Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary

Wolfgang Petersen directs Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo and Morgan Freeman in this ensemble thriller where an Ebola-like contagion enters the US and a maverick USAMRIID virologist attempts to track and contain the timeline of the virus.

The deadly monkey movie. I had read Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone the year before and this rival project (of a similar but fictional outbreak) got into production first thus negating a straight adaptation with Jodie Foster and Robert Redford at the time. The basic concept of a disease that liquifies your organs and evolves how it spreads is ripe with cinematic potential. I remember this being an armrest gripping blast back on release. Recent Warner Bros smash The Fugitive and Seventies disaster movies are definite influences in format and tone. However it does suffer from a baggy middle section that doesn’t quite lean into the mass hysteria of such a plague overwhelming a large township. And Hoffman, bless him, is out of his comfort zone as an army colonel. This is a solid man of action role which has Harrison Ford written all over the part. Beyond those niggles, there’s plenty of chases and gleefully unnecessary sprouts of scale. ‘When in doubt bang a helicopter in’ is the movie’s flamboyant creed. Donald Sutherland approaches his reckless general role with relish – a real boo hiss antagonist. And the prominent monkey stuff, the cutest carrier of death on legs, is handled with surprising class.

7

Perfect Double Bill: Contagion (2011)

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/

Ermanno Olmi directs Rutger Hauer, Anthony Quayle and Dominique Pinon in this arthouse parable where a drunken homeless man is lent 200 francs by a pious stranger, under the promise he’ll repay it to a local church when he is back on his feet.

Feels very much like a novella turned into a feature length film. There is a certain simplicity and literary pretension to this that will either lose you or seduce you. I liked this – despite a certain ambient predictability. It is nice seeing Hauer in a serious, full fat role… even if in my heart of hearts I’d much rather see him kick ass and take names in some substandard action B-Movie that wouldn’t even make my top 10 for him.

7

Perfect Double Bill: Martin Eden (2020)

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/

Herbert Wise directs Adrian Rawlins, Bernard Hepton and David Daker in this horror classic – about a haunting in an Edwardian coastal town.

I was just a little too young and way too horror averse as a child to watch this on its original broadcast on ITV. So it must have been the sole Channel 4 repeat in the nineties when I first experienced this. I’m pretty sure it was programmed then under the billing as something like “the TV movie that terrified a nation”. And though there are minimal shocks and zero gore in this adaptation of Susan Hill’s chilling novella – it works magnificently as an exercise in tension and dread. The few appearance of the titular phantom are impactful, they genuinely shake you if you are engaged with the story. Sure, the restored DVD we just watched somehow imbues just a little too much clarity to Pauline Moran’s spectre. She works better as a grainy shadow glimpsed on a smaller, less defined cathode-ray television screen. Yet the entire milieu of the story is full of paranoia, secrets and isolation. The market town of Crythin Gifford is an inhospitable place where even the kindest souls have been tainted by the tragedy and the curse The Woman represents. Fog rolls off the banks, screams of anguish echo from the past, pathways to safety are consumed by the sea, prejudice informs the callous attitudes of the locals, the children giggle in flocks at funerals. It is an eerie, depressing setting with little sanctuary. Only a brave little hound called Spider seems equipped to handle a week existing there and when he abandons poor Mister Kidd (and us) it feels like the final nail in the coffin for our collective sanity. Even beyond the air of persistent foreboding, there seems to be a greater context of trauma hinted at – the issues of class upheaval and the after-effects of the Great War inveigle their way into the roots of many interactions. This is markedly a society still silently reeling from the shock and violence of the early 20th century and the references to what has occurred in the recent past are tantalising. Susan Hill’s The Woman In Black is one of the great base genre works. By that I mean a work of genre so pure it feels like the definitive text that all other works in a genre are variations of. As haunted house stories go it may not have the twists of The Turn Of the Screw, the mania of The Shining or the relentlessness of The Conjuring but it’s simplicity and traditionalism is matched possibly only by Robert Wise and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting. The book has made for a great West End play and this TV movie… the Hammer / Harry Potter version has its fans… but I very much doubt that’ll be the last adaptation of the great scary story. Every generation surely must spend their own week digging through the secrets of Eel Marsh House.

9

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/

Clint Eastwood directs himself, Eduardo Minet and Natalia Traven in this road movie where a decrepit but nice former rodeo star crosses the border to kidnap his boss’ son and a fighting cock.

So boring. Slight and with some of the most “functional” acting we’ve seen lurking in a decent budgeted studio movie in years. Please don’t let this gentle muddle be Clint’s last. Let him go out on a Gran Torino or a The Mule.

4

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/

Paul Schrader directs Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish and Tye Sheridan in this crime drama where an ex-con makes his money edging casinos using the tricks he learned during his incarceration.

The life of an obsessed puritan – journal keeping, extreme behaviour, strict personal code. We are in typical Schrader outsider territory. I notice the marketing materials completely missed out the massive Abu Ghraib subplot – this dominates the movie as it pushes further ahead. You forget you are watching a “The Hustler” style gambling flick long before the close.

