Maybe because he quite fancies investigative reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams). Maybe because he just wants to prove everyone wrong.

Got that? America – and by extension the world – doesn’t give a flying one about Superman. Scenes of a handcuffed Superman and a heavily armed US force handing him over to Zod constitute the bitterest comment on extraordinary rendition that I’ve seen in any mainstream American film, let alone a superhero flick. Snyder ramps up the deconstructive cynicism with Superman’s climactic smackdown with Zod and his forces. Whereas Marvel have given us epic city-wide battles, portals between worlds and all manner of futuristic technology with barely a civilian casualty, ‘Man of Steel’ stages its almost interminably wearying slugfest in a recognisable environment where a downtrodden populace are going through the motions of working, travelling and making ends meet. The carnage that ensues, excessive and CGI-driven though it is, takes on a weight and a brutish aftermath that the Marvel films gloss over. Whether it was intended or not, Snyder and his creative team seem to be holding up a mirror to the audience’s demands for violence and destruction and asking them to judge their own slavering reflections. Michael Powell pulled this stunt with ‘Peeping Tom’ back in 1959 and it all but ended his career. Snyder isn’t exactly standing in line at the labour exchange right now, but he certainly caught hell for it.

‘Man of Steel’ is a flawed but interesting film. Big concepts bubble beneath its surface, but are subjugated in favour of iconography – grim and bloody iconography but iconography nonetheless. Potentially fascinating characters are given glimpses of an interesting narrative arc then unapologetically sidelined, with Adams and Laurence Fishburne (as Lois’s hard-ass editor) coming off the worst in this respect). And it’s all so grungily self-important. But it strives to locate the concept of the superhero in a world that’s so morally, politically and socially compromised that even the offer of unconditional heroism is met with cowardice, fear and an executive order as regards the use of weapons – and the conclusion it arrives at is dark. The original big-screen iteration of Superman was the hero America needed at the time; the one in ‘Man of Steel’ ends up as compromised as the society he protects.

High-Rise

How often have you come across this staple of lazy film criticism: “the city/vehicle/otherwise-inanimate-object [delete as applicable] is a character in its own right”?

Far too often, right? And it constitutes really bad reviewing, right? 

Good. Glad we got that out of the way. In Ben Wheatley’s ‘High-Rise’, adapted by Amy Jump from J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel, the apartment block is a character in its own right.

‘High-Rise’ is a masterpiece of set design with a punctured bile duct rather than a beating heart driving the two-hour act of aesthetic implosion that constitutes its narrative. Early scenes have Dr Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) prowling the lobby while his boxed-up possessions are crated in. Laing rocks a conservative suit and a grey tie that seem utterly in tune with the soulless brutalism of the high-rise block. The camera prowls just as elegantly, as if DoP Laurie Rose were out to redefine the concept of architecture porn. Already, though, imperfections lurk behind the high-rise’s buttoned-down façade: a single bleb of paint spoiling an otherwise perfectly glossed wall; a couple of angles out of true; a touch of rust on the hob in Laing’s minimalist kitchen. By the halfway point, the mask has slipped entirely and the societal ugliness inherent in the level-based class system has manifested as corridors full of rubbish bags, garbage chutes clogged with filth, lights and elevators failing, smashed glass, piles of rubble, public copulation and acts of what Alex the Droog would refer to as “the old ultraviolence”. The poster for ‘High-Rise’ explicitly homages ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and there’s more than a hint of Kubrick at his most coldly cynical in Wheatley’s mise en scene (not to mention some deliberate nods towards the Starliner Tower in David Cronenberg’s ‘Shivers’).

Or to put it another way, ‘High-Rise’ starts as architecture porn only to veer off suddenly and shockingly into the realms of architecture snuff. Wheatley keeps things slow-burn for the first third, assiduously mapping out the power structure and introducing Laing to a roster of oddball residents, from belligerent TV documentary-maker Richard Wilder (Luke Evans) and his heavily pregnant wife Helen (Elisabeth Moss) – lower level – to the flirtatious and socially mobile Charlotte (Sienna Miller) and her nerdy polymath son Toby (Louis Suc) – mid level – all the way up to the penthouse suite and the building’s architect Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons) and his brittle trophy wife Ann (Keeley Hawes). The metaphor for British society is obvious from the outset and Wheatley adds a good 20 or 30 minutes to the running time in hammering the point, sometimes in wincingly laborious fashion. His talent for visual storytelling is downright precocious, so it’s a shame that the pace is slowed and the dark drama dissipated by a cluster of scenes in which characters sit around and spout thuddingly literal dialogue. 90 minutes was all ‘High-Rise’ needed to be.

Having said that, the film gets more right than it does wrong. The period detail and evocation of the 1970s is spot on. Clint Mansell’s score is a thing of beauty and I’ll be adding the soundtrack to my collection ASAP. The cast are very good, with Hiddleston on excellent form, Miller giving a performance that’s worlds beyond the set-dressing she’s usually called on provide, Hawes taking material that could have been clichéd and turning Ann into a nuanced and almost tragic character, and Evans – who I liked in ‘No One Lives’ and thought was dreadful in ‘The Raven’ – snatching the Man of the Match award with a swaggering, visceral turn that put me in mind of Oliver Reed at his fiery best. Jump – for all that her script drifts intermittently into wordiness – "gets" Ballard in a way no-one has apart from Cronenberg with ‘Crash’.

Wheatley – as you’d expect of the man who directed the genuinely disturbing ‘Kill List’ and the genuinely hallucinatory ‘A Field in England’ – isn’t afraid to go full on in depicting the total breakdown of social order. Minor unfairnesses, verbal standoffs and a laddish invasion of a posh soiree so the children of the tower block can have a pool party soon escalate into orgiastic destruction and rampant self-interest. For all that Wilder has a poster of Che Guevara in his apartment, you can’t even call it class warfare. The only solidarity seems to be among the women, either the blue-bloods who rally around Ann or the much put-upon wives with whom Helen socialises. Charlotte, meanwhile, occupies the middle ground in every sense of the expression and the truth about her loyalties and her son’s parentage don’t emerge until late in the game.

If there are agents for the building’s sudden collapse into chaos, they are Royal’s thuggish aide/bouncer Simmons (Dan Renton Skinner) – whose repeated line “you won’t be needing that” becomes increasingly prescient, – and the reactionary Wilder, who sees the high-rise’s hierarchy as documentary gold for his next project. Laing, meanwhile, drifts through the film as often little more than an observer. For a while he seems like the untainted resident whose moral rectitude might be the yardstick for the audience’s response to the ever-more frenzied onscreen acts. Or maybe not: with blank indifference, he nudges an oikish colleague towards an act of suicide; parlays with Royal to the point of toadying; and goes native as completely as anyone else. The difference is that while Wilder or Simmons’s enthrallment to the building triggers machismo impulses, Laing’s response is placid, almost zen-like. In the midst of the basest displays of (in)human behaviour, Laing begins to feel at home. It says something that while everyone else is happily doling out beatings, torching vehicles in the car park or engaging in joyless group sex, the only real altercation Laing has is with someone who tries to steal from him a tin of grey paint.

The film is ultimately about what society tries to make of us, what we want to make of ourselves, the psychological impulses that drive us (particularly the self-destructive ones that usually end up in the driving seat) and the dangers that occur when mindscape and landscape overlap. The nastiest concept the film serves up – and it’s perhaps the only theme that isn’t bludgeoned by the script into literalism – is that fact that any of the residents could leave at any time. They’re not trapped in or by the building; they just need it. The building is the necessary framework wherein their trappings can be shed. All, ironically, except Laing’s. He clings onto that suit and grey tie till the end.

Zootropolis

Whereas Pixar’s ‘The Good Dinosaur’ starts with a fantastic concept – the comet that should have rendered the dinosaurs extinct misses the earth and dinosaurs gradually evolve to develop the power of speech, cognizance of the family unit, and a facility for agricultural self-sustainability – then proceeds to do absolutely sod all with it, Disney’s ‘Zootropolis’ establishes its anthropomorphised civilisation so rigorously in terms of backstory, geography and inventive world-building that its breathless first act is liable to leave you dizzy. 

Basically: we’re in a world where animals talk and have created a recognisably contemporary society based on trade, upward mobility and lifestyle aspirations; a world where predators and prey co-exist peacefully if suspiciously. The lion might not be lying down with the lamb, but it’s odds-on they work in the same office building. In fact, there’s a lion in City Hall – Mayor Lionheart (J.K. Simmons) – and he’s ably, if nervously, assisted by a sheep, Deputy Mayor Bellwether (Jenny Slate).

