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Land Unknown, The

Monday, March 15th, 2010

company: Universal International
year: 1957
runtime: 78′
country: United States
director: Virgil Vogel
cast: Jock Mahoney, Shirley Patterson,
William Reyolds, Henry Brandon,
Douglas Kennedy, Phil Harvey,
Ralph Brooks, Kenner G. Kemp
writers: Charles Palmer,
Laszlo Gorog and Willam N. Robson
cinematography: Ellis W. Carter
music: Joseph Gershenson (supervisor)
special effects: Orien Ernest, Jack Kevan,
Fred Knoth, Roswell A. Hoffman,
Ray Binger, Clifford Stine
disc company: Universal Studios
Home Entertainment
release date: May 13, 2008
retail price: $59.98
disc details: Region 1 / NTSC / dual layer
video: 2.35:1 / anamorphic / progressive
audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 monophonic (English)
subtitles: English SDH, French
currently only available as part of the
Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection Volumes 1 & 2
order this disc set from Amazon.com

Plot: A group of US Navy explorers and a female reporter crash land in a prehistoric oasis dominated by huge dinosaurs while exploring Antarctica in a helicopter.

This relatively expensive Universal effects production from 1957 pillages plot elements from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and Edgar Rice Burrough’s The Land That Time Forgot while foregoing the drama, action, and excitement of either.  One need only look at the number of effects credits versus other studio science fiction productions of the decade to see that reasonable amounts of money passed hands with this one, but what a waste!

The dull story begins with a bit of dull expositional film-within-a-film, a briefing of a soon-to-begin Antarctic expedition that director Virgil Vogel (Invasion of the Animal People, The Mole People) allows to run in real time.  That is, until it is interrupted by the infinitely more interesting Shirley Patterson (credited as Shawn Smith), as reporter Hathaway, enters the scene.  Commander Roberts (stunt man and Western regular Jock Mahoney) and his underlings react in the expected fashion, encircling the poor woman as though they’ve been ignorant of the basics of human biology for the past 30 years of their lives.

The expedition, to investigate the Antarctic and, more specifically, a warm region discovered their some years earlier, is put underway in short order, though Vogel keeps the pacing at little more than a steady slog.  Commander Roberts, the reporter, a Lieutenant (William Reynolds, Cult of the Cobra, The Thing That Couldn’t Die) and a machinest (Phil Harvey, The Monolith Monsters) hop in a helicopter and take it for a spin, but a side-swipe from a pterodactyl sends them crashing (slowly, per the rest of the picture) into the interior of a volcano.  What they find there is a lost world full of strange plants, dinosaurs, and an endless supply of fog.

Surprisingly little happens from this point forward.  Sure, dinosaurs chase people and a giant carnivorous plant tries to feel up the lovely Miss Hathaway a number of times, but no one is ever put in any real danger.  The chief dramatic impetus arrives with Hunter, a bearded man from a previous expedition who has been living in the prehistoric haze for a decade.  Hunter has the parts the men need to fix their helicopter, but he wants Hathaway for himself.  The usual melodrama and fist-fights result, but Hunter is eventually convinced to give up the parts, allowing the lot of them fly out of the volcano for good.  Only their wardrobes seem worse for wear for their trouble.

There’s nothing wrong with The Land Unknown that better scripting couldn’t have fixed.  The CinemaScope frame is filled with vast sets and complicated process photography, but the story by Palmer, Gorog and Robson keeps the action within it to a barely acceptable minimum.  Editor turned director Vogel would (wisely) move into the greener pastures of television after this, directing only a handful of other feature films before his death in 1996.  His handling of proceedings here is about as accomplished as the limp scripting would allow for. The Mole People’s tale of subterranean Sumerians endeavoring to steal John Agar’s flash light seems almost exciting by comparison.  Almost.  Jock Mahoney seems terribly miscast, and he delivers every line with the same squint-eyed stoicism.  Henry Brandon puts in the most effort, turning the role of the man lost into one of the film’s few high points, while the under-appreciated Shirley Patterson, whose acting career was shortly to go the way of the dinosaurs, is given precious little to do other than look perpetually concerned and scream when necessary.

