Jean Rollin directs Françoise Pascal, Hugues Quester and Nathalie Perrey in this nudie French horror where a young couple get trapped in an eerie cemetery overnight.
Very dull. Nothing happens to the point of incredulity. Françoise Pascal looks lovely clothed, starkers or any state of dishevelled in betwixt. That does not a movie make though. There are one or two atmospheric shots that exploit the dank but sublime locations.
Shane Meadows directs Bob Hoskins, Danny Nussbaum and Johann Myers in this sports movie where a dreamer tries to open a boxing club to keep the young men in his area out of trouble.
At times this can feel like a cavalcade of short films edited together to make a feature narrative. It is very independent, somewhat flawed (especially some of the acting) yet it is brimming with ideas, has a Britpop soundtrack to rival any release of the Cool Britannia revival and orbits a superb lead performance by the legendary Bob Hoskins. A lot of love has gone into this little film – a pean to hope and community that can be enjoyed as a simple rough around the edges boxing comedy or so much more. It can even survive a young James Corden guffing around its edges. No other DVD in my collection could. Shane Meadows has proven himself to be one of the most fascinating British storytelling voices to emerge in my lifetime. His proper feature debut can hold its own against his very best work.
9
Perfect Double Bill: A Room For Romeo Brass (1999)
Michael Showalter directs Jessica Chastain, Andrew Garfield and Cherry Jones in this biopic of the corrupt but glamorous televangelist.
Exists solely as a Best Actress trophy winning salvo. Ultimately a successful one but the rest of the film has an iffyness to it that no amount of cheeky energy can cover up. Made within the settings of a spoof, slathered in an often uncritical jelly when it comes to its titular grifter. How much did she know about the dodgy dealing? How much of an ally was she really to those her religion and beliefs demonised? Was her downfall tragedy… or just good old gaudy excess run its inevitable course? The movie wants to present an unwilling victim and an unlikely hero. Jessica Chastain as an out-and-out rhinestone scumbag won’t bring in the gold. So manipulative sympathy for the devil is the order of the day, just so we know when her mascara runs on camera it ain’t crocodile tears. Andrew Garfield has the more fertile character in the slimy but sexually ambiguous husband… it would be his movie but the edit tries everything to position him back down to a support. Never reaching the heights of The Wolf Of Wall Street (where an embezzling bastard is given zero commiseration) or I, Tonya, this does what it came to do with a colourful blankness. Yet you can’t help feel a little exploited by all the music, glitz, camp and emoting knowing that they never quite get to the heart of the matter.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder directs Brad Davis, Franco Nero and Jeanne Moreau in this arty farty adaptation of Jean Genet’s novel where everybody in a big gay port wants to fuck a butch sailor… but he prefers stabbing folk.
A hyper queer fever dream, the theatrical lighting and set design are thrustingly OTT. Shame the plot is so aimless. You’ll be shocked how unengaging all this murder and cottaging is. The deadpan performance style is particularly alienating.
Steven Spielberg directs Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson and Peter Mullan in this WWI drama following a handsome horse’s exploitation throughout the ‘Great War’.
What if Forrest Gump was a horse? I avoided this as animal cruelty, even if only simulated, really seems to effect me. I shouldn’t have worried as essentially this is a family film. Spielberg does a big visual love letter to the cinema of John Ford and the character credits of “French Horse Auctioneer” followed by “French Butcher” turn out not to be the doomed spoilers I thought they’d be. Well constructed, quite beautiful at times.
Rob Cohen directs Jason Scott Lee, Lauren Holly and Nancy Kwan in this action and romance tweaked biopic of the martial arts legend.
A quite entertaining decision has been made to crowbar a Fist Of Fury style fight sequence into the narrative every 15 minutes. So a game Jason Scott Lee has to take on his co-workers and literally his demons in stunt heavy battles. The more grounded stuff is pretty cheesy, very much the “official” and “authorised” version of a star’s life and loves. If you can get past the surviving family’s whitewash, Dragon still passes an evening nicely in a trashy sorta way.