It’s thanks to Lionheart’s Mammal Inclusion Programme that naïve but fiercely determined rabbit Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) is able to join the Zootropolis Police Department, albeit in the face of cynicism and prejudice. Not that Hopps, for all her talk of inclusiveness, isn’t just a little species-ist herself, particularly when it comes to foxes. It doesn’t help that, first day on the force, she’s played for a sucker by vulpine con artist Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman). The Mammal Inclusion Programme is a curious wrong note in a script that’s otherwise whipsmart: every animal in the ZPD – indeed, every animal in Zootropolis itself (unless I missed some bird life or reptiles) – is a mammal.

This flub notwithstanding, ‘Zootropolis’ plays its cards perfectly as it settles down from its plot-free but exhaustively immersive transitioning of Hopp from her hick small town roots to the bustling capital city by way of a gruelling training montage at animal police academy, quickly becoming a follow-the-clues procedural Hopp, royally pissing off Chief Bogo (Idris Elba), is given the traditional 48 hours to solve a missing persons case, with the caveat of an unceremonious ejection from the force should she fail. When her first clue brings her back into Wilde’s orbit, she loses no time in turning the tables on him … and this is where the film really starts to get interesting.

Let me reiterate that ‘Zootropolis’ is a Disney film. Its first act is imbued with the kind of gently improving moral messages – everyone’s equal; never give up on your dreams – that you’d expect from the studio. And yet even these themes are tempered by jolts of reality. Hopp’s liberalism is challenged from the outset after an assault by a delinquent fox, while her dreams of making it as a police officer in the big city are oh-so-gently chiselled away at by her ultimately well-meaning parents. “It’s okay to have dreams as long as you don’t believe in them too much,” Hopp’s mother counsels at one point, one of several slaps in the face that ‘Zootropolis’ delivers to traditional Disney aesthetics.

So: Disney but not quite Disney, yeah? Disney with a bit of the stuffing knocked out of it after a backstreet scuffle. Now factor in these narrative developments: (a) having successfully beaten Wilde at his own game (“it’s called a hustle, sweetheart”), Hopp demonstrates no qualms in blackmailing him in order continue her investigation; and (b) with Hopp so new to the ZPD (not to mention unpopular enough with Bogo) that she’s effectively operating without resources, the rule book goes out of the window from the outset; indeed, by the time she encounters Mr Big (Maurice Lamarche), in a scene that’s gratuitously accurate in its lampooning of ‘The Godfather’, the rule book doesn’t just go out the window but straight into the sewer.

Between stoner witnesses, unreliable witnesses and witnesses who get the frighteners put on them in a favour Hopp accepts from Mr Big, our intrepid lupine heroine puts together a case that Rumpole of the Bailey would get thrown out of court with one withering turn of phrase; but this is Zootropolis and her efforts are rewarded … but elevation to the media’s poster bunny for law enforcement comes at a price: fear spreads through the city, old prejudices come to the fore, and Hopp’s nascent friendship with Wilde is severely tested.

‘Zootropolis’ constructs its slow-burn crime thriller narrative from meditations on racism, media manipulation, moral compromise, and the politics of fear. It references not only ‘The Godfather’ but ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘The Taking of Pelham One Two Three’. The overriding theme is that the pursuit of one’s dreams will necessarily entail messy mistakes and some degree of failure. And that animals of different species (i.e. people of different races/cultures) will more often than not treat each other shittily.

This is a Disney film, folks. A Disney film that’s finally decided to quit sugar-coating it.

Hail, Caesar!

I was toying with the idea of structuring this review around my reading of ‘Hail, Caesar’ as ‘Barton Fink’ meets the gospels, but that would involve identifying Judas’s stand in and therein lies a major spoiler. Let’s just say that an oft-referenced but never seen studio boss is the Coen Brothers’ absent God, Scarlett Johannsen is the Virgin Mary and studio “fixer” Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) is Everyman and the film itself a chronicle of his long dark night of the soul.

Or you could possibly make a case for Mannix as Jesus, particularly in terms of his temptation, but I prefer the idea of naïve cowboy star Hobie Doyle (Aiden Ehrenrecih) as Christ, which would seem to work in context of his deliverance of Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) – a man who falls among, if not thieves, then writers … and communist writers, to boot.

Either way, the film starts with an image of Christ on the cross and ends with a purposefully hackneyed pan up to the firmament, so we’re definitely in religious territory. Mannix has his most soulful conversations in a confessional, and grabs prayer beads and silently implores the Almighty for guidance at his moment of greatest uncertainty. Granted, outside of his faith he happily slaps around anyone whose peccadilloes might bring the studio into disrepute, complicitly pays off kidnappers and deals with rival sibling gossip columnists (Tilda Swinton) with the aplomb of Machiavelli, but at heart he’s still Everyman, his path is a difficult one and his decisions don’t come easily.

Religion has always bubbled away in the background in the Coens’ filmography, be it John Goodman’s pseudo-Satan and the corridors of a fleapit hotel as an entryway to hell in ‘Barton Fink’, or the mass baptism in ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’, but it wasn’t until ‘A Simple Man’ that the theological truly shouldered its way to the forefront. ‘Hail, Caesar’ offers a scene of four religious spokesmen trading ecumenical verbal bitch-slappings that manages to say more about religion than ‘A Simple Man’ does in its entire running time. 

Or I could be misconstruing things entirely and ‘Hail, Caesar’ is nothing more than an excuse for Joel and Ethan to restage some of their favourite scenes and genre tropes from the golden age of Hollywood. God knows, they certainly stuff enough of their own back catalogue into the blender. The obvious points of reference are ‘Barton Fink’ and ‘The Big Lebowski’: such narrative as ‘Hail, Caesar’ scrapes together (the film happily introduces all manner of characters, situations, subplots and symbolism only to completely forget them again) is basically a conflation of those two earlier films. But plenty of other moments from the Coen back catalogue are included.

It would, in fact, be very easy to write off ‘Hail, Caesar’ as the Coens doing sloppy, second-rate Coen copyism, but that misses out on how entertaining the whole big stupid shaggy dog story is. How entertaining and how intelligent. Weaving McCarthyism, socio-political debate, economics, faith, doubt, moral elasticity and spiritual angst into the fabric of its (un)reality, the Coens’ script is an exercise in Big Concepts played out against a deliberately superficial backdrop. Oh, and it’s laugh out loud funny for a good 80% of its running time.

A plot synopsis would be a self-defeating exercise, so I’m not going there. Analysis of individual performances? All over the place, from Clooney being spectacularly in on the joke and owning every scene he’s in, to Brolin effectively anchoring the film without actually doing anything he hasn’t done a dozen times already, to Jonah Hill in a cameo that proves that once you’ve worked for Scorsese you can blag your way into any prestige production, to complete unknown Ehrenreich basically writing himself a cheque for his entire Hollywood career in one magnificently conceptualised performance. An extended scene where Ehrenreich’s total rube and Ralph Fiennes’s snootily sophisticated director play off each other is pure delight on a level the Coens haven’t delivered in a good few years.

It’s a profoundly deep film and utterly throwaway at one and the same time. It’s about a lot of things and adds up to something slightly less than sweet fuck all. There’s a scene of the communist writers at rest, two of them demurely completing a jigsaw together, only the last piece doesn’t fit. That’s the whole film, right there.

The Forest

‘The Forest’ has two things going for it which promised much: an opportunity for Natalie Dormer, an underused and often miscast performer, to demonstrate her range in a dual role; and a narrative hook inspired by Japan’s actual “suicide forest”, Aokigahara. About 18 months ago on this blog I reviewed Santiago Stelly’s 21-minute documentary on the forest and the propensity of the suicidal to make it their “goodnight Vienna” spot of choice; it’s a calm and eloquent documentary on a deeply unsettling subject that’s remained with me.

The prospect of the appealing Dormer in a psychological horror movie with Aokigahara as its setting was irresistible. And for the first hour of its 93-minute running time, it seemed to deliver.

The opening is a textbook exercise in economical storytelling, setting up privileged American Sara (Dormer) and her unpredictable, emotionally unstable twin sister Jess (Dormer). Alerted by Japanese authorities that Jess has disappeared and that the last sighting of her was close to Aokigahara, Sara flies out to Japan despite the assurances of chinless wonder boyfriend Rob (Eoin Macken) that everything will resolve itself. Adrift in a totally alien culture, Sara struggles to piece together the minutae of Jess’s life. Dormer is extremely good at balancing Sara’s confusion and frustration while suggesting a tenacious inner strength. On paper, Sara is a pretty thankless role – the conceptually more interesting Jess is given little screen time – but Dormer’s performance, understated and nuanced, makes her an empathetic and appealing heroine.