The film’s monsters were featured prominently in the exciting ad artwork and were undoubtedly responsible for selling the majority of tickets.  It’s a pity they’re so utterly unconvincing.  The star of the show is an anatomically improbable Tyrannosaurus Rex, a rubber suit featuring a massive, toothy skull perched atop a lumpy and incongruously small body.  One can’t help but feel sorry for whatever poor technician was shoved inside to operate the thing, waddling around the intricate prehistoric sets on its stumpy little legs.  A mechanized Elasmosaur (a sad precursor to Bruce the shark) improves upon the Tyrannosaurus in design, if not implementation.  The creature creeps anemically through the wave pool it inhabits, hissing at all who dare to enter its domain (which the full cast naturally does, and often).  A stiff pterodactyl mock-up and a pair of dueling monitor lizards round out the film’s unimpressive creature attractions.

Universal Studio Home Entertainment’s DVD of the film, originally part of the Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection Volume 2 and now re-packaged with The Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection Volumes 1 & 2, is nice at least.  The film comes double-booked with the far less inspired The Deadly Mantis, a loathsome sci-fi from the same year that offers up a neat looking monster puppet but little else.

While a Scope transfer did make its way to laserdisc in the late 1990s, most are familiar with The Land Unknown via its pan-and-scanned television and VHS masters.  The 16:9 enhanced 2.35:1 transfer on Universal’s DVD improves upon all of the previous releases, exhibiting strong contrast and sharp detail.  Uninteresting as the film itself may be it looks great here, with only the stock footage inserts (frequent towards the beginning and end of the picture) showing much in the way of damage.  Audio is delivered via a nice Dolby Digital 2.0 monophonic track and the stock music cues (from composers Henry Mancini, Heinz Roemheld, Hans J. Seiter, and Herman Stein) sound fantastic, and far more interesting than the dialogue.  Optional English SDH and French subtitles are available for the feature.  A battered trailer is the only supplement.

The fans are obviously out there this one, and Universal’s DVD comes highly recommended to them.  The film itself  isn’t terrible, all in all.  It’s just not very good, and I doubt I’ll ever understand its healthy 6.0 score at the IMDB.  The Land Unknown rates as a mostly forgettable affair (Irwin Allen’s hysterical 1960 obliteration of The Lost World offers more excitement, intentional or otherwise, and in color to boot),  and I don’t feel bad advising most to give it amiss all together.  Not recommended.

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Clown Murders, The

Friday, March 12th, 2010

company: Magnum Films
year: 1976
runtime: 96′
country: Canada
director: Martyn Burke
cast: Stephen Young, Susan Keller,
John Candy, Lawrence Dane,
Gary Reineke, John Bayliss
writer: Martyn Burke
cinematography: Dennis Miller
order this film from Amazon.com

Would-be big shot business man Philip (Lawrence Dane) is just about to make an actually big deal for once, selling the farm that belongs to his wife Alison (Susan Keller) to a land development company that will build one of those nice apartment complexes where once fields were. Because the land is not Philip’s but Alison’s property, he needs her signature on the sale contracts, which for some reason that is never made quite clear need to be signed on October 31st just before midnight.

This is not a case of a husband forcing his wife, Alison is in fact quite willing to get rid of the farm and with it a part of her past she would like to forget, but there are other people who have quite different ideas.

Alison’s ex-boyfriend Charlie (Stephen Young), who once lived with her on the farm this is all about, has just returned from some unsuccessful business adventures outside of Canada, and he, for one, would just love to get back with Alison, her being married notwithstanding.

While pretending to be as drunk as the people he’s speaking with actually are, Charlie manages to talk three supposed friends of Philip’s, Ollie (John Candy), Rosie (Gary Reineke) and Peter (John Bayliss) into helping him with a mad plan he sells them as a prank. He wants them to use a Halloween party Ollie arranges as a backdrop for kidnapping Alison so that she won’t be able to sign the papers selling the farm on time. Since every single one of them hates Philip at least a little, and lusts quite frightfully after his wife, the idiots agree.

