Category Archives: Movies

A Virtual Film Festival

For the past several years one of my favorite things has been the Horrible Imaginings film festival. In 2018 the festival moved the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego to the Frieda Cinema in Orange county, about a 90-minute drive from my home. However, an all-day and deep into the night festival or short and feature length horror films is well worth the drive and so I still attend. Indeed, I have discovered some of my favorite horror film at the festival including Alena a ghost story set in an all-girl Swedish school.

Last year Festival Director Miguel Rodriguez started a new element with Campfire Tales where one evening per quarter the Frieda cinema and Horrible Imaginings would host three or so hours of horror shorts. While the evenings sounded fun and interesting, I couldn’t quite justify driving for three hours and eliminating an evening with my sweetie-wife, for essentially one long films worth of entertainment and so I haven’t attended any of the campfire tales events.

This year COVID-19 changed that. Because in person events were still banned Miguel moved the festival on-line and after paying a very reasonable admission donation, I was able to watch the offerings at this quarter’s Campfire Tales. Better yet I watched them on my schedule, after an evening of board and card games with my sweetie-wife and a couple of friends. From 9 p.m. until nearly midnight a friend and I watched the short horror films and had a truly wonderful time.

I hope, even though it goes against my own interests, that Miguel can soon get back to the in-person screenings he adores and hosts so very ably but I can’t deny how much fun it was to take part in a cycle of ghost, monster, and psychological horror films.

 

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A Most Challenging Giallo

Giallo is Italian for ‘yellow’ and refers to the bright yellow covers for books that dealt with lurid criminal plots, sort of the Italian answer to pulps but with far less content moderation. As these books were adapted into films the term carried over and Giallo is a sub-genre of Italian cinema dealing with lurid, sexual, and criminal themes.

This week my sweetie-wife and I watched a 1970 Italian/Spanish Giallo ‘In the Folds of the Flesh.’ This was a very challenging movie to view. With a scant running time of a mere 88 minutes In the Folds tries to pack in a number or reveals, reversals, and shocking twists that would be more suitable for a couple of seasons of any daytime soap opera. In short, the story is about Lucille the much younger couple Colin and Falaise dealing with Falaise’s uncontrollable urges to murder any man who is sexually forward with her. Ladled onto this are plot elements of incest, mafia revenge murders, deeply undercover police investigations, and even exploitive flashbacks to Nazi death camps bonus gratuitous nudity.

The camera work seems to have been performed by a spastic chimpanzee with sudden and unmotivated crash zooms, indecipherable close-ups, and rapid circling pans that induce motion sickness. While the editing is reminiscent of a goldfish on acid with unestablished leaps in time and place that are terrible disorienting.

There are quite a few Giallos that I have thoroughly enjoyed since I discovered the genre a few years ago but In the Folds of the Flesh is not one of them and I cannot recommend this movie to anyone who is not currently dosing with hallucinogens.

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Streaming Horror: Scream, Blacula, Scream

The past several nights I watched the 1973 blaxploitation horror film Scream, Blacula, Scream. A sequel the previous year’s movie Blacula about an old-world African vampire played by the incomparable William Marshall, and depending on how geeky you are you may know him best from the Star Trek (Original Series) episode The Ultimate Computer as Daystrom the inventor of the M-5 computer, that arrives in an American urban center instigating a plague of vampirism before meeting his end at the hero’s hand.

Scream, Blacula, Scream, starts with a Voodoo congregation in turmoil as their high priestess passes without naming her successor and two devotees contend for her title, Willis, the self-important son of the priestess, and Lisa, played by Pam Grier, who is more popular with the congregation. Willis, unable to endure his rejection invokes dark magics and unwittingly reanimated Blacula initiating a new cycle of vampirism.

Not as sharp or as on point as its predecessor this film in many respects moves too quickly. Lisa’s lover, Justin, a police detective moves from skeptic to vampire hunter with too much ease and the political among the congregation was brushed aside far too quickly for something that had been introduced with the elements of a major plot development.

That said, I enjoyed this movie. Marshall’s command of every scene in which he appears is unquestioned and he brings a tragic dignity to his African prince that was cursed for confronting the slave trade. Pam Grier, one of the stars to emerge from the blaxploitation cycle, isn’t given a lot of the stuff to do as an actress but she takes this meager meal and gives us a banquet of a performance.