Seeds of folklore and superstition that inform the latter stretches of the film are liberally scattered in an effective scene where Sara visits the school at which Jess taught English. The pupils react hysterically, taking Sara for Jess’s ghost.

Continued narrative economy whisks Sara to Aokigahara, where she encounters Australian journalist Aiden (Taylor Kinney), who listens empathetically to her story and promptly realises he’s got a fucking great human interest article on his hands. Bartering with Sara for the rights to said article – and inveigling a shedload of expository background information on her relationship with Jess – Aiden introduces her to Michi (Yukiyoshi Ozawa), an unofficial sort of park ranger who makes sweeps of Aokigahara looking for either the recently deceased (whose position he marks so their bodies can be recovered) or those who are still undecided (Michi does his best to dissuade them from ending it).

At this point, director Jason Zada starts making wholesale borrowings from the Santiago Stelly documentary and ‘The Forest’ takes its first lurch towards a massive quality control downscale. Some cod psychology about the psychic connection between Sara and Jess has already come into play, and a bit of ham-fisted backstory about a family tragedy that Jess witnessed but Sara didn’t is horribly realised in the film’s first truly bad scene.

Unfortunately, things get worse. The decision – presumably a sop to the US and UK markets – to make Aiden the companion to Sara’s long dark night of the soul in Aokigahara rather than the thematically more appropriately Michi more than indicate that he’d have been a fascinating, grounded and pragmatic foil to Sara’s increasing susceptibility to the forest’s supposed demons. As it is, however, we have Aiden as possible-saviour-possible-villain depending on how screwily the forest demons are messing with Sara’s mind at any given time.

Then there’s the revelation about the tragedy that defined Jess’s self-destructive tendencies. It’s the cheesiest of melodramatic reveals that would have required Sirkian levels of histrionics to even attempt to pass itself off to an audience with a collective IQ of more than a single figure. As it is, Zada delivers it with such boilerplate indifference that the film doesn’t so much go off the rails as recreate the Tay Bridge disaster. A twist involving Jess and a last-minute scare moment that might have been effective in the late 80s don’t help matters either.

‘The Forest’ is one of those screamingly difficult films to review: it starts so promisingly – not earth-shatteringly great or iconoclastically different, but good enough in all the fundamentals that the audience has every reason to expect that it’s going to build and develop and play off in a way that will be truly effective. That it doesn’t is galling enough; that it has to reach for quite so many clichés in order to patch together a finale that nonetheless spirals into abject mediocrity is a kick in the teeth.

I can’t in all honesty recommend ‘The Forest’. Which is a pisser, because I want to. I want its damned good first hour to be enough to offset the shit sandwich of its last 30 minutes. I want to herald it as a vehicle for Natalie Dormer’s talents. I want to champion it as the underdog of this year’s horror releases. But it is so determinedly awful in its closing stretches that I can’t. A shame: its setting and its star deserve better.

Deadpool

Remember that scene in ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ where Iron Man uses the word “shit” and Captain America admonishes him for his language? Captain America would diarrhoetically obliterate his patriotic wank suit and have to mop up his star-spangled spew based on the opening scene of ‘Deadpool’, never mind the whole 108 profanity laden, PC-felching minutes of it. (And can I just say: thank you, mainstream American studios, for finally making a superhero movie that’s (a) adult-orientated, (b) funny, and (c) less than two and a quarter arse-numbing hours long.)

According to the opening credits, ‘Deadpool’ is a film directed by An Overpaid Tool and starring God’s Perfect Idiot, A Hot Chick, A British Villain, The Comic Relief, A Moody Teen and A CGI Character. Said credits are only a couple steps down from providing a bona fide synopsis. Let’s take care of that business: 

Wade Wilson (God’s Perfect Idiot) is an ex-Special Forces nutjob reduced to doing “babysitting jobs”, hobnobbing with favourite barman Weasel (The Comic Relief) and frequenting strip joints. One day he meets the sassy and seductive Vanessa (A Hot Chick) and sparks fly: the banter is badass, the chemistry is chimerical, and the sex is sensational. But as Wilson himself would be the first to admit, pleasant interludes are just that – interludes – and the general shittiness of life is always waiting in the wings. In this case, it’s Wilson’s terminal cancer.

‘Deadpool’ is a film manages to toss off sarcastic one-liners about cancer. ‘Deadpool’ is a film that has no boundaries.

Reluctantly responding to an overture from a secret cabal seeking to configure latent mutants into super-soldiers, Wilson finds himself in the clutches of Ajax (A British Villain) who puts him through hell in order to activate him. It should be noted, at this point, that ‘Deadpool’ exists within the ‘X-Men’ timeline, though Wilson happily breaks the fourth wall to wonder whether Xavier is being played by Patrick Stewart or James McAvoy, admitting that he can’t keep track of the timelines.

Fourth wall. Let’s talk about the fourth wall. The main set-piece in ‘Deadpool’ has Wade, now reconfigured as the eponymous definitely-not-a-superhero, dispatch a fuckton of bad guys on a freeway bridge while two members of the X-Men try to dissuade him from further carnage; the origin story that the movie essentially is plays out as a series of flashbacks. During said flashbacks – hell, during the main action – Deadpool breaks character on numerous occasions and delivers pithy homilies directly to the audience. At one point, he breaks the fourth wall in order to facilitate a flashback, during which he breaks the fourth wall, an act which gives him leave to muse upon how many walls he’s broken – sixteen?

In fact there’s so much fourth wall destruction that Wade might as well be sitting next to you in the cinema providing a running commentary. The self-reflexiveness reaches its zenith in the post-credits sequence where … oh, but why spoil it? Just make sure you stick around for the post-credits sequence.

Sorry: I got distracted. I was talking about the plot. Or the structure. Or wondering how many of the wonderfully sweary examples of the screenwriter’s art I could possibly include in this review in the name of critical analysis. “Cockthistle” is a good one. “About as welcome as a sandpaper dildo” is another. Then there’s Weasel’s avocado speech, which is probably only three months off being quoted as lovingly by cineastes as Joe Pesci’s “you talkin’ to me” monologue from ‘Goodfellas’ or Marlon Brando’s “one way ticket to Palookaville” musings from ‘Scab: The Movie’

Sorry. I got distracted again. But it has to be said: ‘Deadpool’ finds an aesthetic centre to its world-building that all other superhero movies lack. Granted, this predominantly equates to hyper-violence, bad language and nudity. And yet all of these attributes are somehow truer to the essential emotional/intellectual retardation that defines the popularity of comic books than any of Captain America’s square-jawed jingoism or Thor’s mythic nobility. Hell, even the raging uncontrollability of the Hulk is less a realistic depiction of the creature from the id than Deadpool going home after a hard day’s mayhem and blood-letting and slipping on his “masturbating shoes”.

Yeah, you can imagine Tony Stark partying with Victoria’s Secret models or the Black Widow squeezed into skintight leather. And you don’t even have to imagine Mystique naked as long as blue skin isn’t a problem for you. But who else other than Deadpool would even admit to polishing the lighthouse let alone elevate the act to dimestore poetry?

Incidentally, is anybody still reading this review? Because if you are, quit wasting your time and get your arse down to your nearest multiplex. There’s a guy in a red suit with a foul mouth and a taste for strippers, alcohol and cartoon violence who’s just jizzed to make your acquaintance. Tell him Agitation sent you. PS. Look out for the unicorns. I’ll say no more than that.

Goosebumps

Any adaptation of R.L. Stine’s multi-million selling ‘Goosebumps’ series has one question to ask to ask itself from the outset: which story, or conflation of stories, from the 200-odd ‘Goosebumps’ titles the tirelessly prolific author has penned? Darren Lemke’s script, from a story by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, wisely sidesteps the problem of straightforward adaptation and instead crafts the whole movie about Stine himself.

But it wouldn’t be a tale worthy of the franchise’s name if there weren’t a couple of plunky teens on protagonist duties. Step forward plunky team number one, Zach (Dylan Minette), newly moved to the town of Madison, Delaware, where his mother Gale (Amy Ryan) has taken the post of vice principal at the local high school. Not only saddled with this source of social embarrassment, never mind being the new kid in town, Zach also has to contend with the mortifying attentions of both his aunt Lorraine (Jillian Bell) – who is delusionally convinced that she’s down with the kids – and neighbourhood nerd Champ (Ryan Lee), who singles him out as his new (actually only) friend.

