Posts Tagged ‘Crime’


The Sadist

May 10th, 2012 | article by | 1 Comment »
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released in 2010 by Johnny Legend
video: 1080p / 1.78:1 / B&W / Mpeg-4 AVC
 audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
subtitles: none
 discs: 1 x 25GB BD-R / 1 x DVD-R / All Region
supplements: Interview with Arch Hall Jr. by Ray Dennis Steckler, Arch Hall Jr. Video Songbook, Epilogue to The Sadist by Johnny Legend
The Sadist is available now through Amazon.com and Diabolik DVD.

Between Something Weird / Image Entertainment’s latest H. G. Lewis offering and Arrow Video’s long-delayed and predictably problematic treatment of Lamberto Bava’s Demons films, I’ve had about all I can take in the way of disappointing cult Blu-rays for this month. A pity, really, as I had sincerely hoped that at least one of those, if not both, would turn out all right. But if there’s one good thing about disappointment it’s that it can leave you open for the best kind of surprises, and Johnny Legend’s outwardly dubious high definition treatment of schlock icon Arch Hall Jr.’s one really good film is a surprise indeed.

Unlike the other two titles I mentioned, Legend’s The Sadist Blu-ray isn’t a new release at all. He first began offering this 2-disc Blu-ray / DVD combo online in 2010, and continues to give any sort of wide-release model amiss in favor of selling it himself, one copy at a time. Having been long devoted to the DVD issued by historian David Kalat’s All Day Entertainment in 1997 (most notable now for its feature commentary with The Sadist‘s renowned cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, and still available for those who missed out on it), it took me a while to work up the steam to give the Blu-ray a go – it was expensive after all, $29.95 plus shipping through most outlets. As is so often the case, however, my love of cinema ultimately overrode any good financial sense, and I finally broke down and ordered The Sadist Blu from Diabolik DVD on Friday. $30 was still a tough pill to swallow, but in retrospect I’m glad I did.

Before I get to the goods, it must be said that the outward impression of this Blu-ray doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.  The sleeve art is nicely designed, if a bit over-populated with glowing critical quotations (there are even more on the back), but has the deficiency of being physically too tall for the sleeve it inhabits and sticking out about half a centimeter beyond the cellophane. With regards to the case itself, this may be the first time I’ve ever received a Blu-ray in one that’s completely devoid of any sort of Blu-ray logo. I honestly don’t hold either of these things against the release (as quibbles go they are the very definition of minor), but some may find the next bit more difficult to stomach. Having been produced in too low a run to warrant the expense and effort of standard replication, The Sadist is presented on a single-layer 25GB BD-R as opposed to the pressed discs we’re all familiar with. As one Blu-ray.com forum member noted of it, “BD-arrrrgh!”

With all the above taken into account I found myself expecting the very worst from this release when the package arrived yesterday, and it was with no small amount of animosity that I removed it from its resealable plastic baggie to check out the disc proper. Thankfully I soon found my low expectations to be thoroughly and delightfully trounced. Who could ever have thought that Johnny Legend would succeed where mainstream labels like Arrow Video and Image Entertainment failed?

The cover for The Sadist notes that it is sourced from a “new high definition transfer from the original 35mm master print”, and while the “new” bit may be a little suspect (this is the same transfer that was sourced for Legend’s DVD edition after all) the rest is difficult to argue with. Legend presents The Sadist in full 1080p at the comfortable matted ratio of 1.78:1 (the case incorrectly lists a taller 1.66:1), and I was floored by the results. It must be noted that this is not sourced from a pristine print, but it is more pristine than I ever remember the film being. Damage is prevalent throughout, from dirt and specks to reel change markers and all manner of scratching, but I was undeterred. The Sadist looks demonstrably better here than it ever has before on video, and those familiar with just how bad the film has looked in the past will be thrilled.

Rarely lauded by this reviewer, the contrast on this disc may be its keenest attribute. Ace photographer Zsigmond has always been a master of contrast, and the delicious range of it in The Sadist‘s black and white visuals is captured beautifully, perfectly here. The image is suitably crisp and detailed for a film of this vintage and budget ($33,000!), and close-ups can look mighty impressive. Textures are also strong throughout, and the light, unobtrusive grain goes unperturbed by man, beast, or video filter – those who like myself are downright allergic to digital manipulation will find no such impediments here. The Sadist looks like film, pure and simple, and in motion improves handily over both All Day Entertainment’s 15-year old effort and Legend’s own DVD – this transfer would look lovely projected theatrically.

Those worried by the 25GB BD-R specification and what it could have meant for the technical proficiency of this release can rest easy. The Sadist occupies the disc all by itself with the exception of a rudimentary main menu (play film is the only option) and fares all the better for it, with a robust 20.8 GB alotted for the 92 minute film. The video is encoded in Mpeg-4 AVC at a strong average bitrate of 29.4 Mbps with peaks reaching as high as 35.0 Mbps. Compression artifacts are never an issue and the image held up well under even my admittedly excessive scrutinizing. If there’s one sticking point to the release it’s the audio which, as was the case with many of Warner’s early Blu-rays, is presented in lossy Dolby Digital only. That’s not to say that the 2.0 monophonic mix sounds bad by any means, a few unsightly bumps around the reel changes excepted, but I’d love to have heard Paul Sawtell and Bert Schefter’s wicked opening theme in lossless. There are no subtitles.

While The Sadist occupies the Blu-ray by itself, the release is far from supplement free. Included in the package is Legend’s original DVD from 2009 (also a burned disc, a single-layer DVD-R), which arrives with a 10 minute Arch Hall Jr. interview conducted and photographed by the late Ray Dennis Steckler (trailers for Arch’s films are mixed in here as well), a 20 minute Arch Hall Jr. video songbook featuring songs from his various films, and a very enthusiastic 10 minute “epilogue” to the film by Johnny Legend himself. The commentary with Vilmos Zsigmond was unfortunately not licensed for this release, and those interested in it will want to check out the old All Day Entertainment DVD.

The Sadist is both a bona fide American nightmare and a surprisingly great film, and it’s lost none of its potent gut-wrench potential in the last fifty years. This Blu-ray edition from Johnny Legend is an unlikely hit that rises above its perceived limitations and bests some of the bigger labels at their own game. Sure it’s expensive, but I’d rather pay more for something that gets things mostly right than pay less for more crap like this. The Sadist gets a wholehearted endorsement from me, and fans of the film are encouraged to indulge.

Screenshots were captured as native resolution .png in Totem Movie Player, then compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 97% using the ImageMagick command line tool.


The Last Run

March 9th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Richard Fleischer
1971 / MGM / 91′
 written by Alan Sharp
cinematography by Sven Nykvist
music by Jerry Goldsmith
starring George C. Scott, Trish Van Devere, Tony Musante, Colleen Dewhurst, Aldo Sambrell and Antonio Tarruella
The Last Run is available as part of the Warner Archive Collection and through Amazon.com

Former professional driver of getaway cars Harry Garmes (George C. Scott being very brilliantly George C. Scott) had retired to a Portuguese fishing village nearly a decade ago. Shortly after coming to the village he lost his child in an accident, and a bit later his wife to another man, leaving him if not dead inside, then emotionally hibernating for a long time.

Now, Harry seems to have decided that enough is enough, and takes on the job of helping in the escape of con Paul Rickard (Tony Musante) from a Spanish prison. Harry’s supposed to pick up Paul while the guards of his chain gang (or whatever the Spanish version of one is called) are distracted by a big damn explosion, and get him over the border to France.

Of course, things don’t go quite as planned. It’s not just that Paul turns out to be – fitting enough for a professional criminal – a bit of a jerk – a rather dumb one at that, and is willing to risk a detour just to pick up his girlfriend Claudie (Trish Van Devere), who one might imagine to be able to make her way to France on her own. There’s also the little problem that the people responsible for Paul’s break-out only got him out of jail to kill him once he arrives in France.

At that point, the very lonely Harry has already fallen a bit in love with Claudie – something Paul supports for practical reasons – and is willing to risk the little bit of life he feels he still has to help the couple escape. The trio’s best route of escape seems to be to reach Harry’s Portuguese home and cross the ocean to Africa on a fishing boat the driver owns. They only need to somehow avoid the horde of killers that’s on their trail. Yet even if they manage that, things still may not turn out too well for Harry.