Side comment; while watching this film I realized that Pam Grier is a nearly perfect image for the character Sakita Bergen in my military sf series I am

American International Picture

writing. I shall have to keep that in mind.

In the end this movie suffers from being rushed to screen and doesn’t compare favorably to its progenitor piece but it is still worth at least one viewing.

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Columbia Noir: Human Desire

This weekend I continued my exploration of the Criterion Channel’s collection Columbia Noir with Human Desire.

Human Desire is the story of Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford), recently returned home from the Korean War and now resuming his job as a locomotive engineer. In his absence the Assistant Yard Supervisor Buckley, (Broderick Crawford) has married a much younger woman Vicki, (Gloria Grahame.) Before long there is jealousy, robbery, and murder the staples of American Noir. This is very much like the descriptionprovided by the Criterion Channel and it is in my opinion

dŽsirs humains
human desire
1954
rŽal : Fritz Lang
Broderick Crawford
Gloria Grahame
Glen Ford
Collection Christophel

quite misleading and capture where I think the film took its initial and consequential misstep. The entire movie is told from Jeff’s point of view treating the unfolding events as principally his story and it really isn’t his at all. The story should have been written and presented from Vicki’s point of view. When Buckley, a brute and intellectually challenged man, is fired from his position it falls to Vicki to win him his job back but in doing so triggers his violent jealousy launch a series of events that will entangle Buckley, Vicki, and Jeff in robbery and murder as she desperately tries to survive.

Despite its erroneous point of view Human Desire is a film worth watching. Glenn Ford plays the sort of role that he is best known for the fundamentally decent man though in keep with noir’s traditions he has a difficult time resisting temptation. Broderick Crawford as Buckley convincingly gives us both a man who is dangerous and unpredictable but also deeply flawed and trapped by his own self-doubted that is amplified by his alcoholism, but the real star of this film is the luminous Gloria Grahame. Grahame’s realistic portrayal of a woman desperate to escape her circumstances using the means and methods at her disposal without sliding across into evil is a wonder to behold.  Grahame appeared in many great noirs and died too young at 57 but her star continues to shine bright through her performances such as this one. Direct by Fritz Lang is a competent film though a number of plot threads were either never completed or are used simply as audience misdirection. Particular attention in the story is paid to a distinctive watch and yet that element never closes back to a resolution.

Overall, I enjoyed watching Human Desire but I have no desire to add it permanently to my library.

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Italian Genre Cinema, Home Edition: Caliber 9

The COVID-19 crisis among other things stopped could the Film Geeks San Diego’s year-long presentation of Italian Genre Films that my sweetie-wife and I were enjoying so much. So, while we wait for the crisis to pass, we have been scrounging streaming services for gems of Italian Genre movie from the 70s and earlier. Last night we watched Caliber 9 1972.

I would classify Caliber 9 as an Italian neo-noir. It stars Gastone Moschin as Ugo Piazza a small time mobbed up crook just released from three years in prison. Unfortunately for Ugo both the police and the local crime boss, Mikado, believe that Ugo took part in the theft of 300 hundred thousand American dollars from the mob and that he has the money stashed away. Even Ugo’s girlfriend Nelly, played by Barbara Bouchet, thinks he stole the cash. When Mikado puts a particularly brute thug Rocco on point for finding out where Ugo has hidden the loot, thing begin to spiral out of control leading to murder and Ugo’s quest for revenge.

While the quality of these 70s era Italian exploitative movie can vary a great deal I thoroughly enjoyed Caliber 9. This film has a gritty, realism to it that helped sell the story to betrayal, greed, and fractured loyalties. It is not surprising that there is a re-make currently in post-production slated for a release this year, but between the trouble with foreign producers finding American distribution and the pandemic who knows if we’ll get a chance to see that in theaters at all. It’s a nice tip of the hat to the original that Barbara Bouchet will be appearing in the remake.

Caliber 9 is currently streaming on Amazon as one of the movies available to Prime Members.