Zach’s woes are alleviated when he meets plucky teen number two, Hannah (Odeya Rush), his neighbour’s daughter and something of a social pariah herself thanks to her father’s over-protectiveness. When Zach and Champ intercede in what they think is a domestic disturbance at Hannah’s house, he discovers her reclusive and anti-social father is R.L. Stine (Jack Black). A bookcase full of leather-bound original manuscripts of the ‘Goosebumps’ novels, which Champ remembers from his childhood, catches their attention. What they don’t know is that Stine’s retinue of monsters is real, his writing the only thing that can subdue them, the lock on each manuscript a guarantee that they’ll stay imprisoned within the pages of fiction.

Needless to say, Zach and Champ are the unwitting architects of the release of one of the monsters – an abominable snowman type who, with Hannah’s help, they track down to an ice rink. In the meantime, however, and much to Stine’s chagrin, his lifelong nemesis and alter ego, ventiloquist’s dummy Slappy, wrests free of his particular magnum opus and gleefully sets about freeing all the other monsters.

At which point ‘Goosebumps’ turns into the best movie that Joe Dante never made. It’s very reminiscent of Dante’s own ‘Gremlins’: small town, pint-sized terrors, abject chaos and a cute couple to whom it falls to save the day Did I say pint-sized terrors? Well, some of them are – particularly the gnomes (they’re the single best thing in the film) – but the werewolf and the giant praying mantis present problems on a considerably larger scale. Madison’s police force is swiftly proves useless. The high school is just as quickly besieged. A cemetery provides an apposite backdrop to a spooky revelation about Hannah. An abandoned amusement park now overgrown by woodland is the perfect stage for the big finale. Director Rob Letterman knows his genre and exploits all of this to the full.

Black, his performance thawing from misanthropic to merely prickly during the course of the film, turns in his best work since ‘School of Rock’. Minette, saddled with a bit of a non-character, is likeable enough and it helps that there’s a nice low-key chemistry between him Rush, who turns in a winning performance. Kudos also to Lee who forges a character rather than just playing Champ as the butt of the script’s jokes.

True, there’s nothing going on here that you haven’t seen before, but Letterman is canny enough to wear his influences on his sleeve, dealing out in-jokes and viewer-friendly genre tropes with the panache of a cardsharp. He’s also confident in his special effects department, knowing that the monsters, more so than his headliner or his attractive young cast, are the real stars of the show. Slappy (voiced by Black, just to reinforced the alter ego aspect of the character) is genuinely mocking and malevolent. The abominable snowman and the giant mantis benefit from a real sense of scale and physical destructiveness. The werewolf is a snarling, salivating beast. And, as I may have hinted already, the gnomes are just fucking brilliant. In fact, the gnomes walked away with the Agitation of the Mind “man of the match” award the first scene they were in.

The more I think about it, the more the gnomes emerge as a metaphor for the film itself: they’re a bit creepy, a bit silly, eminently entertaining while you’re watching and if everything’s just a shade forgettable a day or two later, does it really matter if you enjoyed yourself for an hour and three quarters in the cinema?

Dad's Army

During the nine years ‘Dad’s Army’ played to hugely appreciative audiences on the BBC, the Nazi threat never got closer to the Home Guard platoon of Walmington-on-Sea than a few cartoon arrows in the opening credit sequence. This was as it should be: the show, at its best, satirises Englishness, cowardice, incompetence and the class system and finds them to be almost incestuously interrelated. The best British sitcoms have always been studies in failure and microcosms of parochialism – ‘Steptoe and Son’, ‘Porridge’, ‘Open All Hours’, ‘Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads’ – and ‘Dad’s Army’ upped the ante with its wartime setting that took a big shiny pin to the translucent balloon of jingoism.

Or, to put it another way, the last thing ‘Dad’s Army’ needed was the Hun. However, 30-minute sitcoms can happily run for season after season and delight their fans simply by having their ensemble casts recreate in comically specific ways to any given situation (that’s why they’re called sitcoms, after all) while a 100-minute film – at least a mainstream one with well known actors in the lead roles and a chunk of studio money behind it – must necessarily have a plot. And thus it is that ‘Dad’s Army’ – the franchise’s first big screen outing since the original cast were assembled for a dreadful mishmash of a motion picture in 1971 – almost inevitably sees them tangle with invading German forces.

The 1971 film, directed by Norman Cohen and mercilessly buggered about by Columbia Studios (who saw fit to junk whole tranches of series creators Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s screenplay), is essentially an origin story – dear God, a ‘Dad’s Army’ origin story! – culminating in the bumbling platoon finally cohering as a unit to rescue hostages taken by the crew of a downed German aircraft. The new film, directed rather more ably by Oliver Parker, has the common decency to raise the stakes and throw in secret codes, D-Day plans and a glamorous double-agent. But does this make it any more successful?

If transferring small-screen situation comedy to a narrative-driven big-screen dynamic isn’t a difficult enough proposition as it is, doing so without the comfort blanket of the original cast presents a whole other problem. ‘Steptoe and Son’ (1972) and ‘Steptoe and Son Ride Again’ (1973) might be woefully inept attempts at film-making, but at least that’s Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H. Corbett up there on screen verbally gouging each other. The biggest pitfall ‘Dad’s Army’ faced from the outset was the potential embarrassment factor of watching a septet of (mostly) A-list movie icons doing impersonations of TV actors.

And, by God, is the cast of ‘Dad’s Army’ its selling point! Here we have Toby Jones as Captain Mainwaring, Bill Nighy as Sergeant Wilson, Tom Courtenay as Lance Corporal Jones. Michael Gambon as Private Godfrey, Blake Harrison as Private Pike, Daniel Mays as Private Walker and Bill Paterson as Private Frazier. By and large, all filter their performances through the audience’s memories of the original actor while bringing enough to the role to reinvigorate it if not (purposefully, one feels) reclaim it. Only Jones seems on a mission to make Mainwaring his own, while Harrison and Mays happily play to the audience’s expectations. Nighy, Paterson, Gambon and – especially – Courtenay fare the best.

It’s the ladies of the cast who really excel, though. Catherine Zeta Jones, as vampish journalist Rose Winter, has more fun than I’ve seen her exhibit in a performance since she cut lose with ‘Hit Me with Your Best Shot’ in ‘Rock of Ages’. Of course, Zeta Jones could play the vamp in her sleep, and the script, by Hamish McColl, doesn’t require her to do much more than smoulder and purr seductive double entendres, but she goes for broke and emerges as one of the film’s greatest assets. Its other assets are: Sarah Lancashire as Mrs Pike, Alison Steadman as Mrs Fox, Annette Crosby and Julia Foster* as Godfrey’s sisters Cissy and Dolly (their double act is priceless), Emily Atack as Walker’s dollybird girlfriend Daphne, Holli Dempsey as Pike’s long-suffering girlfriend Vera and Felicity Montagu as Mrs Mainwaring.

Yes, you read that correctly. Never seen in the show and avoided with almost tactical precision by Arthur Lowe’s Mainwaring, Mrs M not only gets a belated appearance, but leads a corresponding platoon of Walmington’s womenfolk in the climactic action scene. I use the term “action scene” purely as a generic description. It’s actually as geriatric as any of the main cast.

The shoot-out finale is as good an example as anything in the film of how uneven the humour is. There are moments of quiet snobbish one-upmanship, mainly between Mainwaring and Wilson, but also (taking the chain of command up a notch) between actual officer Colonel Theakes (Mark Gatiss) and Mainwaring; the film scores its most effective points during these moments. Slapstick predominates elsewhere, and there’s an extended sequence where various members of the cast dive behind sofas and snag their trousers climbing out of windows, that makes your average Brian Rix farce look like Strindberg. This is offset against the borderline surrealism of inflatable tanks coming loose from their mooring and floating off (one ends up impaled on a church spire, leaking air in a flatulent manner as Mainwaring tries to make a heartfelt speech). There’s also a sequence, early on, where the aforementioned cartoon arrows of the opening credits are recreated as blocks on a map in a German war room; a Nazi officer sniggers that any thoughts of England having the Third Reich on the run are misguided, and asks rhetorically “Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Churchill?” For all I know, it might have been funny as hell on paper; I was a little bit sick in my mouth watching it on screen.