  
  
  

The Last Run‘s director Richard Fleischer is a peculiar case of a man often only regarded as a work for hire guy of dubious talent (which probably is the kind of reputation you deserve when you end your career directing films like Red Sonja and Conan the Destroyer), yet who nonetheless has some fantastic films that look pretty damn personal and auteur-ish to me in his filmography. Especially some of Fleischer’s later RKO noirs and many of the films he made in the late 60s and early 70s are well worth a look, and possibly even worth a snooty remark calling the director a “true auteur” or some such.

Until last year, when Warner decided to finally release the film on one of their overpriced Archives DVD-Rs, it was quite difficult to get a hold of The Last Run at all, so it was easy to believe the critical mauling the film got from people like Roger Ebert. Fortunately, now that one can see the film with one’s own eyes, one just might be able to see a film that certainly isn’t flawless but is also much better than the reviews and its rather pained production history (George C. Scott driving away initial director John Huston! George C. Scott ruining his marriage on set and already working on his new wife! George C. Scott being as difficult as Kinski! Etc.) would lead one to expect.

One of the most criticized elements of the film is the lack of dynamic in its action sequences, but watching them in context, I couldn’t help but think their dry, laconic, and utterly naturalistic tone is part of the point of the whole affair. After all, Fleischer (or frequently brilliant scriptwriter Alan Sharp) even sets up an explicit contrast between the old gangster romanticism of classic Hollywood and the much dryer tone of his own film through various dialogue scenes between Musante and Scott and another scene where Musante and Van Devere are watching an old gangster movie.

This does not mean that the action scenes are completely unexciting. In fact, if you’re willing to accept Fleischer’s clear emphasis on staying inside the realm of the physically possible, you’ll perhaps find them to be unexpectedly effective at raising your blood pressure. Fleischer’s direction of these scenes, and really, of the whole rest of the film too, is wonderfully off-handed and laconic, avoiding all big directorial gestures and all showing off – and not by making this avoidance of showing-off its own grand gesture, either. The director grounds his sparse plot in a believable sense of place, giving as much room to the Spanish landscape his characters drive through as to the things happening in that landscape.

Neither the action scenes nor the crime plot are really what the movie is interested in anyway. I believe these elements are only there at all to fulfil the genre expectations an audience will probably have going in. At its core, though, The Last Run is a film much more interested in exploring the nature of loneliness in middle-aged men and the emotional death it can lead to, the difference between the cynical optimism of youth as embodied by Musante and the – ironically – much less cynical pessimism of Scott’s age, and the very existentialist (or Nietzschean, depending on your philosophical favourites) concept of hope as the most destructive emotion of them all – even if the one hoping is as conscious as Scott here of how little importance his hopes are in the greater picture of the universe.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


Twilight Time: Swamp Water

March 1st, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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Swamp Water is available on Blu-ray from Twilight Time in a limited edition of 3000, and is offered exclusively through Screen Archives Entertainment and their Amazon storefront.

Dana Andrews goes looking for Trouble (with a capital “T”) and finds it deep in the Okefenokee in 1941′s Swamp Water, expat director Jean Renoir’s first American film and his only for Darryl F. Zanuck’s 20th Century Fox. When his appropriately-named hound goes missing in the 440-thousand acre swampland Ben (Andrews, looking uncharacteristically youthful in the second year of his career) makes up his mind to find him. What he tracks down instead is wrongly-convicted murderer Tom Keefer (Walter Brennan), scrounging a living for himself in the Okefenokee five years after his escape from the law.

Though at first confrontational, Ben soon strikes up an unlikely alliance with Keefer, and takes to trapping in the Okefenokee as a means of supporting himself and Keefer’s daughter Julie (a wonderful, feral Anne Baxter), whom Ben takes to courting after falling out of favor with town belle Mabel (Virginia Gilmore, who would co-star with Andrews in the following year’s Berlin Correspondent). It isn’t long, however, before his attention to Julie and trapping success in the swamp lead the townspeople to suspect that Ben is in cahoots with the murderer-on-the-run, and when Ben fails to tell them of his whereabouts (after a bit of backwoods waterboarding) he finds himself ostracized by all but his kindly stepmother Mrs. Hannah (Mary Howard) and rough-edged father Thursday (Walter Huston).

Adapted by Dudley Nichols (Stagecoach) from Vereen Bell’s eponymous tale of small-town injustice, Swamp Water is ripe with studio influence (from the casting of Ford stock players like Brennan, John Carradine, and Russell Simpson to the post-production concoction of a conventionally happy Hollywood ending) yet manages, in spite of it all, to remain uniquely Renoir’s. The film is marked by his long, uninterrupted takes and fluid photographic direction (dual DP’s J. Peverell Marley, House of Wax, and Lucien Ballard, True Grit, lens the show beautifully), and his location shooting in the Okefenokee Swamp, limited by Zanuck to just a handful of crew and star Dana Andrews, takes on a fantastical and mythic quality. As the philosophical Keefer ruminates, “Living alone in this swamp is just like living on another star.” Indeed, Swamp Water presents its star location in a manner that’s appropriately other-worldly, rendering small and insignificant the human characters who dare wander among its ancient mangroves and treacherous peat bogs.

In line with its mythical presentation (its borders are grimly marked by a submerged cross topped with a human skull) the primordial landscape pulls double duty as both a purgatory for the unjustly hunted Tom Keefer and a hell for those ultimately discovered to have committed the murder for which he was convicted. When the real murderers show themselves, intent on stopping Ben and Keefer before they can share the truth with rotund Sheriff McKane (Friar Tuck himself, the great Eugene Pallette), the swamp rises as a formidable deliverer of cosmic justice, devouring one of the guilty men outright. The other, in a satisfying twist of fate, is condemned to troll its cottonmouth and gator-infested wilds forever with the knowledge that nothing but a hangman’s noose awaits them on the outside.

Beyond its central tale of cold injustice and righteous retribution, Swamp Water also offers its share of enduring human developments. Huston is as fantastic as ever as Thursday, evolving from a hard-hearted authority figure, determined to keep his head-strong (or as he says, “butt-headed”) son under his thumb, into a caring, understanding father when Ben is really put in harm’s way. The beautiful Anne Baxter blossoms as Julie, shedding the skin of a ragged social outcast with a moonlit dance both joyous and elegant, and made all the more so by contrast to the awkwardness that came before. Walter Brennan bolsters the fantastical undertone of the piece in rising from the sure-death of a cottonmouth bite, rendering Ben’s funeral arrangements blessedly unnecessary. Consequently, Ben’s eulogy (necessary or not) makes for one of the film’s most sincere and touching moments. “I ain’t gonna hold nothing against him, Lord, not even his trying to steal old Trouble. So if you want to go easy on him for killing Jim Collins it’ll be alright with me.”

Swamp Water has been released in numerous other territories on DVD, but this limited edition Blu-ray from Twilight Time (just 3,000 pressed, the norm for the label) marks its domestic premiere on digital video. There aren’t nearly enough of these classic Academy ratio black and white productions out in high definition for my tastes, but Twilight Time’s presentation of Swamp Water (sourced from the latest 20th Century Fox restoration of the film) can stand toe-to-toe with the best of them.

The worst that can be said for the film as presented here is that it sometimes shows its age (can it really be 71 years?), presenting with mostly frame-specific specs and scratches, but occasionally leaving a few more persistent vertical lines to contend with. That said, this is an absolutely beautiful transfer, with as fine a clarity of detail as can be expected of the production and pitch-perfect contrast throughout. There’s a fine layer of grain in evidence, and rendered well enough that it holds its own even at excessive magnification (with the image zoomed in 4-5x its native resolution). That one-of-a-kind 35mm allure is alive and well here, and makes for a tremendously satisfying viewing.

With just the 90 minute feature and its accompanying audio tracks to contend with Swamp Water only occupies a single layer BD-25, but this proves to be more than enough. The 1080p 1.33:1-framed image receives a healthy Mpeg-4 AVC encode at an average bitrate of 29.4 Mbps, and the results are impossible to argue with. Encoding flaws, if any, are so negligible as to go unnoticed, and I suspect the image could be presented theatrically without issue. This is another reference level presentation from Twilight Time and 20th Century Fox, and it just doesn’t get any better than that.

Screenshots were captured as full 1920×1080 resolution .png in Totem Movie Player, and compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 97% using the ImageMagick command line tool.