6

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/

Pablo Larraín directs Kristen Stewart, Sean Harris and Timothy Spall in this arty character study of Princess Diana, exploring her difficult last Christmas within the Royal family before she separates from Charles.

Finally we get the movie and role that matches Stewart’s talent and big screen thrall. She and whispering Sean Harris give Oscar worthy turns here. In fact everything technical about Spencer is impeccable; from Jonny Greenwood‘s demented genre-hopping score, Jacqueline Durran’s onslaught of costumes and Claire Mathon’s grainy, Kodak snap style cinematography. The influences are all over the shop but The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby and Lynch feel the most acute. This is gothic horror. A woman trapped in herself, haunted by an old version of herself… a past decision caging her from being her true self. A repressive family hounding her every thought, sexual urge and moment of individuality. Gothic horror with dance montages. We start with her lost in the landscape she grew up in and slowly she breaks free by rattling through the regime and musty forgotten wings and protocol. The ending is orgasmic – like an Eighties teen college movie with the rest of the cast looking either inspired or shaking their fist in the air as Diana gains her agency and escapes to a bit of soft rock. There’s something truly unabashed by the Ford Mondeo “find yourself” commercial shamelessness of finishing something so measured and artful on an extended moment of pop. Not every directorial decision lands quite so well but this is a movie taking big daring swings between biopic, ghost story, Shakespearean tragedy and kitsch fashion show. You gotta admire that moxy. As for it being Stewart’s towering achievement… mission accomplished. I don’t care about the Windsors one little jot and I fully engaged with Spencer. Though one can also approach it as an unofficial Twilight epilogue; the young wife realising her marriage into a family of closeted, cold, cult members has stunted her true self… which then sees she her breaking free from their vampiric customs to re-embrace the life she gave up before immortality. Just saying.

8

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/

Garry Marshall directs Julia Roberts, Richard Gere and Joan Cusack in this romcom where a journalist investigates a small town girl who keeps dumping men at the altar… only for him to fall for her during the run-up to her next potential big day.

A big release back in the day as it essentially was marketed as an indirect sequel to Pretty Woman. Same team, same vibe, and in true 1990s Hollywood fashion, eventually 60% of the original’s box office take. The studio and talent walked away with a decent payday. Audiences less so. The bloated, listlessness of it all certainly is not Roberts fault. She excels within her wheelhouse; the smile, the legs, the laugh are all trotted out. Gere feels out of place… he’s no Cary Grant or Billy Crystal or Kevin Kline. He struggles with the decent jokes and definitely can’t cover up the bad ones. The film ambles along, relying on a deep ensemble of supports, none of whom really justify their often over qualified presence. Marshall likes a nice busy cast so he can mix up his reaction shots and toppers but it ends up a little too overcrowded here. Everyone seems stifled by everyone else and the inherent cynicism of the project allows very little for us to do but groan about the mechanics of it all. Undemanding but almost begrudgingly so.

4

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/

Takeshi Kitano directs Claude Maki, Hiroko Oshima and Susumu Terajima in this Japanese surfing movie.

A deaf mute bin man finds a discarded surf board and decides to take the sport up. A very sweet romance ensues, gilded by a wonderful Joe Hisaishi score. Clearly a labour of love for Beat Takeshi, this is indicative of his non-yakuza output. Highly recommended.

8

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/

Geoff Murphy directs Bruno Lawrence, Alison Routledge and Peter Smith in this New Zealand sci-fi movie where a man wakes up to discover he is seemingly the last man on Earth.

Another cult gem knocked off my watchlist. More humanist and literate than, say, a Mad Max movie… this shows a gentle apocalypse. Probably has more in common with Don McKellar’s Last Night with its satirical / metaphysical vision of the end of humanity. Geoff Murphy lenses this like it is a far more expensive project… you can see why Hollywood snapped him up to direct sequels and serve as 2nd Unit helmer on endeavours like The Lord of the Rings.

7

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/

Peter Yates directs Tom Selleck, F Murray Abraham and Laila Robins in this prison thriller where Magnum is framed and sent to prison, after some initial squeamishness he becomes a man not to be fucked with and then looks to clear his name.

Solid star. Solid direction. Infantile screenplay with discombobulating lurches into a far nastier (and realistic?) tone. Works better as a poor man’s The Fugitive than as a yuppie honky’s nightmare. David Rasche plays an unstable dirty cop and somehow makes a sloppily written heavy role quite charismatic. Not the best Saturday night at the movies, the cocaine deal subplot is more convincing in Three Men and A Baby.

5

Check out my wife Natalie’s Point Horror blog https://cornsyrup.co.uk

We also do a podcast together called The Worst Movies We Own. It is available on Spotify or here https://letterboxd.com/bobbycarroll/list/the-worst-movies-we-own-podcast-ranking-and/