For all its problems, though, I’ll admit to enjoying ‘Dad’s Army’ a lot more than I had any right to. Maybe the tradition of British sitcoms utterly failing as feature-length expositions – the first ‘Dad’s Army’ film, both ‘Steptoe’ attempts, ‘Porridge’, ‘The Likely Lads’ – justifies a certain creative accountancy as regards my usual critical standards. Maybe it’s because it was a cold, wet and miserable evening and a few good belly laughs in a warm cinema auditorium were worth an hour and three quarters of my time. Maybe it’s because Catherine Zeta Jones looks good in a burgundy two-piece and a pillbox hat. Or maybe it’s the unalloyed delight I took in the cameo by Ian Lavender (Private Pike in the original), a piece of reverse-casting that works a treat.



*Meta moment: Julia Foster starred alongside Tom Courtenay 54 years ago in ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’; there’s a lost episode of ‘Dad’s Army’ called ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Walker’.

The Hateful Eight

In 1967, Roy Orbison starred in his one and only film: a lightweight and gimmicky western called ‘The Fastest Guitar Alive’. It wasn’t a successful endeavour for anyone concerned. Orbison wrote a passel of bland songs for the soundtrack, only one of which – ‘There Won’t Be Many Coming Home’ – had anything specific to say. The producers, concerned that it was too serious and not in keeping with the film’s lighthearted tone, removed it. Forty-eight years later, Orbison’s civil war ballad is restored to the soundtrack of a western. A Quentin Tarantino western. And if the producers of ‘The Fastest Guitar Alive’ thought it sounded too serious in that film, it comes off as downright flippant here. Tarantino’s use of the Orbison song is the final irony in a 70mm epic that spends three hours bristling with irony, righteous anger and the kind of wallowing self-indulgence that characterises its director's approach to filmmaking.

Now, regular readers of this irregularly updated blog (I tries, folks, I really does) will know that I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Tarantino fan. I can entirely appreciate why people don’t dig his work, and completely sympathise with those whom it renders decidedly uneasy. But, because of a number of interrelating vectors, from being blown away by ‘Reservoir Dogs’ at the impressionable age of twenty, to meeting the man himself two years later when he was guest of honour at the Broadway Cinema’s Shots in the Dark festival, the trajectory of my cinephilia has progressed in tandem with Tarantino’s career. He’s the only director whose entire filmography I’ve seen on the big screen.

So, yes: I likes me some Tarantino. I even like ‘Death Proof’. And I don't edge uneasily back from his work, convinced he’s a racist because his scripts use the N-word. No racist would gift such iconic parts to black actors. What I’m not sure about, however, is his attitude to women, and nowhere have I had such doubts than with ‘The Hateful Eight’. Reader, I’m going to come straight out with it: ‘The Hateful Eight’ is the first time I’ve come out of a Quentin Tarantino film not quite sure what to make of it.

It’s been about a week since I saw the film and the more I think about it, the more I’m tempted to narrow down my rationale to one of two options:

1) Tarantino, deciding that his usual critics will accuse him of racism anyway, structures a three-hour roadshow epic in such a way that his audience will be sent stumbling into the intermission in the immediate aftermath of an almost Shakespearian soliloquy, delivered in half-mocking-half-menacing fashion by Samuel L Jackson, the (ahem) thrust of which is the phrase “big black dingus”;

2) It’s a remake of ‘Reservoir Dogs’ disguised as a remake of John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ with Kurt Russell in the Kurt Russell role and a certain interchangeability between Jennifer Jason Leigh and Channing Tatum as regards the role of the thing.

Either way, it’s a film of two halves. The first documents the stormy stagecoach journey that brings bounty hunter John Ruth (Russell) and his shackled charge Daisy Domergue (Leigh) – the running joke about the mispronunciation of her surname is the script’s subtlest aspect – to Minnie’s Haberdashery en route to the town of Red Rock (aficionados of ‘Django Unchained’ won’t be surprised at the ‘Blazing Saddles’ homage). En route, Ruth reluctantly ends up giving a lift to fellow bounty hunter Major Marquis Warren (Jackson) and Red Rock’s sheriff-to-be Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). Arriving at their stop, Ruth and Warren are suspicious that Minnie (Dana Gourrier) and her husband and business partner Sweet Dave (Gene Jones) are nowhere to be seen and the establishment has been left under the stewardship of taciturn Mexican Bob (Demian Bichir). Also at Minnie’s, seeking shelter from the storm, are dandy English hangman Oswaldo Mowbray (Tim Roth) – the proximity of the character’s name to notorious blackshirt Oswald Mosley cannot be coincidental – enigmatic cowboy Joe Gage (Michael Madsen) and doddery Confederate General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern). What follows is a series of variations on a theme, the theme being how downright fucking loathsome all of these individuals are in their own special way. Racism, snobbery, intransigence, intolerance and the deep social, political and geographical divisions created by the civil war all come to the fore. At one point, various parties suggest that the cabin itself be divided in two (I couldn’t help but think of the ‘Steptoe and Son’ episode where Albert and Harold reduce the family home to a microcosm of apartheid) as a temporary alternative to killing each other.

The second half is marked by at least two tonal shifts, the first of which is done to brilliant effect. The linear, classical storytelling of the first half goes out of the window, to be replaced with voiceover, flashbacks, shifting perspectives … basically, the whole non-linear playbook that Tarantino has delved into with zero restraint throughout his career. For approximately half an hour, ‘The Hateful Eight’ morphs into an Agatha Christie locked room mystery, with Warren in the Miss Marple role, if Miss Marple packed a pair of pistols and everyone in St Mary Mead used the word “nigger” like it was going out of style. This, for me, was easily the most focused part of the proceedings and I could happily have watched “Samuel L Jackson in a drawing room mystery with swearing and pistol whipping” for the rest of the movie; however Tarantino curtails this section with a short sharp shock of a rug pull, immediately seguing into an extended flashback that manages to be sweatily tense even though we all know, by this point, exactly how it’s going to play out.

Then we’re back to the present and the final act. Which is where the film seems to start juggling desperately – it’s a state of the nation piece; no wait, it’s an essay on how ideology deflates in the face of survivalism; no wait, it’s a variation on the theme of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”; no wait, it’s a Corbucci checklist replete with amoral cynicism and violence against women; no wait, it’s an ugly ironic statement on how liberal hand-wringing for interracial tolerance is founded on the big self-delusion of the liberal hand-wringer wanting to feel better about themself – and never fully commits to a final statement. Maybe this is what Tarantino intended. Or maybe he just decided that America – and by extension the world – is fucked and the best we can do is laugh at the sheer absurdity of it while we pointlessly kill each other.

Whichever, this is Tarantino we’re talking about and the man couldn’t do existential despair if he binged on Bergman, Tarkovsky and Tarr for a year. And that’s what gives ‘The Hateful Eight’ its wilful perversity: never mind the unpleasant places it goes, Tarantino’s sheer exhilaration in the process of film-making is splattered across every frame like a valentine’s love heart made of blood squibs.

Spectre

For all of the things that it did well, 'Skyfall' remains, for me, an awkward movie. Certainly an awkward Bond movie. On the one hand, it strives to be resolutely unBondian, documenting its protagonist's psychological depletion and building towards a low-key finale (by the standards of the franchise, anyway) in which 007's past is effectively obliterated; yet on the other, it shamelessly panders to the fan-boys (the Aston Martin with modifications; M's old office). 'Skyfall' stretches an act of transition across two plus hours, maneouvring Daniel Craig's Bond from the origin story and flawed coda of 'Casino Royale' and 'Quantum of Solace' respectively to a point of reference recognisable from the early Connery to mid-period Moore years.
 
'Spectre' was mouth-watering in its potential: a cold, ruthless Bond going head to head with a re-imagined Blofeld, the antagonist back after a decades-long rights wrangle.

Then the reviews started coming in and they were lukewarm; some outright hostile. With expectations at rock-bottom, I hauled myself off to my local multiplex and caught a screening the day before its run ended. Maybe it was the low expectations that did it, maybe it's because I never quite embraced 'Skyfall' the way everybody else seemed to, but I enjoyed 'Spectre' a lot.

There are, I should add with some degree of haste, caveats. First and foremost, 'Spectre' suffers from a two-and-a-half hour running time not remotely bolstered by anything resembling a plot. "Bond looks into some things that pissed him off from the earlier movies" is about as sophisticated as things get narratively. Basically, Bond receives a posthumously instruction from Judi Dench's M to take out an entirely disposable bad guy, after which he joins a series of heavily telegraphed dots, finally ending up at a secret base owned and operated by our old mate Ernst Stavro. Said dots serve as a tying up of loose ends from the preceding three movies (Quantum, in turns out, is little more than a sub-contractor to Spectre), but whereas those movies each have something at stake, the only thing 007 seems to be racing against the clock to prevent is the new M (Ralph Fiennes) being made redundant.