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Land of the Minotaur AKA The Devil’s Men

This will be quick. My sweetie-wife found a film she wanted to watch during our 30-day free trial of Fandor, The Devil’s Men US Title Land of the Minotaur.  Starring Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasance this is a Greek horror film about a minotaur-worshipping cult that abducts college students willy nilly and has a young girl kill them in sacrifices to their half bull half man god. Pleasance is a local Irish priest with an accent that is never very good and often disappears entirely while Cushing is an expat Hungarian noble with a wholly English accent that is the high priest of the murderous cult.

Roger Ebert called this ‘the worst Peter Cushing Film ever,’ but we think both Shockwaves and The Uncanny can give this poorly crafted film a run for that title. I have never seen a movie directed with such a lack of spatial awareness, scenes get turned around, characters are unaware of the geography around them and there is nothing in this movie to recommend it. During the climax of the story the priest informs the young heroic man helping him that they must get there before moonrise when their friends will be sacrificed, never mind that there have been loads already without that full moon, now they have a ticking clock. The companion asks how does the priest know this? It’s a good question because absolutely nothing that happened before this clued either the character or the audience to this suddenly critical fact. The priest’s answer? “I just Know.” He might as well have said, “The writer told me!”

 

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Monday Night Movie: The Big House (1930)

Surfing through the offerings on The Criterion Channel yesterday I landed on The Big House from 1930 as my evening’s entertainment.

With story and dialog credit to Frances Marion and her second Oscar nomination for writing The Big House is the source for many cinematic tropes found in later prison movies. The story is concerned with three principal characters, Kent, a new arrive at the prison, starting a ten-year sentence for man slaughter after he killed a pedestrian while driving drunk, Morgan a forger, and Butch an illiterate thug serving time for murder. While the film makes sociological points about the prison system including having the warden complain that society is happy to throw people into prison but unwilling to pay for it, it avoids pulling out a soap box but instead focuses on the nature of its central characters and how their time in prison reinforces or breaks their character.

Many scenes which would later become clichés in the sub-genre of prison movies are present here in this early ‘talkie.’ The food riot in the massive dinning hall, the full riot with bedding thrown from the upper levels of a massive cell block, the sharp concern among the inmates about ‘squealers,’ and so on though it is far from routine when the climax of a prison movies involves several tanks.

Running just under an hour and a half The Big House doesn’t waste time, there is no preamble and very little fat, something filmmakers today struggle to maintain. With visuals that were sometimes decades ahead of their time this movie remains an important and watchable piece from a time nearly a hundred years ago.

 

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I Went to the Movies!

San Diego has two drive-in theaters and both are now operating during the COVID-19 lock-down. Last night I went to the Santee Drive-In and watched the most recent iteration of The Invisible Man.

Universal Studios had planned to make an Invisible Man film as part of the Dark Universe Franchise series but the smoking crater left behand after the release of Tom Cruise’s The Mummy and the disappointing performance a few years earlier of Dracula Untold (2014) destroyed those plans as thoroughly as a snap from Thanos. This movie was produced by horror specialists Blumhouse and is quite the good film.

Written and directed by Leigh Whannell, The Invisible Man stars Elisabeth Moss as Cecilia Kass as a woman who has escaped the physical and mental abuse of her brilliant tech-bro husband Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). Following her escape Cecilia grapples with the PTSD from her years in an abusive relationship and learns that Adrian has apparently killed himself but soon she becomes convinced that through his technological brilliance Adrian has faked his own death and is now tormenting her with some manner of invisibility. Friends and authorities are naturally quite skeptical of her assertions and dismiss them as stress induced mental illness leaving Cecilia to reclaim her life and her power alone.

The script is tight with nary a wasted beat or moment and the characters presented are smart and capable. Cecelia, though dealing with sever PTSD, keeps her head and shows a level of intelligence and cunning that is often rare for characters of horror cinema. (Though it was left to the teenager in the story to instruct Cecilia that you never use water to fight a grease fire.) Whannell’s direct sure and on target with even the use of jump-scares, where a sudden action or appearance in frame is used to startle the audience, motivated by character and logical plot developments. I can’t honestly judge the cinematography as the outdoor presentation ruined a number of darker sequences but other than that the film had a sharp, cold, modernist look that well suited the story and tone. The score was neither particularly memorable nor intrusive but support the scenes well without drawing excessing attention. The entire cast delivered competent performances but this movie lived or died on Moss as she carried the entire story and appeared in every scene as our sole viewpoint character. I can report that she excelled and gave us a credible, sympathetic, and ultimately strong character worthy of our support.