On Halloween, the quartet sets their plan in motion, dresses up as clowns and kidnaps Alison. At first, they drag the woman to Peter’s home, but there, cracks between the men become obvious. Until now nobody except Charlie did truly realize what repercussions their actions would have. For some reason, not one of them imagined that Philip would just call the police, as he of course does. Now, the men don’t know what to do anymore.

Alison herself doesn’t exactly act like a good kidnap victim. She doesn’t seem too sure about what to do with Charlie and the others, but she is most certainly not afraid of them or trying to escape from them.

After some arguments which already begin to turn violent, Charlie talks his co-kidnappers into transporting their “victim” to the farm. Surely, nobody will look for them there.

At their destination – and after a meeting with a cop that goes as badly for them as everything else – the men squabble and drink some more, while Alison does her best to provoke them. You’d think leaving these people cooped up with each other alone would be enough provoke a minor blood bath, but there’s someone else stalking them, someone who dons a clown mask and shows some rather murderous tendencies.

The Clown Murders is certainly different. The DVD cover (and the plot description on the IMDB, of course) let the film look like a run-of-the-mill slasher, but nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s a psychological thriller much more interested in building an atmosphere of tension up to the moment just before it turns to violence than in the violence itself. There is a bit of bloodshed, to be sure, but the film spends most of his running time building up to it until it becomes seemingly inevitable.

The character work here is surprisingly subtle. While the characters’ actions aren’t always logical or rational (actually, the men mostly come over as rather dumb, Alison as quite inexplicable), they perfectly fit their character types. These are all men jealous of something in Philip that they find embodied in his “possession” of Alison. Rosie and Peter are certainly not able to see Alison as a person, and their lusting after her has much more to do with their wish to prove their dominance over Philip than in any carnal interest in her. Charlie for his part has (probably, the film is only insinuating, not telling) thought up the whole bizarre plan as a way to win Alison again, yet it is the Alison he remembers he wants, and not the woman standing right before him. I had my problems understanding Ollie’s character, or why he goes along with the kidnapping, but I’m pretty sure there’s a reason why he is the one among the men Alison sleeps with in the end, apart from her sharing the self-destructive urge that seems to drive everyone’s actions.

There’s an uncommon element of ambiguity running through the whole film; nobody’s motivations are ever directly explained, and I’m quite sure that the characters don’t know why they are doing what they are doing. There is of course a subtext to the film talking about violence lurking just below the surface of male interaction, barely repressed and just waiting to explode, and the roles someone like Alison has to play just to survive, but that doesn’t explain everything that is going on in the film’s text.

What is Alison trying to achieve? Does she realize who the other man in the clown mask is? The film isn’t telling, and I’m not too sure if the director and writer Martyn Burke actually knows, or if he’s making some parts just up as they come along.

Burke does some fine, unobtrusive directing here. The Clown Murders might move slowly, but not a single shot in it is padding. Everything on screen is meant to convey something about the characters that couldn’t be told through dialogue alone.

Of course, one could argue that the film is just too ambiguous and/or too subtle for its own good, and it is certainly true that this is a film for people willing to take it on its own terms and in its own rhythm.

The Clown Murders needs viewers willing to accept that there are theories to have, and interpretations to be made, but no clear answers will be given about its characters. Like some things in life, much in it needs to stay ambiguous.

