Max Ophüls directs Madeleine Renaud, Jean Gabin and Claude Dauphin in this French anthology movie based on the short stories of Guy de Maupassant’s set around the Fin de Siècle.
A stranger in an uncanny mask dances the night away in a hectic club. The popular brothel closes up for a day to visit a countryside Holy Communion of a girl. A painter and his model’s marriage turns sour. Two vignettes bookend the longer central tale. Bawdy yet classy, frank and unsentimental. There’s real sparkling visual verve here as Ophüls’ roving camera pans through elaborate sets overspilling with characters and mini subplots. It is a frothing construction, featuring a busy cast of French stars. A winner that clearly influenced both Kubrick and Wes Anderson. I loved the first two mini-movies.
John Carpenter directs Roddy Piper, Keith David and Meg Foster in this sci-fi thriller satire where a drifter tries on some special sunglasses that reveal humanity is being subjugated by aliens who walk among us.
“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass… and I’m all out of bubblegum.” One of Carpenter’s less polished efforts. The killer concept proves a helluva hook, there are fabulous quotes, it is prescient as fuck and it features that infamous 6 minute alleyway fistfight. But it is fair to say once the movie shows its hand after an expert paranoid build-up to the big reveal, Carpenter doesn’t take the idea anywhere particularly compelling. The seemingly never ending brawl over a pair of RayBans is maybe Exhibit A that Carpenter did not know where to move this on to after acing the set-up. It is a silly set piece but extraneous.
Meaty Roddy Piper is adequate as John Nada, Keith David as charismatic as ever, but the most fascinating characters are those who are relatively underdeveloped. Meg Foster’s token female’s moral ambiguity is left deliciously unexplained and what’s with that tuxedo guy who thinks he knows the construction worker heroes when they crash the party? There’s part of me that wonders if Carpenter wanted to do more with these two or whether he banged this out as a quick retrofit rewrite of an early draft of Big Trouble In Little China and never ironed out the wrinkles? He loves to recycle, just look at the format similarities between Assault On Precinct 13 and Prince Of Darkness, for example. Maybe that explains the loose ends and overlap between these two projects.
Anyhoo… a fun cult item, even if our grumpy autuer is only at half power. The real juice is the patient yet thrilling sequence where Piper sees the real world for the first time, those colonising blue muscle faced humanoid freaks going about the every day as if they were one of us. It is a perfect 15 minutes and I’m definite the Wachowskis cribbed from it for the first act of The Matrix. What self respecting sci-fi movie couldn’t say that though? This joyously features less five syllable words… though wouldn’t it be fun to see a blocky wrestler try and say ‘simulacra’ and ‘perception’ in the same sentence? Carpenter knows to show, not tell. The rich / poor and them / us dynamic of this is pretty on the nose and maybe that is the reason They Live (along with Trading Places and Brewster’s Millions) is a ripe IP that bizarrely the global corporation which own the rights has never decided to reboot or revisit the well.
7
Perfect Double Bill: Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978)
Martin Campbell directs Ray Liotta, Scott Wilson and Lance Henriksen in this sci-fi prison movie where a convict is dumped on a wild secret island where the criminals have divided into two feudal tribes.
I sneaked into Central London to watch No Escape at the shittier Leicester Square Odeon. Probably blew two weeks paper round money and I certainly did not have my parents permission. No idea why this was the movie that made me break the rules and cross the boundaries of how far out of Hanwell I was allowed to go by myself. It was sci-fi, which was my main jam back then. Lance Henrikesen was in it which was the gold seal of approval to 14 year old me. And I all really remember from my illicit trip was the rumble of the Dolby Sound System. The sound system slapped. The movie itself is adequate but still right up my street. It could be a couple of clicks more action heavy. Ray Liotta is far better at menacing than he is straight laced action hero but doesn’t feel out of place. You can tell the Australian production crew loved creating this salvaged feudal world and the sheer scale of the cast and open air sets is genuinely impressive. Probably more so now than back then. The highlight is Scott Wilson’s super hammy dreadlocked villain – kind of a corporate Head of Sales for cannibal living. Not sure how his verbose, genial rotter has managed not to be usurped by his town of savages but I guess that is part of the silly excess. No Escape is precisely as fine and limited as I remember it being but it still hits a spot that isn’t really being catered for anymore. Art is all well and good but violent kinetics are what got me into cinema. This unashamed B-movie delivers with a lack of fuss.
Sean Baker directs Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, Mya Taylor and Karren Karagulian in this comedy drama following two trans sex workers over a Christmas night in L.A.
Great Los Angeles location work, filmed on an IPhone, resulting in a fantastic palette of vivid colours. The content itself is a little facile and grating. Either you are going to get swept along with the manic energy or find it exhausting. I enjoyed it as an eye catching feature debut.
Massimo Dallamano directs Fabio Testi, Cristina Galbo and Camille Keaton in this Italian giallo where a killer is sticking his or her knife into a group of bitchy Catholic school girls in London.