Audio is presented in lossless DTS-HD MA 1.0 monophonic, and while it doesn’t impress so much as the visuals of the film it sounds perfectly accurate to the original recording. Sound effects and dialogue are clear as a bell – the odd element out is, strangely enough, the score from David Buttolph, which presents with a notable warble at times. The disc’s only supplement, an isolated score track in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0, does not present with this issue, and sounds very good given the age of the recordings (pre-cue noise, like band members coughing and the cue number being read, has been delightfully retained in some cases). Unfortunately there are no subtitles, making it clear again that Sony are providing sub tracks for these Twilight Time discs while Fox are, for whatever reason, not.

Swamp Water is another fully-functional Blu-ray disc, complete with non-generic chapter stops (12 of them) and a pop-up menu accessible during feature playback. In terms of design this may be my favorite yet of Twilight Time’s releases, with a superb cover illustration that reflects the film’s indelible first shot. Julie Kirgo’s liner notes again prove indispensable. Several insightful quotes from Renoir himself are included, along with some lovely behind-the-scenes production stills of the director at work with his top-flight cast.

What can I say, I loved Swamp Water, from its ominous opening shot straight through to its somewhat dubious conclusion. Huston, Andrews, Baxter, and Brennan are each in top form, and Renoir’s touch is unmistakable. There’s very, very little to complain about with Twilight Time’s Blu-ray presentation, which ranks as one of my favorite classic film releases of the year thus far. Highly recommended!


No Orchids for Miss Blandish

February 17th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. St. John Legh Clowes
1948 / Tudor-Alliance / 103′
written by St. John Legh Clowes
from the novel by James Hadley Chase
cinematography by Gerald Gibbs
music by George Melachrino
starring Linden Travers, Jack La Rue, Hugh McDermott, Walter Crisham, MacDonald Park and Lilli Molnar
No Orchids for Miss Blandish is available on DVD through Amazon.com

It looks like a certain thing for a trio of would-be gangsters: grab the incredibly valuable jewellery of millionaire’s daughter Miss “I don’t need no stinking first name” Blandish (Linden Travers) while she and her fiancée are driving through dark country roads on the way to a roadhouse. As it goes with things that are certain, the robbery plan ends with a dead fiancée, two dead would-be gangsters and Miss Blandish kidnapped by the last surviving gangster, a certain Bailey (Leslie Bradley). Oops.

Bailey drives his victim to a country shack, where is planning on, well, shacking up for a while and doing Miss Blandish harm. Just when he is about to rape her, members of the Grisson gang, who learned of Bailey’s plans and whereabouts by ways too complicated to explain, appear like a particularly inappropriate sort of cavalry. Their leader, Slim Grisson (Jack La Rue), decides to kill off Bailey and kidnap Miss Blandish (and her jewellery) for himself.

But a strange thing happens to the hardened gangster once his booty (human and monetary) is safely stashed away at the club he owns. Slim falls in love with his victim, even becoming willing to risk the wrath of his partner/boss Ma Grisson (Lilli Molnar) – who doesn’t actually seem to be related to him – for said love. When Slim tells Miss Blandish to take her jewellery and just go on home, it turns out that he’s not the only one who’s in love here. Clearly, that sort of mutual feeling can not end well in a noir.

 
 
 

At the time the British noir No Orchids for Miss Blandish came out, it seems to have caused a minor scandal by flaunting British censorship scandals towards filmic violence (and probably sex) enough to end the career of its director, the excellently named St. John Legh Clowes and its female lead Linden Travers. From my modern perspective, this, like a lot of things causing censors to foam at the mouth, seems more than just a bit overblown. Sure, conceptually the film’s scenes of violence are a bit more directly visceral than was typical for its time, but Clowes execution of those scenes is so unconvincing, with fists that miss bellies by miles and bullets that are so clearly never shot no audience member (many of whom will have lived through various kinds of real violence during World War II) can have been shocked by what’s happening on screen.

I suspect that it’s the sexual content that broke the film’s neck anyhow, seeing as the amount of innuendo and the number of scenes where the film is basically stating “the characters are now going to have premarital sex while the camera’s not looking” reminds of the raunchier Hollywood pre-code films I’ve seen.

But really, it’s not the sex nor the violence that makes No Orchids as interesting a film as it is, it’s the peculiar way it goes about its business of being a British noir. Most of the British noirs I’ve seen were putting their efforts into taking the aesthetics and philosophy of the Hollywood noir and putting them into a decidedly British setting, with decidedly British characters and exploring decidedly British themes. It’s none of that for No Orchids. Like the novels of James Hadley Chase (one of which this is based on), the film tries its damndest to pretend it is an American noir, setting its story in the USA yet still casting – apart from Jack La Rue’s ersatz-Bogart and Walter Crisham’s ersatz-Widmark – British actors for the roles.

This lets No Orchids take place in a particularly strange place – a USA where everyone tries for a different kind of badly done American accent to stiffly utter (often rather weird) dialogue full of off-key americanisms in, frequently while wearing clothes that are clearly supposed to be American-style, but actually look like the clothes people wear in classic gangster films as recreated by a mad tourist. This whole aspect of the movie has a highly alienating effect, putting a distance between a modern viewer and the film that makes emotional involvement near impossible. It’s all much too artificial too be immersive.

 
 
 

This effect is even further heightened by a script that is confusing and difficult to believe even for noir standards, and that oozes so much puppy-like excitement about aping all aspects of American noir it ever put its eyes on that it’s impossible to take it seriously at all. The film makes no attempt to make the sudden love between Slim and Miss believable even in the slightest, and instead puts them into scenes of bizarre domesticity that can’t help but leave one with the feeling that Clowes either had a very peculiar sense of humour and was trying to have the audience on, or is an alien only vaguely familiar with the idea and ideal of love. This sort of thing sure makes for an interesting film, but also left me giggling throughout the “dramatic” climax that – I think – is supposed to jerk a few tears.

So, by the standards of how a “good” film is supposed to be, No Orchids For Miss Blandish is pretty much a total loss. However, as a film that takes a by the time well-developed style of filmmaking and makes it weird through its own sheer wrong-headedness and an insistence on imitation as if it were a broken mirror, it’s absolutely brilliant. As regular readers of this column and my blog know, there’s not much I love better in a movie than the ability to present itself as part of a different world than the one I come from. No Orchids For Miss Blandish achieves that effect effortlessly, while also providing some very pretty pictures to look at (say what you will about Clowes’s direction, but he sure knew how to do “pretty fake”), horrible musical numbers and “comic” interludes to be disturbed by, as well as psychosexual nonsense to shake one’s head about.

For a film that is trying so hard to be like other films, No Orchids sure is very much only like itself.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


Una Iena In Cassaforte

August 19th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1968   Runtime: 91′  Director: Cesare Canevari
Writers: Cesare Canevari, Alberto Penna  Cinematography: Claudio Catozzo   Music: Gian Piero Reverberi
Cast: Maria Luisa Geisberger, Dimitri Nabokov, Ben Salvador, Alex Morrison, Karina Kar, Cristina Gaioni

Eleven months after the deed, a group of intrepid robbers and their backers come together in the villa of one of their own, Boris, to divide up the diamonds they stole out of a Swiss vault. The diamonds are hidden away in a safe that in its turn is hidden away in a pool of water, only to be lifted by some sort of hydraulic device, and not openable through explosives because it’s somehow built with uranium inside™. Said safe can only be opened with six keys, one of which should be in the possession of each robber.

Of the original robbers, only Steve (Dimitri Nabokov), Klaus (Otto Tinard?) and Albert (Alex Morrison) are left, though. Boris has died (and is entombed in his own backyard) and is represented by his wife Anna (Maria Luisa Geisberger) whose frightening fashion stylings will delight and/or horrify the audience for the rest of the movie, while another of the original robbers has lost his key gambling to a certain Juan (Ben Salvador). The final robber is hiding from the police and has sent his girlfriend Carina from Algiers (Karina Kar). Because two women aren’t enough, Albert has brought his fiancée Jeanine (Cristina Gaioni, doing her best Brigitte Bardot impression) to the party.