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

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Crazies, The (original)

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

companies: Pittsburgh Films,
Latent Image and Cambist Films
year: 1973
runtime: 103′
country: United States
director: George A. Romero
cast: Lane Carroll, Will MacMillan,
Harold Wayne Jones, Lloyd Hollar,
Lynn Lowry, Richard Liberty,
Richard Francis, Harry Spillman,
Will Disney, Edith Bell,
Bill Thunhurst, Leland Stames
writers: Paul McCullough (original
script) and George A. Romero
cinematographer: Bill Hinzman
music: Bruce Roberts
special effects: Tony Pantanella
and Regis Survinski
order this film from Amazon.com:
VHS | SD DVD | Blu-ray

Things get a little crazy in Evans City, Pennsylvania after a germ warfare experiment crash-lands in the town water supply in this early thriller from director George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead, Martin).  Recently remade as a slick horror piece by Breck Eisner with an executive production assist from Romero himself (read our coverage of that film here), the original The Crazies plays less for chills than one might expect.

The story is relatively simple: The Army descends upon the quiet community of Evans City in full HAZMAT getup in an effort to contain an accidental outbreak of the experimental Trixie virus.  Epic miscommunication between the Army, civilians, and the scientists on the hunt for a vaccine causes no end of trouble, with the unprepared military suddenly finding themselves up against both the crazed infected and the understandably defensive citizens of the town.  Meanwhile a small group tries to escape the insanity, dodging military patrols while dealing with the crazies among their own . . .

There are horrific elements to Romero’s The Crazies to be sure.  The opening plays as a repeat of that from Night of the Living Dead, with a young boy trying to scare his sister through ghoulish behavior.  Things soon take a turn for the serious, as the boy’s father loses his mind and sets fire to the property.  Later displays of insanity, a priest’s self-immolation in front of his church, an elderly woman treating a soldier as so much knitting, and a father lusting after his teenage daughter, make for indelible images as powerful as anything from the earlier Night . . . but are few and far between.

The step down in horror means a step up in action, the uneasy balance between the two marking The Crazies‘ place as a bridge between the better-known horror classics that bookend it.  Scenes of the Army bursting into homes unannounced and the gun battles that ensue are highly evocative of the tenement scene early on in Dawn of the Dead, with one major difference:  The tenement residents in Dawn know that they’ve been breaking the law in keeping their dead in the basement of their building – no one bothers to tell the citizens of The Crazies why they’re suddenly finding themselves under martial law.  It’s no surprise when factions of the town, crazed and sane, take up arms against what they see as an anonymous invasionary force.

Made as the war in Vietnam was in its death throws and opposition to it was at its height, the image of the US military in The Crazies is not a terribly kind one.  Soldiers are seen stealing from invaded homes as well as from the corpses of dead, for instance.  The commentary here seems to be more about individual indiscretion under extreme circumstances (a big part of the later Dawn of the Dead) than a condemnation of the military as a whole, here presented as an organization of working men who are every bit as confused about what they’re doing in Evans City as the citizens are about their being there.  Hogtied by bureaucracy and a lack of both supplies and manpower, it’s no small wonder that the containment operation devolves into madness so quickly.

The real villains (the only villains, in fact) of the piece are the politicians and generals at the top of the food chain.  They’re first priority is to put a nuclear weapon in the skies over the quarantined city, a decision that has more to do with saving face (biological warfare experiments are obviously a no-no) than containing the infection.  Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain seems a likely inspiration for these sequences, with those in charge sitting in a room far from the center of action with far more concern for their personal careers than anyone who might be affected by their decisions.  Romero adds a nice touch here, showing several of the group having snacks (an orange, a sandwich) as they glibly discuss the mass-murder of a few thousand civilians.

Made for peanuts in his native Pennsylvania and on the streets of the real Evans City, The Crazies is an interesting if jumbled production from a Romero still trying to find his footing in the film world.  The biggest fault of the production is its kinetic editing sensibility, heavily influenced by Romero’s past as a commercial filmmaker.  What works well for scenes of action or horror leaves the drama tangled and, thanks to the low-budget audio recording, frequently unintelligible.  It’s not a bad film by any means, particularly given the considerable budgetary constraint, and there is still some prescience to the story (the corralling of displaced citizens into a high school gymnasium reminds of the Louisiana Superdome during and after hurricane Katrina).  It’s just not up to par with Romero’s better known works from the same time period, though the positives – strong performances and immediate, documentary-style photography – make up for the negatives.