Hiroshi Teshigahara directs Eiji Okada, Kyoko Kishida and Hiroko Ito in this Japanese arthouse drama where a holidaying school teacher finds himself trapped in a desert pit with a ready-made wife and ever encroaching avalanches of sand to deal with.
Is it the worst prison in the world? Nothing to do but fuck and dig sand? Obvious parallels to Kafka and the myth of Sisyphus and also clearly influencing future works as diverse as Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance and The Truman Show. There’s definitely an element of the leering ‘Pink Film’ here too. One stunningly horrific sequence sees our protagonist offered a chance at freedom and all he has to do is abandon his last trace of humanity, obliterate the relationship he has built with his inmate, in full view of everyone else who still knows he exists. It is a nasty, disturbing, lingering set piece of psychological horror. Eija Okada excels as an amateur entomologist, his hobby the perfect metaphor for the brutal vivarium he himself is tricked into entering. He slowly sheds his manners and civilisation, becoming as brute and uncaring as a pinned insect. An even more fascinating performance is Kyoko Kishida’s enigmatic widow. Sexually needy, she appears to be a coy domestic honeytrap at first, but just as imprisoned as him, maybe only a bit further along in mindset and understanding of her unofficial sentence. Are we in hell? Or a cynical reduction of the institution of marriage? However you interpret this clearly potent and daring work it has lost little of its power to shock over the many decades since its release. A bleak strangeness buries you.
8
Perfect Double Bill: In The Realm Of The Senses (1976)
Clive Donner directs Peter O’Toole, Alastair Sim and Harold Pinter in this British thriller where a maverick toff decides to assassinate Hitler on the eve of WWII and finds himself with no safe place to hide, from fascists of all stripes, after his bullet misses.
An unfussy meat-and-potatoes adaptation of one of my favourite novels. This was made for TV and often in location and in costumes looks like something the ‘Allo ‘Allo team might have filmed with the ‘short ends’ of celluloid on their tea breaks. Yet the casting aims for a higher standard, more worthy of Geoffrey Household’s perfect anti-appeasement chase story. Every interaction is a classy cliffhanger in the first hour, even now there still is a charged thrill in experiencing Adolf tantalisingly in the crosshairs of a hunter’s rifle. How modern audience will take to the third act – where a ragged O’Toole digs himself a hobbit hole in Devon and literally goes to ground – is anyone’s guess? Even this static, drawn out siege sequence reaches an impactful solution, slyly bringing us full circle to that near-perfect opener. Dated, for sure, but the hook of the source material is so strong you can’t help but enjoy it.
Jack Sholder directs Mark Patton, Kim Myers and Robert Englund in this horror sequel where Freddy tries to re-enter reality via a confused teen boy.
“You are all my children now!”
Dismissed as a half assed cash-in back in the day, this has a pretty blatant gay subtext running throughout it. Making it fascinating to watch and to pick apart. Fred Krueger still retains some of his threatening mystique here and the closer where our final girl (a winning and sympathetic Myers) decides to hug the demon out of the monster is quite dramatic and operatic. There aren’t enough scare sequences though and the wobbly set-piece where Freddy runs amok around a pool party feels like a missed opportunity; given he only really knocks a few hotdog bun packets over. The practical FX are pretty exciting when they happen – tongues emerge from phone receivers, Freddy hatches like a chick from inside a screaming man. While not as full steam as its groundbreaking progenitor 2 certainly is less clownish than what followed.
Paul W. S. Anderson directs Milla Jovovich, Tony Jaa and Ron Perlman in this sci-fi action movie based on a man versus mythical beasts computer game.
Pretty rote. Jovovich and Jaa, after their respective breakout roles, have starred in far more rubbish than decent stuff and this certainly isn’t going to reverse that flow. Yet Monster Hunter delivers on its slight, simple promise and the last half hour certainly aims for the epic. The look of it embraces a grainier, scalier real world heft than most mid-budget video game adaptations. Lower your expectations and its kinda okay.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 