Alas, things are not going as smoothly as everyone present had hoped. Just when the group is about to open the safe, Albert realizes that he has lost his key. The others don’t believe his story and begin to first try to find the key on Jeanine’s body and then – after that doesn’t lead to anything but a woman at once sticking out her décolleté and cupping her breasts – decide to torture Albert for a night by not giving him his favourite drug and puttering about on a piano.

  
  

Once that is over, leading nowhere, somebody shoves Albert down a balcony. Obviously, this won’t be the last murder in the villa, because soon enough, everyone is at each other’s throats, and everyone’s trying to get the diamonds for his or herself.

Una Iena In Cassaforte belongs to that school of the giallo that doesn’t see its own lack of a budget as an excuse for not being a mad and stylish concoction of luridly glowing pop particles. As giallos go, this one’s most definitely far on the mindless pop and pulp side of the equation, and not at all interested in (even pop-)psychology, social commentary or depth. Instead Una Iena is a film working hard to keep its audience entertained by throwing as much exciting and crazy shit at it as the money allows, in a style closer to the weirder eurospy films than most other giallos.

The whole story is presented with all the sensibility and subtlety of a fumetti (I’d be very surprised if “make it look like a comic” wasn’t scrawled on the first page of the script), with caricatures instead of characterization, delights through weird flourishes like the “uranium in the safe” business, and is dominated by a mood of overexcited playfulness that seems to have infected every part of the movie.

  
  

The actors (most of them having only this and one or two other films in their filmographies) are inhabiting their one-note roles with great enthusiasm, as if they were born into them (and I’m not too sure they weren’t), and – when the situation affords it – can go from comparatively normal acting to wild scenery chewing at the drop of a hat. Especially Geisberger and Gaioni are fantastic that way. As a special bonus, the former actress does all her freak-outs wearing clothes and make-up that many of the more exalted drag queens would reject as a bit too tacky and bizarre, as if the guy responsible for her wardrobe were a Martian visitor trying to get his three brains around the concept of a “vamp”, at once failing and succeeding incredibly well.

There’s something wildly inventive (always bordering on hysteria, but only succumbing to it from time to time) about Cesare Canevari’s direction too. Canevari seems to have gone into the film with the determination to do something visually interesting or outright bizarre with every single shot (possibly to distract from the small number of locations). Sure, some of his ideas of the bizarre and the interesting are quite clearly part of the generic visual language of the pop cinema mainstream of his time, but Canevari manages to build a beautiful little freak out of these more generic parts and his own ideas. Plus, the generic of 1968′s pop cinema is pretty damn colourful.

Una Iena In Cassaforte (yes, as far as I understand, the film’s title really translates as “An Hyena in the Safe”) is not only an extremely fascinating and fun film to watch, it’ also a film that can make for an instructive hour and a half of “guess the influences”. Elements like the water death trap garage seem to point either at the Bond movies, the eurospy film, or Rialto’s Edgar Wallace krimis as sources and influences for the film at hand, but it’s neither impossible, nor unlikely that these influences did run in more than one direction, and this small and unassuming film influenced later films of the respective series back. We are talking about pop cinema after all, and one of pop cinema’s most noble activities is to go through an endless cycle of films borrowing ideas other films took from somewhere else, that will in turn be borrowed again by other films, and then by other films again, until it becomes difficult, possibly even absurd, to find an original source, or anything amounting to a state of authenticity.

The Horror!? is a weekly cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, an aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.

Die Blaue Hand

August 12th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a.: The Blue Hand / Creature With the Blue Hand / The Bloody Dead
Year: 1967    Runtime: 84′  Director: Alfred Vohrer
Writer: Herbert Reinecker  Cinematography: Ernst W. Kalinke   Music: Martin Böttcher
Cast: Klaus Kinski, Harald Leipnitz, Carl Lange, Diana Körner, Siegfried Schürenberg, Albert Bessler
(This write-up concerns the original German cut of the movie, and not that abomination some cruel American producer created out of it and random horrible inserts later on.)

Dave Emerson (Klaus Kinski), descendant of a formerly rich family, is sentenced to a nice little holiday in the establishment of local shady psychiatrist (so untrustworthy he’s even wearing a monocle, for Cthulhu’s sake! in the 60s!) Dr. Mangrove (Carl Lange) for killing the family gardener.

Nobody cares much that Dave has insisted on his innocence in the murder throughout the trial, or that the evidence against him is pretty circumstantial, least of all his “loving” mother Lady Emerson (Ilse Steppat).

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357 Magnum

April 22nd, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1979    Runtime: 88′   Director: Rubén Galindo
Writers: Rubén Galindo, Carlos Valdemar  Cinematography: Miguel Araña
Music: Manuel Esperón, Pedro Galindo   Cast: Mario Almada, Fernando Almada,
Ursula Prats, Roger Cudney, Carlos León, Jeanette Mass

(Don’t be like an IMDB reviewer and confuse this with any of the other movies of this or a slightly different name!)

The members of the improbably named “Brigade 357 Magnum” of the police are disturbing the work of a syndicate of weapons and drugs dealers only known as The Organization with a half successful raid on an arms deal with a Communist revolutionary group from a Central American country (whose boss, as we’ll later see, goes for classic Castro chic). The Organization is not pleased at all, so the whole gang – boss, favourite moll and all – stuff themselves into two cars and shoot Tony Murillo, the leading cop of the operation, his wife and his little daughter.

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BMX Bandits

March 14th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1983   Company: Nielsen Premiere   Runtime: 91′
Director: Brian Trenchard-Smith   Writers: Patrick Edgeworth, Russell Hagg
Cinematography: John Seale   Music: Colin Stead, Frank Strangle   Cast: David Argue, John Ley,
Nicole Kidman, Angelo D’Angelo, James Lugton, Bryan Marshall, Brian Sloman, Peter Browne,
Bill Brady, Linda Newton, Bob Hicks, Guy Norris, Chris Hession, Norman Hodges, Tracy Wallace
Disc company: Severin Films   Video: 480p 2.34:1    Audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 English
Subtitles: None   Disc: DVD9 (Region 1)   Release Date: 03/15/2011   Product link: Amazon.com
BMX Bandits is reviewed here from a screener provided by Severin Films.

A trio of athletic youngsters with BMX bikes on the brain become embroiled in a payroll heist when they stumble upon a shipment of contraband walkie-talkies.  With a pair of bumbling crooks on their tail and the cops slow to respond, can the gang of BMX Bandits rally and put an end to the criminal goings-ons before it’s too late?

Forget the cast, forget the bikes, and forget the gorgeous north-Sydney locations.  There are really only two things one needs to know to appreciate BMX Bandits. The first is that it was directed by the legendary Brian Trenchard-Smith, the Ozsploitation mastermind behind Turkey Shoot, Stunt Rock and, my personal favorite, The Man From Hong Kong (in which Jimmy Wang Yu heads to Australia to kick international ass).  Trenchard-Smith’s career may have taken a couple (okay, a lot) of unfortunate turns in the past few decades, which have seen him credited for two Leprechaun sequels and the dreadful Sci-Fi original Aztec Rex, among others, but BMX Bandits is the director at his early-’80s prime.

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The Saviour

February 18th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1980    Runtime: 81′   Director: Ronnie Yu Yan-Tai
Writer: Alfred Cheung Kin Ting    Cinematography: Tony Hope    Music: Teddy Robin Kwan
Cast: Pai Ying, Gigi Wong Suk-Yee, Ng Man-Hun, Kent Cheng Jak-Si, Tien Feng

It would be easy to confuse Hong Kong police Inspector Tom (veteran actor Pai Ying, looking a bit bored) with your run-of-the-mill cop on the edge. His boss (Chris Dryden) at least seems to take him for one, complaining that Tom never keeps any criminal alive. But what the film shows of the cop lets him look like some sort of anti-Danny Lee, killing only in self-defence, being not too fond of torture, spending his free time taking care of an orphan boy. Given these facts, our so-called loose gun acts like the least psychopathic cop in Hong Kong cinema, though, admittedly, the way police officers in HK movies usually act, that’s not much of to say of a cop’s mental health.

Tom’s newest case is a series of murders of prostitutes. While the audience knows the identity of the killer right from the start, Tom will have to spend a few scenes not moving a facial muscle, or, as the experts call it, “investigating”. Fortunately, one of the killer’s victims escapes with her life and is willing and able to identify him. The young man doing the deeds is one Paul Kwok (Ng Man-Hung?), who isn’t quite the nice little boy he once was anymore since he witnessed his mother killing herself in front of his eyes while rambling about “sluts” and “tramps”, a catastrophe caused by his Dad’s very obvious cheating. Now, with a witness, it should be an easy case for Tom, and Paul should be facing a nice vacation in an institution.