The Crazies wasn’t a terrifically successful picture upon release in March of 1973 (it was even less successful when re-released as Code Name: Trixie a few years later) and hasn’t developed the same level of cult devotion Romero’s two contemporaneous zombie pictures.  Released twice previously on VHS by Vista Home Video and Anchor Bay respectively, Blue Underground has recently given the film the respect deserving of a lesser work from a horror icon.  Now available on both DVD and Blu-ray from the company, their editions come with excellent restored 1.66:1 framed anamorphic video as well as a nice array of supplements – including a commentary track with director Romero, a featurette on supporting actress Lynn Lowry (Shivers, I Drink Your Blood), the usual trailers and television spots and an extensive stills gallery.  Suffice it to say, the Blue Underground editions are the ones to own.

There are more than enough reasons for genre fans to see this one – the director, the supporting cast (Richard Liberty (Day of the Dead), Richard France (Dawn of the Dead) and the aforementioned Lynn Lowry), the memorable moments of craziness.  Though rife with imperfections Romero’s goal of creating a timely action / horror / thriller is achieved all the same, and The Crazies ‘73 is still a far more intriguing beast than its recent remake will ever be.  Recommended.

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VHS | SD DVD | Blu-ray

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Crazies, The (remake)

Monday, March 1st, 2010

companies: Overture Films, Participant
Media, Imagenation Abu Dhabi FZ,
Penn Station and Road Rebel
year: 2010
runtime: 101′
country: United States
director: Breck Eisner
cast: Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell,
Joe Anderson, Danielle Panabaker,
Christie Lynn Smith, Brett Rickaby,
Preston Bailey, John Aylward,
Joe Reegan, Glenn Morshower
writers: Scott Kosar
and Ray Wright
cinematographer: Maxime Alexandre
music: Mark Isham
out in wide release

A germ warfare experiment crash-lands in the water supply for the sleepy community of Ogden Marsh in this modestly budgeted redux of George Romero’s sardonic 1973 thriller.  The new The Crazies wisely avoids rehashing the events of the original outright, though a few moments of slick horror aren’t enough to cover for the fact that the Scott Kosar and Ray Wright screenplay has precious little on its mind.

The story this go around focuses squarely on sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant, Live Free or Die Hard) and his wife Judy (Radha Mitchell, Pitch Black, Surrogates), who are expecting their first child.  The intrusion of a shotgun-toting maniac into a high school baseball game announces the arrival of Trixie, a destructive virus engineered by those maniacal masterminds working for the big-G Government.  It isn’t long before other townspeople are showing signs of infection, glassy stares and questionable behavior (some reminiscent of the M. Night Shyamalan misfire The Happening).  Just as sheriff David and deputy Russell (Joe Anderson, Amelia, The Ruins) start to put the pieces of the Trixie puzzle together the town is cast into darkness, an all-encompassing communications blackout announcing the arrival of the film’s second villain: the big-M Military.

Soon David, his wife and his faithful deputy are on the road, doing their best (and failing) to avoid the likes of crazed gun-toting hillbillies and the anonymous forces of the gas-masked Military on their way to Cedar Rapids.  They meet others along the way of course – one of Judy’s patients, her boyfriend, and the less-than-friendly new management of a rural car wash – none of whom are terribly important.  The film wastes no time in dispensing with them by means of pitchfork-armed high school staff or squads of Army-issue goons.

Breck Eisner’s The Crazies hits upon several of the high points of the 1973 film, updating the house-fire opener of that picture to good effect, but eschews the military perspective entirely (a huge part of the original, which focused on the inefficacy of government bureaucracy at the time of the Vietnam War), a perspective that could have added some prescience to this by-the-books horror programmer in the wake of hurricane Katrina and in the midst of two wars in the Middle East.  Instead we get an anonymous Military machine that, in obvious allusion to the Nazis, rounds the towns population into cattle trucks and concentration camps in preparation for mass extermination.  Yikes.  A soldier momentarily captured by David and his cohorts even enlists the Nuremberg defense after helping to gun down a teen-aged boy and his mother: “We were just following orders.”  There can be little doubt as to who is supposed to be perceived as more dangerous – the Military or the crazies – with a fuel-air bomb hanging over our protagonists’ heads.