In a subplot that has more nuance and credibility than the main action, an MI5/MI6 merger is on the cards and politically-savvy hatchet man Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott) is hellbent on shutting down the Double-O programme while brokering an information-sharing agreement between security services on a global level. There was a moment in the film where I really hoped that Christoph-Waltz-as-villain was merely a feint and Scott would be revealed as Blofeld, nicely exploiting his already iconic turn as Moriarty in 'Sherlock'. But no. Waltz plays Hans Oberhauser, a figure from Bond's past who fakes his own death and re-invents himself. Blofeld's his mother's name. Yes, the revelation really is that ho-hum.

On the plus side, however, the pre-credits sequence is Craig's best yet (which is saying something after the fantastic set piece that kicked off 'Skyfall'). Even its immediate supplanting by Sam Smith's truly fucking horrible theme song and a title design that is bizarre to the point of hallucinatory can't detract from how good it is. Even if it does homage 'For Your Eyes Only' a little too slavishly. The rest of the action more or less maintains the quality: a car chase, a plane/jeep chase (one of the film's best self-contained sequences), a speedboat/helicopter chase, a shedload of explosions and an extended bout of hand-to-hand combat in the narrow confines of a train. Even if it does homage 'From Russia With Love' a little too slavishly.

In fact, let's just call it: 'Spectre' is the most self-reflexive Bond movie since 'Die Another Day' wallowed in the non-hilarity of its parade of in-jokes. Granted, director Sam Mendes and scripters John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Jez Butterworth attempt to work them cohesively into the narrative, but it doesn't take long for deja vu to set in. In addition to the above cited examples, we have the mountaintop clinic from 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service', lifestyle porn hospitality as a prelude to torture from 'Dr No', and the collapsing building/trapped heroine finale from 'Casino Royale'.

Speaking of the heroine, let's drag this review back on course and notch up another high point for 'Spectre'. All hail Lea Seydoux, the most capable Bond girl and character-in-her-own-right since Diana Rigg provided the franchise’s apex in this regard in 'OHMSS'. And also the most unlikely. Seydoux plays Madeleine Swann (a clunky but more-or-less thematically valid nod to Proust) – Mr White (Jesper Christensen)'s daughter. Not much further down the cast list, but with criminally less screen time, Monica Bellucci provides Bond with the frisson of a dalliance with a woman who isn't young enough to be his daughter; although she's little more than a plot device to take Bond one step closer to Spectre and Blofeld, she achieves an edgy chemistry with Craig that works to the film's benefit.

There's also a nice vibe going on between M, Q (Ben Wishaw), and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris). Mendes has great fun throwing them together for a little fieldwork during the extended (perhaps overly extended) finale.

And here I find myself unable to escape the defining tone of this review: everything I liked about 'Spectre', every aspect of it I thoroughly enjoyed, triggers a caveat. Believe me, I'd love to have pounded out 1,000 breathless words, adjectives cascading like spent cartridges from a semi-automatic weapon*, and sung its praises. But there's no avoiding the fact that 'Spectre' is flawed; not tonally as 'Skyfall' was, but structurally and narratively. Simply introducing Blofeld as a fully formed supervillain and giving him some kind of doomsday device would have helped matters no end. After pursuing the Bond origin story and its psychological fallout over three consecutive films, staging 'Spectre' as the Blofeld origin story seems equally transitional. Maybe next time we'll get a straight-down-the-line Bond movie.



*Yeah: I’m classy, me.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Play Motel

You know when you’re in poor company with a giallo when it’s basically a blue movie with a hint of murder mystery thrown in. You know you’re in poor company when it stars Ray Lovelock (ever seen ‘Oasis of Fear’, ‘Almost Human’ or ‘The Seventh Woman’? I have, and I’d rather put in several hours of unpaid overtime at work than watch them again). You know you’re in poor company when it’s directed by Mario Gariazzo (the anti-talent behind porno ‘Exorcist’ knock off ‘L’ossessa’ and lame cannibal snore-fest ‘Amazonia: the Catherine Miles Story’).

And you know you’re in poor company when a movie configured to incorporate the maximum possible nudity utterly fails to generate any eroticism. Let’s be honest, in the bottom-of-the-barrel sub-genre that is the giallo-sex-film, ‘Strip Nude for Your Killer’ and ‘The Sister of Ursula’ are better works of cinema.

With all of that in mind, are you ready to check into the Play Motel? If so, let’s spend a few words considering the title. As far as I can tell, that’s the only moniker the film goes by, which makes in quite rare in the annals of Italian exploitation cinema, where even something as auteurish (and more or less mainstream) as Argento’s ‘Profondo Rosso’ – literally translated as ‘Deep Red’ for the English-speaking markets – was also variously known as ‘The Hatchet Murders’ and ‘The Shiver of Agony’, and Mario Bava’s ‘A Bay of Blood’ has more aliases than a master criminal. But no, ‘Play Motel’ doesn’t even allow me to indulge this review with an Italian title like ‘Fotografie compromettenti in strano motel’ which at least sounds elegant even though it patently isn’t.

No, ‘Play Motel’ smirks at me like the seedy receptionist (Mario Novelli) who hands the room key to the succession of wealthy gentlemen who use the facility for assignations with call girls. Smirks at me knowing that every time I reference the film’s title in this review, I’ll wince inwardly as I type the nine letters that make up ‘Play Motel’.

Seriously, I’d have more respect for this film if it were called ‘The Fuck Pad Murders’.

But things are as they are, and this is the Winter of Discontent. Dubious and depraved works of exploitation are the season’s raison d’etre and for better or for worse (actually, for worse; definitely for worse) ‘Play Motel’ was where this evening’s viewing led me. So let’s collect our key from the smirking receptionist, down a shot of J&B at the bar, trundle along to our seedy room and hope that it had a deep clean after the previous tenant departed. Now, let’s slip into something more sleazy and survey the, ahem, delights on offer.

‘Play Motel’ tells the fairly simple story of a blackmail scam in which the aforementioned wealthy gentlemen (and, in one remarkably unoriginal twist, the wife of a well-connected individual) are lured to said establishment under the promise of all kinds of hanky-panky, only to receive some glossies in the post a few days later and a demand for ready cash. The movie starts with glacial businessman Rinaldo Cortesi (Enzo Fisichella) meeting model/call girl Loredana (Marina Hedman) for some kinky role play. Upon receipt of the compromising photos, he seeks advice of his lawyer. This eminently professional gentleman advises him to cough up the readies. Unbeknownst to Cortesi, however, his wife Luisa (Patrizia Behn) stumbles upon the pictures and does what Cortesi has been warned not to: go to the police.

Enter Inspector Toselli (Vittorio Ripamonti), who sets out to track down Loredana. Recognising her likeness in an adult magazine (“this publication was in the files relating to porn,” says the lackey who retrieves said literature from the evidence room, miraculously keeping a straight face as he delivers this deathless line), Toselli tracks Loredana to the photographer, Willy (Mario Cutini), who works for said magazine.

Any reasonably competent armchair sleuth should be able to fit the pieces together, and indeed Gariazzi (writing as well as directing, and doing both with precious little competency) pretty much plays his hand about half way in, saving just one twist for the finale. What does work, however, is the amount of false starts that occupy the first third of the 90 minute running time. Cortesi seems like the protagonist for the first few minutes: an early scene where his lawyer and his wife are shown having an affair seems to set up a tangled web of personal and professional relationships, but before any of them can unravel, the baton of the narrative passes suddenly to Luisa. Her initial consultation with Toselli not resulting in much urgency on the good detective’s part, she starts snooping. But this development is swiftly curtailed and ‘Play Motel’ settles for quarter of an hour or so into a boilerplate procedural with Toselli taking the reins. Only at around the half hour mark does aspiring actor Roberto Vinci (Lovelock) enter the proceedings, vivacious girlfriend Patrizia (Anna Maria Rizzoli) in tow.

And even though Lovelock gets main billing, Vinci goes on to do a remarkable amount of fuck all for most of the next hour. Caught up in proceedings when a corpse is dumped in his car boot, Vinci is recruited by Toselli when the latter realises that Willy and the publishers of the wank mag will recognise him from previous busts when he was heading up the vice squad. Evidently there must have been budget cuts in the Italian police force at the time and the first to go were the undercover officers, but still the casualness – nay, the indifference – with which a seasoned detective happily drags in a civilian off the street and pretty much pins upon him the onus of the entire investigation is a big ask in terms of suspension-of-disbelief. That Vinci is reluctant is perfectly understandable. That Patrizia rushes headlong into the investigation, putting herself in harms way with a toss of the hair and a flash of the pearly whites, can have no rationalisation other than the requirement in these kind of films for attractive women to sashay around in perilous scenarios looking sexy as all hell.