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Mision Suicida

July 9th, 2010 | article by | 2 Comments »
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company: Puerto Mexico Films
year: 1973
runtime: 78′
director: Federico Curiel
cast: El Santo, Lorena Velazquez,
Elsa Cardenas, Dagoberto Rodriguez,
Roxana Bellini
writer: Fernando Oses
cinematography: Augustin Jimenez
music: Guustavo C. Carrion
Order this film from Amazon.com

Mexico City, during the Cold War. A Soviet spy ring – as we later learn under the leadership of Nazis with fitting names like Otto and Elke – kidnaps the Nazi war criminal and expert in brainwashing techniques Doctor Müller (Juan Gallardo). They need him to prepare the unsuspecting women populating their secret spy training camp in Santo Domingo for their real work. These women, you see, think they are just training (for who knows what?) at a very special gym that just happens to have a lot of swastikas in some of its rooms. In truth, they are meant to be the Soviet Union’s new elite spies who are supposed to start an awesome series of sabotage missions in the USA in the near future. They just need to be convinced, and that’s where Müller will fit in.

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Run and Kill

June 10th, 2010 | article by | 2 Comments »
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company: Come On Film
year: 1993
runtime: 88′
director: Billy Tang
cast: Kent Cheng, Simon Yam,
Esther Kwan, Lily Lee,
Danny Lee
writer: Bryan Chang
cinematography: Tony Miu King-Fai
music: Jonathon Wong Bong
Order this film from Amazon.com

“Fatty” Cheung (Kent Cheng) is not the luckiest of men. He might have a solidly running business selling gas, a doting mother, a loving little daughter and a pretty if costly wife (Lily Lee), but he’s bound to lose all of it faster than he could have expected.

When Cheung comes home early on his wedding anniversary, he finds his wife having a bit of adulterous fun with a decidely thinner and younger man than himself. Cheung is not the kind of man prone to violent outbursts, so he just protests limply that the couple really shouldn’t do it in his living room and skitters away to get drunk.

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Kiss of Death

February 6th, 2010 | article by | No Comments »
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rating:
company: 20th Century Fox
year: 1947
runtime: 99′
country: United States
director: Henry Hathaway
cast: Victor Mature, Brian Donlevy,
Coleen Gray, Richard Widmark,
Taylor Holmes, Howard Smith,
Karl Malden, Anthony Ross
writers: Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer
and Eleazar Lipsky
cinematographer: Norbert Brodine
music: David Buttolph
dvd company: 20th Century Fox
release date: December 6, 2005
retail price: $14.98
disc details: Region 1 / NTSC / dual layer
video: 1.33:1 / full screen / progressive
audio: Dolby Digital 1.0 mono (English, Spanish)
Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo (English)
subtitles: English, Spanish
special features: Feature commentary by
Alain Silver and John Ursini, theatrical trailer,
stills gallery, promotional trailers for other Fox Noir
(Call Northside 777, House of Bamboo, Laura,
Panic in the Streets, The Street With No Name)
order this film from Amazon.com


Plot: An ex-con back in prison for a jewelry heist squeals on the mob that hired him after learning that his wife has died in his absence.

What a great film!  Victor Mature last paid visit to this site via Hal Roach Sr. and Jr.’s original cavemen-versus-dinosaurs epic One Million B.C., which cast and typecast Mature as the stoic slab of manhood he would play time and again throughout his career (Samson and Delilah, Demetrius and the Gladiators and so on).  Henry Hathaway’s location-bound neo-realist noir requires far more of Mature as a performer than any of those efforts did or would, and the actor, cast against then and future heavies Brian Donlevy (Beginning or the End, The Quatermass Xperiment) and Richard Widmark (Panic in the Streets, The Bedford Incident), proves time and again that he can pull it off with chops to spare.

Mature plays Nick Bianco, a decent man forced by unfortunate circumstance into a life of crime.  His past is checkered, his father was shot dead by police when he was just a kid and he spent time in prison as a young adult.  His wrap sheet is enough to keep him from finding a steady job in post-war New York, so Bianco turns to pulling contract heists for the local mob.  On Christmas Eve a jewelry store hold-up goes sour, and Nick finds himself on the street in front of the Chrysler Building with a policeman’s bullet in his leg.  Assistant D.A. D’Angelo (Donlevy) offers Nick is offered a plea deal, but he refuses it, getting 15 years in Sing Sing while his accomplices go free.

Nick, good guy that he is, is more than happy to serve the time for the crime he knows he committed, and is led by shady (or shyster, as D’Angelo puts it) lawyer Houser into believing that his wife and two young daughters will be taken care of.  He couldn’t be more wrong.  After an affair with Nick’s old cohort Rizzo his wife takes a nosedive into alcoholism and depression, eventually snuffing out her miseries in a gas stove.  Nick doesn’t find out until well after the fact, and concerns over the welfare of his children, now in an orphanage, and a visit from his former babysitter Nettie (Coleen Gray in her first billed role) convince him that helping the assistant D.A. might be the right thing to do after all.

Ratting on his cohorts in the Christmas Eve jewelry store job is small stuff, and soon Nick is put on the job of squealing on slick mobster Tommy Udo (Widmark in his Academy Award-nominated screen debut), a squirrelly sociopath Nick first met while awaiting trial in the Tombs.  The gig works, and Nick gives D’Angelo all the evidence he thinks he needs to put Udo away on a murder wrap.  Bianco goes on with his life, marrying the much younger Nettie and living with his kids in Queens under an assumed name.  But it isn’t long before D’Angelo is calling again, demanding that Nick shed his secrecy and testify in the Udo case, a guaranteed conviction we already knows is going to swing the other way.

With the sadistic Udo back on the streets, Nick knows that it’s only a matter of time before he gets an unwanted knock on his door.  Realizing that D’Angelo will be of no help, Bianco puts his family on a train to the country and goes out to find Tommy himself to settle things once and for all.

Kiss of Death is best remembered, and perhaps rightly so, for the hilariously sadistic breakout performance of Richard Widmark as the demented hood Tommy Udo.  With sunken eyes, a slicked-back hair piece and a constant giggle, Udo is more of a cartoon caricature than a human being, but even caricatures can be dangerous.  Udo is the man Houser calls when there’s dirty work that needs doing, and when the lawyer is led to believe that Nick’s old friend Rizzo is squealing on the mob it’s Udo he sends in to fix things.  And fix them he does, wrapping Rizzo’s wheelchair-bound mother with electrical wire and sending her on a face-first trip down her tenement’s stairs.  Widmark’s performance is absolutely electrifying here, and he imbues Udo’s human weasel (undoubtedly an inspiration for Judge Doom’s henchmen in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) with enough raw power to make him a believable threat, even when so obviously physically outmatched by co-star Mature.

Though he can’t help but be upstaged by Widmark in his gravy role, Mature is no push-over.  At 6 foot 2 inches tall he looks a bit like Gulliver after his landing on Lilliput when decked out in his suit tie (perhaps an intentional move to make the family man look all the more out-of-place as a criminal), but his emotions are spot on and in the final confrontation with Widmark he more than holds his own.  It’s interesting that even in noir Mature can’t escape Biblical associations, and his sinner-turned-martyr is followed by a good deal of Christian symbolism.  Prison bars cast shadows that form crosses in at least two scenes (one of them across Mature’s face) while he is seen centered beneath another (this one in a stained glass window) when he visits a Catholic  orphanage with D’Angelo and his cop assistant.  When it comes time for the cops and robber to take their seats in a waiting room, Mature sits directly below a painting of Christ, and a nun working the orphanage, much to the embarrassment of the assistant D.A. and his friend, has to ask which of them is the ex-con father.

While much of the symbolism looks to have originated with director Hathaway (Call Northside 777, True Grit), it extends well into the Hecht and Lederer (and possibly the Lipsky source story, though I’ve not read it to check) as well.  The assistant D.A. who saves Mature from prison is named Louis D’Angelo (Louis ‘of Angels’) and Mature himself plays a character named Bianco (white), re-enforcing his overall goodness.  It’s never terribly overbearing and no one will ever confuse Kiss of Death for a Christ allegory, but it’s interesting to point out all the same.