The “military = bad” trope has been repeated in films ad-nauseum for as long as this reviewer can remember, and while it probably still works for plenty of people it’s my biggest complaint against the picture.  One thing we can be thankful for, however, is the exclusion of a scheming uniformed baddie behind it all.  Whoever is behind the quarantine operation in Ogden Marsh is left graciously unexplored, and one irksome genre pratfall avoided.

The other villains of the piece, those poor souls unfortunate enough to have become infected with the Trixie bug, are utterly unremarkable in design, with Eisner choosing to take his cues from the overflowing cornucopia of blandness that is modern zombie cinema.  The crazies sprout sores, puffy veins and discolored eyes, an aesthetic far too familiar to be in the least big frightening on its own.  Crafty implementation could have solved that particular issue, but no dice.  Eisner telegraphs his scares far in advance and allows too many of the horrific setups to devolve into outright silliness, leaving The Crazies sorely lacking in real visceral thrills.  Gore is actually quite limited here, and those expecting buckets of exposed inner organs may be disheartened.  Here I find myself giving Eisner considerable credit, for depending on the horror of the situation over graphic visuals.  A pitchfork to the gut is no less terrible a prospect without the sight of intestines flailing about.

Eisner seems more adept at action than horror here, with the slow-motion tumbling of an SUV proving one of the highlights of the picture.  His handling of the dramatics is adept if not particularly brilliant, and it’s the believability of the small-town characters that ultimately lifts The Crazies above merely average.  The cast do well in their respective roles even if no one (as is the case with much of the picture) stands out.  The fictitious Ogden Marsh may be no substitute for the real Evans City of the original, but it’s Mayberry-esque main street appeal is not to be underestimated.  The intrusion of HAZMAT-suited military men upon Rockwellian America is still a vision both surreal and effective, though it is a pity more wasn’t done with it.

I feel it important to note that I did enjoy The Crazies by and large, even if I have no desire to see it again.  Neither memorable or really effective, it’s still better than most horror programmers these days.  The crowd I was with was certainly entertained (admittedly much more-so than myself), even with a baby cooing and giggling  throughout.  The best thing about the picture may be Romero’s place as its executive producer – he’ll undoubtedly see a decent payday for his troubles.  This new The Crazies may be entirely forgettable, but those on the lookout for a matinee’s worth of entertainment could certainly do worse.

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Wolfman, The

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

company: Universal Pictures
year: 2010
runtime: 102′
country: United States
director: Joe Johnston
cast: Benecio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins,
Hugo Weaving, Emily Blunt,
Art Malick, Roger Frost,
Geraldine Chaplin, Jordan Michael Coulson
writers: Andrew Kevin Walker
and David Self (based on the original
screenplay by Curt Siodmak)
cinematography: Shelly Johnston
music: Danny Elfman
special effects: Rick Baker
and a few hundred others
out in theaters in wide release

Plot: A man is bitten by a werewolf and becomes a wolf man.

Warning: Spoilers lie ahead.  Proceed at your own peril!

“It had to be this way,” the dying Lawrence Talbot whispers in the closing reel of Universal’s The Wolfman, the needless big-budget reboot of the ’40s franchise, and perhaps he’s right.  Slick and soulless and propelled by little more than a mountain of time-lapsed lunar photography, Joe Johnston’s Valentine to the Lon Chaney Jr. classic ranks as nothing short of $150 million in wasted opportunity.