The Invisible Man (2020) is well worth the time and I look forward to seeing it again at home where I can enjoy the photography under better conditions. The unsuitability of the venue to films with dark sequences forced me to leave after the first feature as The Wretched promised substantial scenes at night or in deep darkness.

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The Inadvertent Comedy of Creature with the Blue Hand

After hearing about the subgenre of films called Krimi on a documentary about Giallo my sweetie-wife and I decided that we needed to watch some of the German crime movies. She found one starring Klaus Kinski as twin brothers, one locked away in an asylum for a heinous murder and after his escape a series of grisly bizarre killings plague his noble English family.

Creature with the Blue Hand is a West German production, for the kids out there Germany used to be broken into two countries one democratic and one communist, based upon the novel The Blue Hand by Edgar Wallace. Sadly, the version on Fandor is not only dubbed but taken from a poor quality video

I really want to know what edition this image is from because nothing in the one watch was this clear.

recording of the film with washed out colors and some scenes so dark that’s it is impossible to discern what is actually transpiring on the screen. On its own Creature with the Blue Hand is a substandard feature, thin characterization, tropes that were tired in the 70s when it was produced, and resolutions to mysterious the repeatedly rely upon information not previously disclosed to the audience.

That said the movie does provide moments of unintentional hilarity.

For example, there is a scene where Dr. Mangrove, a corrupt and evil psychiatrist moves to a secret safe in his office. Really when I have a secret safe it is never going behind an oil painting. With the context of the scene you’d expect that he’s retrieving cash or some other valuable but what is pulled from the locked steel container is a live python with which he murders a disloyal member of his staff.

The other scene which burned into my memory in any other movie would have been placed for deliberate comedy but nothing in the presentation here suggests that the filmmakers were aware of the absurdity I am about to describe.

The heroic police inspector has finally figured out that Mangrove is a villain, but not the ‘Boss’ and after a brief struggle has thrown him to the floor in his asylum and gotten to drop on the thugs/staff with a pistol. Two of the thugs have taken Mangrove by the arms and are helping him to his feet while the others threaten the inspector with club. (Yes, they brought clubs to a gun fight.) The Heroic Inspector orders them to get their hands up, thrust his handgun forward to empathize the threat. They all throw their hands up, including the pair helping Dr Mangrove who tumbles right back down on his ass. There’s no cut to a shot of the outraged or indignant Mangrove to put a button on this comedic scene because they seemed to have truly missed that moment of slapstick.

I can’t say this is even a mediocre movie but we did get entertainment value from it just not what the filmmakers intended.

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Noir Review: 5 Against the House

Continuing my expedition into Columbia Noir hosted on the Criterion Channeland early Kim Novak performances Sunday night I streamed the 1955 noir 5 Against the House.

Directed by Phil Karlson from a screenplay by Stirling Silliphant and John Barnwell based on a novel of the same name by Jack Finney who is better known for penning the novel The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. 5 Against the House is about a collection of college students that decide to rob a Reno Casino as a prank with intentions to return the money. Naturally the plan goes from prank to plot when one of the students seizes on the idea that this sudden influx of cash will end his troubles.

While the characters attend Midwestern College, they are older than the usual student body because they are Korean War Veterans going to school on the G.I. Bill, particularly Al, played by Guy Madison, whose life was saved in combat by ‘Brick’, played by Brian Keith. Brick suffers from what is now known as PTSD and struggles both academically and socially due to his difficulty integrating back into civilian life and leaving the horrors of the battlefield behind. His instability coupled with a tendency towards violence drive much of the films tension for the second half.

My trouble with this movie is that while there is taunt tension in the second half the first is devoid of any serious conflict and none that concerns all of our major characters. Al wants to marry his girl Kaye, played by Kim Novak, but she’s uncertain about their love and skittish to commit while the others in the friendly clique engage in freshman hazing and comic banter that is well written but serves no function in advancing the plot, making this 83 minute feature feel much longer. The actors rang from adequate to quite engaging with the obvious star power of Novak and Keith driving much of this movie’s appeal.

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