Veteran director Henry Hathaway plays the early events as realistically as possible for a dramatic film, showing us through the procedure of Mature’s confinement and ushering us through a series of real locations.  The drama will seem dated for anyone happening upon it today, but seeing the Tombs, the D.A.’s office, and Sing Sing and its workshops alive on the big screen helps.  The documentary style on display, with its high-key lighting and straight compositions, stands in for that classic noir aesthetic for the first two acts, not that it hampers the suspense (an early scene of Nick trapped in an elevator is superbly claustrophobic).  The change arrives with a call from D’Angelo informing Nick that Tommy Udo has beaten his murder wrap, and from here on out fans of low-key noir stylings will find themselves in familiar territory.  Hathaway ramps his crime drama into a slick thriller in the third act, and his direction of Mature, crushed by the realization that his work with D’Angelo was for nought and turned paranoid by fear for his family’s well being, is exceptional.

My only real complaint is with the framing and the ending, which smells of studio tampering, not that either of these things keeps the film from succeeding.  The film is bookended with narration from Nettie, who offers a bit of useful backstory in the beginning and adds a happy high note to the otherwise grim finale.

Those worried about spoilers should skip this rest of this paragraph. Nick ends them film prostrate on the ground, shot half a dozen times in the gut by the vengeful Udo, with the three-time-loser immediately apprehended by police for the assault and locked away for good.  As Nick is shuffled into an ambulance, obviously on his way out, Nettie’s narration chimes in to let us know that he, in no uncertain terms, survives.  Here we fade to a stock shot of New York seen at the beginning of the film, then the ending title.  There’s ample evidence here to indicate that Nettie was not originally intended to be the framing device, and the Nick did not actually survive.  It seems far more likely that assistant D.A. D’Angelo was set to be the original framework for the piece, particularly given that the source story was based on the experiences of its author Eleazar Lipsky, a former prosecutor.  It’s food for thought certainly, but as I said, not enough to ruin the picture.


Kiss of Death gets exceptional treatment as part of the Fox Film Noir collection, with the black and white feature and supplements spread over a hefty 7.5 gigs of disc space.  The progressive transfer is excellent for such an old catalog title, with tight 1.33:1 framing and healthy detail.  Contrast looks appropriate if a little boosted and a fine layer of that beloved film grain is present throughout.  Damage is limited but still present, mostly as dust and speckles but occasionally as more obvious chemical imperfections.  It’s never enough to really distract from the viewing and I suspect this is the best the film has looked in a good long time.  Audio is available in three flavors, English in Dolby Digital 1.0 mono and 2.0 stereo, and Spanish in Dolby Digital 1.0 mono.  Recording on all three is crisp, and I didn’t note much difference between the stereo and monophonic tracks.  Subtitles are available in English and Spanish.

Fox offers up a feature commentary track from Alain Silver and John Ursini as the chief supplement for the disc.  While short on background information and high on observations of things that will be pretty obvious (at least I hope so) to most viewers, the pair still offer up some good information – certainly worth a listen and not nearly so pointless as some other tracks I’ve come across (Once Upon A Time In The West, for instance).  The other supplements are pretty standard issue, a theatrical trailer in good shape, a still gallery, and a collection of trailers for other Fox Noir titles (including Panic in the Streets, starring Widmark, and Call Northside 777, directed by Hathaway).

This is a great disc from Fox, currently on sale at 60% savings (a bargain price of just $5.99) at Amazon.com.  Fans and film buffs in general are encouraged to indulge.  As for the film, what more need be said?  It’s a landmark performance from then-newcomer Widmark and one of the best from the underrated Mature, all wrapped up in a fine crime drama by director Hathaway and writers Hecht, Lederer and Lipsky.  The fine score is so good we’ve heard it thrice, with the opening theme recycled for Elia Kazan’s Gentlemen’s Agreement and the less upstanding 3D attraction Gorilla At Large (insert your own canned ape sound effects here – they did).  Excellent stuff, and highly recommended.


Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

December 21st, 2009 | article by | 1 Comment »
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postera.k.a. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans
company: Millennium Films
and Saturn Films
year: 2009
runtime: 122′
country: United States
director: Werner Herzog
cast: Nicolas Cage, Val Kilmer,
Eva Mendes, Feiruza Balk,
Jennifer Coolidge, Brad Dourif,
Michael Shannon, Shawn Hatosy
writer: William M. Finkelstein
cinematographer: Peter Zeitlinger
music: Mark Isham
out in limited release
pre-order the film from Amazon.com:
DVD | Blu-ray

Warning: This review probably contains some spoilers.


Plot: A police lieutenant is hampered by drug addiction, local gangsters, and an ever-loosening grip on reality while heading up a homicide investigation in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is, in a word, unlikely.  A reboot in name only of the 1992 cult picture Bad Lieutenant produced more than 15 years after the fact with Nicolas Cage in the starring role and Werner Herzog in the director’s chair, its very conception seems suspect, and yet it’s here all the same.  Herzog has taken the script by William M. Finkelstein (writer for N.Y.P.D. Blue and L.A. Law, amongst other television shows) and made something special, a darkly comic tale of corruption, addiction, and redemption and one of the best films of the year.

Herzog’s sense of location is as impeccable as ever, and he makes the depopulated ruins of New Orleans parishes, crumbling in the shadows of the glass towers of the city proper and festering with all manner of crime, as much a character as any other in the film.  Set only a few months after the disaster of Katrina, Herzog’s New Orleans is a place already forgotten by those on the outside – a near-apocalyptic landscape that can’t help but be the birthplace of monsters.

One such monster is newly promoted police lieutenant Terence McDonagh (Cage), a pitiable creature whose chronic pain has led him into addictions to heroin, crack, and cocaine.  McDonagh is an undeniably talented officer, seen at one point single-handedly apprehending a suspect while a SWAT team waits outside, but his tunnel vision starts to get the better of him after his promotion.  As he tells a suspect he’s arresting, “it’s amazing how much you can get done when you’ve got a simple purpose guiding you through life.”  Unfortunately for McDonagh, securing a constant supply of illicit drugs has become that simple purpose.

Things go well for a while.  McDonagh subsists off the steady stream of cocaine and prescription drugs filtering into the evidence room of his department and even finds a kindred spirit and devoted lover in high-class prostitute Frankie (Mendes).  But the life can’t last, and soon he’s betting on football games with money he doesn’t have and getting in trouble with the local mob.  The hallucinations – particularly of ambivalent iguanas on stakeouts – don’t help.  McDonagh hits rock bottom hard, forced to make an uneasy allegiance with the local gangster responsible for the homicide he’s investigating after the case falls apart due to his own negligence.

Herzog keeps the audience aware of the fact that, in spite of all the snarling, screaming, and frequent insanity, McDonagh is ultimately just a decent human being in the midst of making the worst decisions of his life.  The accident that led to his chronic pain was the result of his rescuing a suspect, left behind after the waters began to rise -  no good deed goes unpunished.  Herzog allows McDonagh to commit (and get away with) truly despicable acts on the shaky road to redemption, but always leaves ample room for forgiveness, never letting McDonagh succumb to mortal sin.  The lieutenant  even goes so far as to save the life of murderous gangster Big Fate (Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner) from his depraved partner Stevie (Kilmer).

I never thought I’d find myself praising a performance from Nicolas Cage, but here it’s deserved.  Kudos to Herzog for allowing the actor to flex his professional muscles, which have gone so underserved by recent efforts like Next, Ghost Rider, The Wicker Man, and on and on and on.  Cage lurches through the film like an old-school Universal monster, retaining that all-important note of tragedy while on his drugged-out rampage.  It’s the best performance that’s been seen from the actor in years, and a welcome respite with crap like Ghost Rider 2 (I suppose even Cage has to eat) on the way.

Herzog keeps up his well-earned reputation for experimentation and even finds room to dabble with surrealism in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.  McDonagh’s highs are amplified with operatic outbursts of handi-cam wildlife close-ups (notably of an iguana and an alligator) while another  scene has the youthful soul of an aged hit man break dancing after the man himself is killed.  The ambiguous fish-tank ending will leave many viewers scratching their heads, though it seems entirely appropriate in the context of the film.  Herzog always has had an affinity for being strange just for the sake of being strange, and that’s just fine with me.