The Wolfman roots itself firmly in the territory of classic Gothic horror tales, with the dusty ghost of a once-great English manor serving as the primary location.  Visiting the manor after the untimely mutilation of his younger brother, Shakespearean actor Lawrence (Benecio Del Toro) ignores his sinister father’s (Anthony Hopkins) simple warning about the full moon and promptly finds himself in the middle of the resident lycanthrope’s gypsy buffet, receiving a nasty shoulder wound while chasing a blur of fur and muscle through a slurry of dismembered limbs and entrails.  Lawrence survives of course, and when the next full moon rises he enacts his own bloody massacre.  No sooner has he awakened than the police mob of Inspector Abberline (Hugo Weaving) arrives, convinced of his lunacy but not of his monstrous alter-ego.

A brief stint in a London asylum goes as well as one might expect, and is punctuated with a visit by Lawrence’s father, there to remove a particularly nasty skeleton from the family’s closet.  In no time at all our cursed anti-hero is howling through the streets of London and lunging across its rooftops, dodging bullets and slicing through all who stand in his way.  The conclusion sees Lawrence’s return to the family home, to confront his father (it seems claws and fangs run in the family) and meet his inevitable end.

The biggest thrill of The Wolfman was seeing Curt Siodmak receive a solo credit for his original screenplay, small consolation indeed for a film more troubled than its cursed protagonist.  The great cast does their best to breathe life into the foul writing of Andrew Kevin Walker (Sleepy Hollow) and David Self (1999’s The Haunting, Road to Perdition), so lacking in dramatics that it precludes them from being characters at all.  Del Toro’s Wolfman is sadly forgettable, a failing of a script that shuffles him about like a pawn – a massacre here, a father-son brawl there, and a bit of cliche romantic monster pathos to tidy up the ending.  It’s not nearly enough to cover up the fact that this Wolfman’s heart was ripped out well before the cameras began to roll.

Hopkins does what Hopkins does best, lending weight and credibility to his role as the woefully underwritten villain of the piece, whose malediction is obvious from the moment he first appears on screen.  Hugo Weaving plays the part of the obligatory law man, one of the more memorable caricatures of the picture and the vessel through which the inevitable franchise’s sequel baiting is delivered.  Emily Blunt is pretty but perfunctory, and the audience knows even without the silly gypsy gibberish (delivered by a fine Geraldine Chaplin) that it will be her hand and not Abberline’s that delivers the Wolfman’s death blow.

It’s obvious from the ugly CGI title card that the over-produced effects are to be the star of the show, with Rick Baker’s capable (and faithful) Wolfman make-up designs taking center stage.  While the frequent violent outbursts make for a bit of much-needed fun in this otherwise dull seat-filler, highlighted with torn limbs, gnawed fingers, and a decapitation or two, none of it is anything we haven’t seen before.  More importantly, it’s nothing we’re going to remember.  Some extensive CGI is as obvious as ever, particularly in Lawrence’s night time prowl through the London skyline.  The animated stand-in for Del Toro’s flesh-and-blood creature suffers from the same lack of weight and presence that dooms so many of its ilk.  The transformations, heavily inspired by Baker’s earlier work on the vastly superior An American Werewolf in London, are quite good at least, though they have little impact given the muck that surrounds them.

The less said about Joe Johnston’s (Jumanji, Hidalgo, Jurassic Park III) pedestrian direction the better.  Suffice it to say that it wastes Rick Heinrichs’ reasonable Gothic production design almost entirely.  Pacing is a problem throughout, The Wolfman’s sparse narrative not so much flowing as stuttering from point to point.  Perhaps the worst thing about this thoroughly mediocre outing is the lack of thrills or suspense – the sporadic splashing of blood and gore does not a scary film make.  Cinematography by Shelly Johnson (The House Bunny, Jurassic Park III) is as uninspired as the rest and composer Danny Elfman seems at a loss entirely, crafting a meandering score that’s fitting for the production in its lack of excitement.

The best thing about this unnecessary retread is its trailer, which covers all the same narrative ground in considerably less time and at no expense to the viewer.  Go to Youtube, check it out, and ponder what could have been – you’ll be happier and your wallet slightly fatter for the trouble.  Skip it.

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Kiss of Death

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

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)
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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.

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