One by one a killer is stabbing a group of schoolgirls in their unmentionables. Prime suspect is the hot Italian gymnastics teacher… whose underage mistress might have witnessed the first kill while they were punting and necking. He needs to clear his name but with entire faculty made up of creepy, lecherous red herrings and the girls all clearly hiding something big, he has little chance of keeping ahead of the twists. Then there’s a shock death long before we can even see the plot’s finishing line. As a potboiler mystery this is pretty decent. As exploitation it doesn’t make half as much of its seedier plot point than as half mentioned clues. This is intended for the sleazy – let us see the sex rings and affairs. And the kills lack tension. Another giallo that resembles an episode of Inspector Morse, this needed more set pieces, less talk. Ennio Morricone score, London location work.
Hal Hartley directs Robert John Burke, Bill Sage and Elina Löwensohn in this US indie road movie where two brothers go searching for their counter culture revolutionary father, who has just escaped prison, and find two restless women instead.
Simple Men is a movie that has been on my ‘To Watch’ for a long old stretch. Now we’ve watched it, an overriding sense of déjà vu suggests I almost certainly watched it in my teens. Possibly at a time when I had no idea who Hal Hartley is or what this movie was. For example, I expected it was going to be a subversion of the musical, and while there is one great dance sequence to Sonic Youth, such a wonderful scene does not a genre movie make. It comes out of nowhere with minimal build up. Yet you could kinda could say that’s where the comedy comes from. These deadpan, near lethargic, characters experiencing extreme moments of drama yet reacting with the same spaced-out flatness. The distance between the characters and the viewer and the director is felt. And maybe that is why, for to brief a while, Hartley was a Generation X posterboy. His movies share the same detachment from life and events and feelings as many of us experience. We were the first generation so in touch with our feelings that we didn’t see the point in reacting or over emoting – the terminology for what we are going through has already been set in stone so why waste time on it? Boomer critic Roger Ebert had a real problem with this cool coldness. “The word for this kind of movie, I think, is postmodern, which means that it has been manufactured primarily for the purpose of deconstruction, just as crossword puzzles are written to be solved.” Yet there is no solution… you could try and shake out a deeper meaning than the events on screen and the half articulated dialogue. If I were, I’d say Simple Men is about what masculinity means in a world of absent fathers – where the extremes of what you’ll grow up to become are heartbroken robber and slacker student. Or faith. There’s lots of ironic potshots at Catholicism. But I really do think there is no deep message here. Just a tale that needs to be told by characters with no need to spell out their feelings, goals or hopes. Simple Men lives in its own moment, a moment that can be sweet, boring, silly and pointless.
Ga-Young Jeong directs herself, Tae-Hwan Choi, and Seok-Hyeong Lee in this Korean indie comedy where a filmmaker has an affair with the man she doesn’t fancy (but once had a fling with) to avoid starting an affair with the married man she actually is attracted to.
Talky and self reflective, like a Woody Allen or a Hong Sang-soo but not without some nice moments. Does feel a little tenuous even at only 70 minutes long. Ga-Young Jeong has a likeable, frisky enough screen presence that I’d watch her again in something else.
George A. Romero directs Lane Carroll, Will McMillan and Lynn Lowry in this indie infection thriller where the US army quarantine a small town that are turning deadly from a new virus.
Made on a shoestring but ambitious, this probably needs half a dozen more moments where the townsfolk go creepily nutso. What does work really well is the second half – we follow a ramshackle band of survivors as they try to break for the border… not always sure who is cracking under the exhausting pressure and who is actually infected. With a bigger budget this might be the best evolution of the trad zombie movie. As it stands, the slick Timothy Olyphant remake actually improves on the potent concept. The Crazies is the kinda movie that plays out better in your memories than when you are actually sitting through it.
Takashi Miike directs Riki Takeuchi, Show Aikawa and Renji Ishibashi in this scuzzy Japanese Yakuza movie.
The opening six minute flash edited montage of depravity and death sets the tone. The longest cocaine snort ever, noodle full guts bursting, foil-wigged stripshows. The rest of the movie meanders with only the expected but still quite off putting lurches into the extreme gaining your full attention. There’s definitely at least one scene here to turn your stomach. Once it settles down, it eventually is a mere cheap Heat knock-off. Show Aikawa is all kinds of cool as the stoic cop. The ending jumps the rails of reality.
Lucio Fulci directs Patrick Magee, Mimsy Farmer and David Warbeck in this U.K. set giallo that updates Edgar Allen Poe’s classic horror tale.
Quite reserved and staid by normal giallo standards and certainly one of Fulci’s calmest. The fact this often resembles an episode of Inspector Morse is no terrible thing. The animal wrangling work is marvellous and the deadly black cat is as cute as a button and full of personality. Not the most intense experience but quite classy.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 