Teaming up with Herzog once again is cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger (Encounters at the End of the World, Wheel of Time, and Invincible to name a few), and his presence is welcome here.  Frequently working with natural light alone, Zeitlinger ensures Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans’ place as one of the best photographed pictures of the year.  Composer Mark Isham (Invincible, The Black Dahlia) provides the exceptional score, its themes rich in accoustic guitar and augmented with occasional explosions of harmonica.   Here’s hoping a CD release is on the way.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is out in limited release in the States with simultaneous Blu-ray and DVD releases slated for April of next year from distributor First Look Films (this article will be updated with a disc review at that time).  This is, for my money, one of the best films I’ve seen all year – old or new.  Herzog is still a master of the craft, and his latest comes very highly recommended.


Miragemen

August 28th, 2009 | article by | No Comments »
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Mandrill Films [2007] 90′
country: Chile
director: Ernesto Diaz Espinoza
cast: Marko Zaror, Maria Elena Swett,
Ariel Mateluna, Mauricio Pesutic

When he and his brother were young, Maco’s (Marko Zaror) parents were killed in a robbery. Maco now works as the bouncer of a slightly classier strip club, but the death of his parents hasn’t left him with much of a life – he’s honing his martial arts skills alone in his nearly empty cellar hole of an apartment and is obsessed with physical fitness, and that’s all he has in life. He certainly has neither friends nor lovers.

Maco is still less hurt than his brother who lives in a mental institution, traumatized and depressed and unable to even leave his room.

One night on his way to work, Maco witnesses a robbery. He kicks the perpetrators’ asses, donning the mask he takes from one of them for no reason he himself could explain, rescues their victims and flees. One of the victims (Maria Elena Swett) is a TV reporter and on the next evening news, Maco finds himself styled as a masked vigilante hero.

His brother sees the news too, and the newly made hero seems to help him to get in contact with reality again. With a motivator this strong, Maco really doesn’t have much of a choice. He buys himself a reasonably silly outfit and tries to become the masked vigilante his brother dreams of.

Mirageman1 Mirageman2 Mirageman3
Mirageman4 Mirageman5 Mirageman6

At first, his exploits aren’t always dignified, but everything goes reasonably well. Things change for him with rising popularity, though, and soon he has to cope with the dark side of the vigilante business – a media circus that wants to use him and eat him up, criminal enemies who are more dangerous than your typical street thug and the simple fact that Maco himself is not made of steel nor a millionaire playboy.

Mirageman demonstrates admirably that you don’t need Hollywood blockbuster money to create a good superhero movie. Director/writer Ernesto Diaz Espinoza and his star and martial arts and stunt expert Marko Zaror (who before made Kiltro, “the first South-American martial arts movie”, if I can believe what I read) take the whole masked vigilante thing down a to the street level and into something more aking to reality as we know it and ask the question how and why a physically normal man in modern Chile would go about being a hero of a sort. It’s probably as close to realism as you would want a film like it to be.

The film’s low budget aesthetic helps a lot to build this mood. Espinoza uses a lot of handheld camera (not to be misinterpreted as “shaky-cam”), while at least some of the film is obviously shot guerilla style on the streets, giving everything a gritty sheen which reminds every reviewer writing about the film – me included -  of 70s cinema, as does the third generation funky soundtrack. The colours are unfortunately very much of the yellow, blue and gray 2000s, but I’m willing to let this slide as one of the compromises people making movies without much money have to make to be able to produce something at all.

The first half of the film plays at least in parts for laughs, but it never overplays the humor in the way your typical spoof would do it. The film’s humor instead arises mostly from thinking the difficulties of things like costume changes in real life through and looking at them in a clever and dry sort of way without any need to fall back on meanness or slapstick.

Mirageman7 Mirageman8 Mirageman9
Mirageman10 Mirageman11 Mirageman12

But Espinoza is also able to handle the darker and more tragic parts of his film well, shifting its mood from lightness to grimness in a fitting replica of the history of superhero comics. If one goes into the film only expecting sweetness and light and broken bones, one would probably be shocked by the big final battle.

There are also some very fine fights on display which Espinoza decides to show instead of hiding everything in them away by way of fast cutting and stupid camera effects. It does of course help that Zaror is an actual martial artist who is able to perform authentically enough looking fights without problems. To my surprise, Zaror shows himself also to be quite a decent actor, able to sell the psychological scars of his character well enough.

Of course there are flaws – the film’s pacing is a little jagged and not every element and character is as clearly or logically developed as our hero and his brother. I found the deus ex machina character who helps Maco a few times especially clumsily inserted.

Still, its healthy mixture of believability and playfulness, comedy and tragedy is what makes Mirageman so satisfying. It’s the great little superhero movie that could, even though too few people know about it.

For more bizarre movie goodness, be sure
to visit Denis’ excellent review blog The Horror!?


Icons of Sci-Fi: Toho Collection

August 24th, 2009 | article by | No Comments »
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casecompany: Sony
release date: August 18, 2009
retail price: $24.96
details: 1x DVD5 + 2x DVD9 / NTSC / Region 1
subtitles: English
film: The H-Man
a.k.a. Bijo to Ekitainingen
company: Toho Co. ltd.
year: 1958
runtime: 86′ / 78′
director: Ishiro Honda
cast: Kenji Sahara, Yumi Shirakawa,
Akihiko Hirata, Eitaro Ozawa
film: Battle in Outer Space
a.k.a. Uchu Daisenso
company: Toho Co. ltd.
year: 1959
runtime: 93′ / 93′
director: Ishiro Honda
cast: Ryo Ikebe, Kyoko Anzai,
Koreya Senda, Yoshio Tsuchiya
film: Mothra
a.k.a. Mosura
company: Toho Co. ltd.
year: 1960
runtime: 101′ / 90′
director: Ishiro Honda
cast: Frankie Sakai, Hiroshi Koizumi,
Kyoko Kagawa, Jerry Ito
Order this collection from Amazon.com

This has been a long time coming from Sony / Columbia Pictures, who have been sitting on renewed rights to a trio of Toho-produced science fiction and fantasy classics for the past 20 years.  The good news is that this Icons of Sci-Fi collection [hopefully the first of many more to come] is well worth the wait, a few nagging caveats aside.  I think it best that we get those out of the way right now.

The biggest complaint I have is with just how cheaply the set appears to have been put together – this is a far cry from the excellent slim-case packaging of the earlier Icons of Horror: Sam Katzman Collection.  The cover is a aesthetically off-putting blob of photoshop madness that’s far beneath what we know Sony can produce when they put their minds to it.  The packaging itself is a single Amaray case with a single hub used to house all three discs in a small stack, making scratching during removal all but inevitable [this reviewer's first action after opening the set was to put each disc in a proper case of its own and chuck the one provided in the garbage].  Then there is the labelling of the discs themselves, which is just printed text on the silver DVD surface.  I expect this kind of garbage from companies like Mill Creek or Navarre, but from a major studio it’s nigh on unacceptable.

Less a complaint than an admission of personal disappointment is the lack of supplemental material [beyond the two fine audio commentaries, to be discussed below] for the set.  Both Toho and Sony / Columbia Pictures have trailers for these films in storage, but they are nowhere to be found on this set.  The most we get is a bit of cross-marketing via a trio of previews for unrelated releases that can be found on the disc for THE H-MAN.

That said, the set’s retail price is low and the sale price at most online retail outlets even lower – I snagged my copy for less than what a bootlegged disc of any one of these films would have cost from popular fan venues like Video Daikaiju and for a third of what a R2 Toho disc can be imported for.

It’s also important to note that all three films in this set received digital restorations from Sony, which recreated the English dubbed editions through a combination of their own less than stellar  elements with new interpositives provided by Toho Co. ltd.  The image quality remains consistent between the English dubbed and original Japanese versions, as shown in the second and fourth captures from THE H-MAN.  While some dust, speckling and minor damage is still present, the transfers are very satisfying to behold and will be a real treat for stateside fans.

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THE H-MAN is a film I fondly remember waking up early to see on the precious few occasions that it aired through the late 80s and early 90s, but my younger self couldn’t have appreciated the true spectacle of the thing from the cut and cropped version that kicked around on US television.  The film follows the interweaving stories of a woman on the run, detectives out to solve a gang-related missing persons case and a young researcher looking to prove his radical hypothesis that exposure to intense radioactivity can liquify living tissue.  It’s a bizarre mix of crime noir and Quatermass-inspired science fiction goodness and one of the most memorable of the non-daikaiju efforts Toho was producing at the time.