Only this is where my enthusiasm for trash movies and tendency to exaggerated threaten to overwhelm the review. For while Rizzoli is certainly attractive, there is nothing sexy about ‘Play Motel’. This is a film where there’s a nude scene every five minutes or so, where a sequence involving Patrizia posing topless for Willy in order to gain access to his studio seems to run longer than ‘Satantango’ played at half-speed. Where even the occasional jolting hardcore insert only serves to reinforce how grubby and free of frisson the whole thing is.

It left me feeling that I might just have to check in at the ‘Slaughter Hotel’ just for a taste of sophistication. Dear God, the ‘Slaughter Hotel’!

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Eugenie de Sade

Some directors return obsessively to a single theme throughout their filmography. For Peckinpah, it was the idea of men outliving their times; for Bergman, the struggle for faith in a Godless world. For Jesús (Jess) Franco, it was naked ladies the work of the Marquis de Sade, particularly his 1795 novel ‘Philosophy in the Boudoir’. In this work, siblings Madame de Sainte-Ange and Le Chevalier de Mirval enlist the assistance of Chevalier’s bisexual friend Dolmancé in persuading the virginal (and underage) Eugenie into a life of libertinism.

Franco first approached the material in 1969 with the subtly titled ‘Eugenie: The Story of Her Voyage into Perversion’ starring Marie Liljedahl and Maria Rohm. Tonight’s offering, ‘Eugenie de Sade’, followed in 1970 – arguably Franco’s annis mirabilis, during which he also made ‘Nightmares Come at Night’, ‘Vampyros Lesbos’, ‘She Killed in Ecstasy’ and ‘The Devil Came from Akasava’.

He returned to all things Sadean with ‘De Sade’s Juliette’ in 1975, a sort-of companion piece to the earlier ‘Marquis de Sade: Justine’ (1968), ‘Erotic Symphony’ in 1979 and ‘Eugenie: The Story of a Perversion’ (with Katja Bienert as the titular nymphet) in 1980, the same year he made ‘Sadomania: Hell of Passion’, a women-in-prison film whose title is its only real connection to the writings of de Sade. Naturally, for such a prolific director, a certain reworking of material (did I put that politely enough?) is evident in the Franco canon, and many of his other films, while ostensibly not de Sade adaptation, are steeped in the admixture of pseudo-intellectual waffle and dirty sex that was the Marquis’s stock-in-trade.

So what makes ‘Eugenie de Sade’ (a.k.a. ‘Eugenia’, ‘De Sade 2000’ and ‘Eugenie Sex Happening’) stand out amongst Franco’s other takes on the material? What makes it ripe for evaluation on Winter of Discontent? Apart from the fact that it was streaming for free and I haven’t update this blog in a week, you mean?

‘Eugenie de Sade’ conflates Madame de Sainte-Ange and Le Chevalier de Mirval from ‘Philosophy in the Boudoir’ into one character: novelist Albert de Franval (Paul Muller, who I would describe as a Franco regular except that Franco only ever worked with regulars), and ups the ante on the controversy stakes by making Eugenie (Soledad Miranda) his step-daughter. The film unfolds in flashback as a badly injured Eugenie recounts to investigative writer Attila Tanner (Franco himself) the events that led to her hospitalisation. The Tanner character is an interesting diversion from the source material, reminiscent less of anyone in de Sade than of Clare Quilty in Nabakov’s ‘Lolita’ as his path crosses Albert and Eugenie’s at key moments in the story.

Although “story” is probably pushing it as a description. The glacially paced 91 minutes of this opus consist of Eugenie discovering pornographic works in her step-father’s library; her step-father discovering that she’s discovered them and demonstrated a certain moral indifference by way of response; and Albert and Eugenie then embarking on a quasi-incestuous sex ‘n’ killing spree, for all the world as if Humbert Humbert and Delores Haze had decided to get their Bonnie and Clyde funk on.*

Although “sex ‘n’ killing spree” is also pushing it as a description. By rights, ‘Eugenie de Sade’ ought to be a fast-paced sleazy romp. It’s actually glacial in both its pacing and its aesthetic. From its wintry landscapes to its concrete cityscapes, its low-lit clubs to its bland hotel rooms, the film plays out in a world leeched of colour. Even its most lurid set pieces – a kinky photoshoot that ends in murder; a drinking game that ends in seduction and death – proceed with not only a lack of narrative urgency or tension, but also very little in the way of erotic frisson. It’s as if Franco had made a specific artistic decision from the outset to use the film as a comment on the banality of evil.

Compared to the sunny location work and lifestyle porn of ‘Eugenie: The Story of Her Voyage into Perversion’, or the unremitting focus on pain-as-pleasure in ‘Eugenie: The Story of a Perversion’, and this middle chapter in what can only be considered as a series of variations on a theme, emerges as the one in which the cruel self-centeredness of de Sade’s basic philosophy (as long as you’re the one taking pleasure, it doesn’t matter who gets hurt) is neither thrillingly sexy or orgiastically vicious, but steeped in ennui. This reading is emphasised by the presence of Soledad Miranda – a stunning actress, but a blank canvas for a director’s obsessions if ever there was one. She moves languidly and disinterestedly through the film, occasionally twitching out a half-smile that looks like it was carved with a razor blade, then sinking back into a sort of trance-like boredom.

The banality of evil, all right; but your average priest would still kick a hole in stained glass window just to get the slightest taste of it.


*Thankfully Franco makes Eugenie of age. Doesn’t excuse any of the other stuff that goes on the film, but – hey – it’s nice to observe some proprieties.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Dead Boyz Don’t Scream

Meet the “three stooges”. No, not Larry, Curly and Moe. This trio are beefy male models: Christian (Christian Mousel), Todd (Logan Hilyard) and Anthony (Zack Vazquez). They’ve been given this less-than-flattering appellation by their agent Tess (Victoria Redstall). As the film opens, Tess has landed them a shoot with commercial photographer Roz (Monique Parent) that might lead to a contract with fashion boutique Greg Parry (trust me, this is a lot wittier on paper than in the actual film). Roz is also keen to have them pose for a coffee table book of cowboy-themed gay porn, but Tess feels this would be a backwards step in terms of their career. The stooges’ rivals – for both the Greg Parry contract and the gay cowboy book – are “the poodles”, Dieter (Ewan French) and Peter (Aaron Mark), so called for the corruption of their Germanic surname Pudl. The Pudl brothers are camper than a row of tents and seem overly tactile with each other. As Roz puts it in the film’s one genuinely amusing line, “I think the rumours might be true: that their parents met at a family reunion.”

The, ahem, story gets underway after their photoshoot with Roz when they hook up with Latino loverboy buddy Jimmy (Anthony Giraud) and go and meet Christian’s lifelong friend Callie (Catherine Wreford), who’s just flown in from Vancouver. Christian behaves as if Callie is some fragile dreamy romantic type whereas it soon becomes clear that she just wants to get wasted and party with the hunks. Said activity takes a turn for the worst that leaves Callie traumatised and Jimmy dead after a plunge from a balcony that might have been an accident but probably wasn’t.

At this point, Tess steps in to smooth things over, pay Callie off and bundle her back on a plane. Changing her mind about the gay cowboy book, Tess decides that a few days in the wilds will serve the dual purpose of allowing her to keep a close eye on her troublesome charges, and remove them from the spotlight of any negative publicity. And there’s also the incentive of a dalliance with her forest ranger girlfriend Belle (Gina Gian). Only things go pear-shaped very early on: Christian has a spectacular meltdown, rivalries and jealousy come to the fore, and then – hey ho, whaddaya know – people start dying in grisly (if poorly staged) fashion.
 

Directed by Marc Saltarelli, whose only feature this is (he’s made a number of shorts and contributed to the portmanteau film ‘Green Briefs’), ‘Dead Boyz Don’t Scream’ is a kind of homoerotic ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’, with bulging abs and taut buttocks instead of Jennifer Love Hewitt’s cleavage. It offers the alternative of hunky men being chased through the woods in the underwear instead of nubile women (one scene has an axe descend on Todd’s back, miss by a millisecond and the blade snick his tightie whities insteads; his terrified flight through the darkness continues au naturel). Just in case you’re wondering: yes – this kind of role reversal is the only satirical card the film has to play.