The script by Takeshi Kimura [MATANGO] from a story by Hideo Unagami is played essentially straight and offers up plenty of opportunities to showcase the horrific powers of the titular menace [and, vicariously, nuclear weaponry].  The H-men [or liquid humans, as they are referred to in the original Japanese] are the bi-product of nuclear testing in the Pacific and a unique metaphor for mankind’s more destructive tendencies.  Kimura’s end message is clear – more tests mean more H-men, and more H-men mean no humans.  Ishiro Honda’s direction is deft and assured, and he allows the picture to retain a welcome darkness in spite of its primary focus on entertainment.  Special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya are more limited with this effort than with the other two in the set but are no less accomplished – who can forget those oozing swaths of green slime or the vistas of Tokyo waterways engulfed in flame.

Sony offers up two transfers of THE H-MAN, the original Japanese cut and the shorter English dubbed American theatrical cut, on a dual layer disc.  The general details are the same, with the restored sources being presented in fine 16:9 enhanced 2.35:1 Tohoscope with great color and solid contrast.  Hajime Koizumi’s vivid scope cinematography is well served.  Audio is presented in the original 2.0 stereo for both the English dubbed and Japanese versions, with the latter having the best fidelity overall – Masaru Sato’s lively score, one of the best out of his early work, punches through nicely.  Separate easy to read English subtitles are provided for both versions.  For an older Toho title THE H-MAN looks very good here, and I’ve no complaints with the presentation.

This film gets the short end of the stick in the supplements department and is the only one of the set not to feature a commentary track – a pity, really.  The only supplements are a trio of trailers for unrelated Sony product.

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BATTLE IN OUTER SPACE, Toho’s big sci-fi special effects blockbuster for the New Years season of 1959 / 1960 plays like a thematic sequel to THE MYSTERIANS from two years earlier [there are no direct plot connections to the earlier film, though a few characters share names with characters from that film], but with the bulk of the action moved beyond Earth’s atmosphere.  The story concerns a moon-based assault on our planet by the war-mongering people of Natal and the efforts of the United Nations to stop the invaders.  The fantasy quotient of BATTLE is spot on.  Audiences are treated to a lunar offensive by way of ray-gun armed super vehicles that look like a cross between the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile and the landmasters from DAMNATION ALLEY, an outer space dogfight between alien saucers and Earthly fighter craft and the uprooting of downtown Tokyo by the Natalian mothership.

Unfortunately the drama of BATTLE is strictly bottom-of-the-barrel stuff.  Romantic interest must have been deemed necessary late in the game and seems to have been tacked on as an afterthought, with the relationship between stars Ryo Ikebe and Kyoko Anzai relegated to two brief scenes in which the former is a complete jackass.  The rest of the screenplay is devoted exclusively to military / scientific babble and the stereotypical threat-speeches from the Natalian invaders.  The only really promising element is the character of Iwomura played by the eccentric and ever-reliable Yoshio Tsuchiya, and his arch from scientist to Natalian slave to self-sacrificing hero is still shortchanged by the writing.

Inept as it is in the drama department, Eiji Tsuburaya’s effects direction is top-of-the line for the genre.  The lengthy moon offensive and it’s bevy of blue screen work is particularly impressive, as is the first-of-its-kind outer space dogfight.  Tsuburaya’s work is enough to make BATTLE a must-see for genre aficianados.  Akira Ifukube’s rousing score, one of his best for the genre, is another high point of the film – the dark and melodious themes that accompany Earth’s astronauts on their first visit to the moon are not to be missed.

BATTLE IN OUTER SPACE was not edited in regards to running time by Columbia Pictures, though new titles were made and much of the Ifukube soundtrack removed in favor of bland library cues.  Sony presents the film on a single layer DVD5 with seemless branching between the original Japanese and English dubbed variants.  The transfer is 16:9 enhanced in the original Tohoscope ratio and looks splendid, with vibrant colors and contrast – I’ve seen this film in all manner of disrepair over the years and the restoration here is a revelation.  While the vast majority of the transfer is encoded for progressive playback, the branched opening and closing segments are interlaced and a drop in quality is noticeable [particularly at the end of each version].  Audio is presented in Japanese and English, both in their original 2.0 stereo formats.  Unfortunately someone seriously goofed on the subtitle front, and the only option available are the subtitles made for the English dubbed varient.  That version’s talkiness leads to many subtitled lines that simply don’t exist in the original Japanese and the dub-titles are, predictably, not always accurate to the Japanese dialogue that is present.

Supplements are limited to a fine commentary track by authors Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski, two of the best in the business as far as genre commentaries are concerned.  The two keep the discussion lively, entertaining and, most important of all, informative.  Thanks to the branched structure, the commentary track is accessible from both the English and Japanese cuts of the film.

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Rounding out the collection is one of the most highly regarded of Toho’s giant monster efforts, the big budget fantasy MOTHRA.  The story has a bit of a KING KONG vibe, with two young women substituted for the giant ape as the exploited centerpiece.  Novel to this film is the concept of a giant monster as an impartial guardian, concerned only with the well being of the two Infant Island princesses.  The peaceful culture of Infant Island exists in stark contrast to the rest of the world in MOTHRA, even with the Cold War literally knocking at its door through its use as a nuclear weapons test site by the country of Rolisica [a fictitious stand in for Cold War superpowers Russia and the United States].

MOTHRA was a huge undertaking for Toho, warranting a higher budget than was typically alotted their already largely budgeted genre pictures, and it shows.  Special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya is at the absolute height of his talents here, creating vast cityscapes for the larval and adult Mothras to destroy.  Some of the models are quite large and, as such, feature an amount of detail rarely seen in miniature work – seeing them smashed to bits by the unstoppable monster-god is pure old-school spfx bliss.  A sequence in which the larval Mothra destroys a dam is simply astounding and was recreated by Teruyoshi Nakano, albeit on a smaller scale, for the much maligned GODZILLA VS. MEGALON.

The drama in this case is, in contrast to BATTLE IN OUTER SPACE, quite good and balances out the picture nicely.  Frankie Sakai and Kyoko Kagawa are wonderful as a trouble-causing reporter / photographer team, two characters who would be recycled [with different actors] in 1964′s MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA.  Hiroshi Koizumi, one of my favorite genre actors, plays the eccentric linguist Chujo, who is forever at odds with Jerry Ito’s greedy opportunist Rolisican Clark Nelson.  Nelson is one of the most ridiculous and audacious villains in Toho history, and is so identifiably bad that it’s hard not to boo and hiss whenever he’s on screen.  A prime example of his character comes just before he is killed at the conclusion of the film, with Nelson stealing the cane from a hobbling elderly man and hurling it into the street.  Then there is the twin sister musical act The Peanuts [Emi and Yumi Ito], whose reasonable performances and exceptional voices hold MOTHRA together.

Sony presents MOTHRA on a dual layer disc with two unique transfers – one for the English and another for the original Japanese variants of the film.  Both are presented in 16:9 enhanced 2.35:1 Tohoscope and are progressive, with exceptional color and contrast.  The level of detail is a notch higher here, and Hajime Koizumi’s work as cinematographer is well served once again.  This is easily the best looking film of the set.  Audio is presented in 2.0 stereo for both films, with the original Japanese element being the most aurally satisfying.  Seperate subtitles in an easily readable white font are provided for both variants.

Another choice commentary track by Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski is on board as the only supplement, but it’s a welcome one.  The pair are as entertaining and informative here as ever, and provide extensive background and production information for the title.  The commentary track is available for the shorter English dubbed variant of MOTHRA only.

While more supplements and [especially] better packaging could have improved my reception of this set, I found myself growing more and more satisfied with it as I watched.  The films all look fantastic [brief interlacing on BATTLE IN OUTER SPACE aside] and the addition of the English dubbed US theatrical variants is just what my inner child ordered.  This one is an easy recommendation and a must-buy as far as I’m concerned.  Now if whoever is sitting on the U.S. rights to the Brenco Pictures distributed Toho classics GORATH, THE LAST WAR and THE HUMAN VAPOR will just get with the program . . .


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