With originality pretty much off the menu, the thankfully sparse 78 minute running time devolves to an exercise in playing spot-the-homage and second-guessing the denouement. Is the killer an unhinged Christian? Or has Belle, whose stated intent is for Tess to leave her job and move to the woods with her, trying to accelerate the process by way of decimating Tess’s client base? Or are the poodles taking out their competition for the Greg Parry gig? Or is it Roz’s assistant Kimba (Kenyetta Lethridge), who seems to be floating around in the background without actually having anything to do with the proceedings? Or are there deeper secrets that connect the characters?

Or is ‘Dead Boyz Don’t Scream’ simply a camp piece of trash in which absolutely none of this malarkey matters? And, indeed, what the hell is it doing on the Winter of Discontent? Well, it was available to watch for free and I’d been drinking the previous evening. So yah boo, it’s on Winter of Discontent and I’m not wrapping up this review till I’ve found something to say about it.

And you don’t have to scratch the surface of the film too vigorously (it’s all surface anyway) to note two things. Firstly, for a film so determinedly tailored to a gay audience – every photoshoot Roz does after the stooges and the poodles arrive the ranch involves full-frontal male nudity, the fetishisation of western imagery and the kind of penis-to-screen-time ratio you’d normally expect in a Derek Jarman film – its only sex scene makes Callie the focus. Sure, there’s plenty of close-ups of the boys’ muscular physiques as they eye each other up while they wait their turn, but this is essentially less a depiction of group sex or bisexual activity than three latent gay men sublimating what they actually want to do into a take-their-turn demonstration of heterosexual conformity.

Secondly – and the target audience is worth reiterating – ‘Dead Boyz Don’t Scream’ is mind-bogglingly homophobic. From its depiction of Tess and Belle’s relationship by way of a few chaste kisses to saddling Belle with the surname Van Dyke, never mind transposing the homoerotic tension between the stooges to the incestuous almost-consummation between Dieter and Peter , the film seems to loathe both its characters and its audience. That the twist delivers an equally cynical slap in the face to gender reassignment – the killer’s motivation is revealed in a line of such jaw-dropping what-the-fuckery that “the killer developed a morbid fear of tennis balls bouncing in the night” from ‘A Blade in the Dark’ comes across as a masterpiece of psychological exposition in comparison – leaves Saltarelli and screenwriter Rick Jensen’s motivations even murkier than their understanding of how to stage comedy.

Did I mention that it’s a horror-comedy, by the way? It is. Allegedly. It’s just not fucking funny.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The ABCs of Death

Beware the anthology (or portmanteau) film. Two problems dog the format: weak or contrived framing device, and inconsistency across its stories. The only anthology film I’ve seen that avoids these problems – that is, in fact, an out-and-out work of art – is Masaki Kobayashi’s ‘Kwaidan’; that all four of the tales it comprises were realised by one director is a good indication of why it succeeds where others fail. Even the Ealing Studios classic ‘Dead of Night’ takes a misstep with Charles Crichton’s over-egged segment about the rival golfers.

‘The ABCs of Death’ gets at least one thing right: it jettisons the necessity for a framing narrative. Instead it delivers, one after the other, 26 meditations on death, each by a different director. Some are subtitled, some are animated, some are black comedies, some are serious dramas, some are surreal, some predictable and others just downright fucking sick (I’m looking at you, Timo Tjahjanto, Jason Eisener and Yoshihiro Nishimura). To describe it as a mixed bag is being understated. To trot out the “too many cooks spoil the broth” cliché is both lazy and not quite accurate: given the degree of scatological obsession on display here, the cooks in question aren’t just spoiling the broth – a fair number of them are also taking a poo in it.

At least four segments take place in lavatories (the twentieth story is in fact called ‘T is for Toilet’), and only Ti West’s ‘M is for Miscarriage’ actually bothers to generate any real social horror from the setting. Elsewhere, Noboru Iguchi’s ‘F is for Fart’ tries to elevate flatulence and soft-core lesbianism to the level of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. Bear in mind that Iguchi is the classy motherfucker who gave the world enema fetish porn videos before moving into the, ahem, mainstream with the likes of ‘The Machine Girl’, ‘RoboGeisha’ and ‘Zombie Ass’, and you’ll probably have some idea of how far short he falls.

Sex is predictably omnipresent. Banjong Pisanthanakun’s ‘N is for Nuptials’ is basically a shaggy dog story where an indiscreet mynah bird royally buggers up a marriage proposal. ’O is for Orgasm’ sees Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet serves the same pretentious mishmash of homages, arthouse obscurism and style-over-content that marred their tedious feature-length debut ‘Amer’ (itself a portmanteau outing that never adds up to the sum of its parts). ‘V is for Vagitus (The Cry of a Newborn Baby)’ strays from the horror genre in favour of a dystopian sci-fi mini-epic about patriarchal governments and reproduction. The most disturbing of this set is Tjahjanto’s ‘L is for Libido’, which starts out as a weird conflation of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ and ‘Fight Club’ (had he been given another letter of the alphabet, Tjahjanto could just as easily have presented the piece as ‘W is for Wank’), peaks with the best visual pun on impotence I’ve seen, and would have been utterly brilliant if he’d faded to red at that point. As it, he plunges on into ‘Serbian Film’ territory and the last minute or so leaves a fetid taste in the mouth.

But not as bad a taste as Eisener leaves with ‘Y is for Youngblood’, a misjudged and leeringly unpleasant tale of a zombie deer taking revenge on the paedophile who coaxed a young boy into killing it. Conceptually, had the paedophile been less of a rubber-faced cliché and his actions been suggested rather than Eisener wallowing in them like a pig in a particularly odious patch of excrement, the material could have worked. This could – and should – have been a serious psychological drama (is the deer in the protagonist’s mind? is he being driven towards insanity or immolation by his own guilt?), but as anyone who’s seen Eisener’s ‘Treevenge’ or ‘Hobo with a Shotgun’ will know, all he’s interested in is upping the ante on already well established genre tropes and grossing out his audience. He has no moral compass as a filmmaker, and probably no idea that life actually happens outside of a ribbon of celluloid running through a projector.

It’s a damn shame that so many problems plague ‘The ABCs of Death’, with the exception of ‘F is for Fart’ its first third establishes a fairly high standard. Nacho Vigalondo’s ‘A is for Apocalypse’ is the perfect opener for a portmanteau film: stylistically bold, disorientating and with a killer punchline; Adrian Garcia Bogliano’s ‘B is for Bigfoot’ quite simply owns the urban myth subgenre; Ernesto Diaz Espinoza’s ‘C is for Cycle’ comes on like a distilled version of Christopher Smith’s ‘Triangle’; Marcel Sarmiento’s provocative ‘D is for Dogfight’ is the film’s high point, a wordless dissertation on bloodsports, audience complicity and the death of innocence – hard to watch but never less than aesthetically valid, it shows up a lot of the later segments for the pabulum that they are; Angela Bettis’s ‘E is for Exterminate’ uses mordant humour to document those tiny acts of cruelty (in this case the killing of a spider) that so many of us rationalise; and ‘G is for Gravity’ uses the first-person POV to chilling effect in a dialogue-free description of a suicide.

Interesting that ‘Dogfight’ and ‘Gravity’ eschew dialogue. Ben Wheatley’s ‘U is for Unearthed’ – the film’s other genuine standout – uses the same technique (first person POV with so little dialogue as to be neglible) to capture the final moments of a fleeing vampire as it’s run to ground and staked. It’s a simple enough reversal of a done-to-death scene, but Wheatley gets the absolute maximum out of his couple of minutes. 

There are one or two other offerings that are worthwhile – Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett’s black comedy ‘Q is for Quack’ and Srdan Spasojevic’s bizarre, hallucinatory and brilliantly imagistic ‘R is for Removed’ deserve honourable mentions – but overall the variance in quality control isn’t just obvious, it’s a deal-breaker for long stretches of the two hour plus running time, particularly in the final stretches where headfucks like Jon Schnepp’s ‘W is for WTF!’ and Nishimura’s ‘Z is for Zetsumetsu (Extinction)’ rub shoulders with Eisener’s stinker and Xavier Gens’s ‘XXL’, where all the viscera a bathtub can hold can’t make up for how tedious and predictable his treatment of the material is.

Even at a few minutes apiece, presenting 26 separate stories, in such wilfully divergent styles, as a single coherent movie was always going to prove something of a poisoned chalice. I’ve not seen ‘The ABCs of Death 2’, but I understand the producers attempted to even things out tonally by focusing on black comedy. Hmmm. Maybe it’ll crop up on Winter of Discontent, maybe it won’t.