What have you watched recently? 3D!
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Austin Butler's character looked constipated.
Jody was fine and comes out of it all well.
Tom Hardy was in mumbles mode.
Bikes looked loverly.
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160 Metres: A History Of Rock In Bizkaia (from 2013, in Spanish and Euskara) - This was a really interesting portrait of Greater Bilbao in the 80s and 90s, and the backdrop against which a bunch of significant punk, rock and metal bands were formed and came to prominence in Spain. I'm biased in my interest as I've recently moved to the area, but I found it really interesting - not least the way that the west side of the river (a more working class area with a greater history of social deprivation) seems to have correlated with both punk/metal as the musical styles and the likelihood of singing in Euskara, while the east side of the river (a historically more affluent area) tended more towards straight-up rock and opted for English rather than Euskara if they didn't want to sing in Spanish. I watched it on Filmin but the doc is also on YouTube for those interested.
The Rover (2014) - I got a hankering to revisit this after some of the discussion around Furiosa and the original Mad Max trilogy. It's not really the same as any of those films - while it shares a conceptual underpinning (and a lack of interest in the specifics of how the status quo came to be), its tone and focus is very different. The Rover doesn't have any of the larger-than-life elements that make the Mad Max films so distinctive, but its characters are distinctive and well-realised - with the core of the film being Eric's *very* slow trajectory to trusting and respecting Rey.
It holds up to a rewatch well, and its pacing impresses all over again - at a little over 90 minutes it strikes a perfect balance between not rushing the introspective moments or the scenery and not dragging its heels unnecessarily.
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Criterion said no, but Mubi? Clearly they read my review, the timing is too convenient 🤡
GLEE
EXCLUSIVE: Arthouse streamer and distributor Mubi is set to re-release Tarsem‘s cult 2006 film The Fall in a newly restored 4K version from 27 September 2024 in the US, Canada, Latin America, the UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Benelux, Turkey and India. The Match Factory is handling sales for the rest of the world.
The 4K restoration will have its world premiere at this year’s Locarno Film Festival where it will play on the Piazza Grande. Mubi will subsequently stream it on its service.
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The Outwaters on Amazon Prime.
Good critical reviews, poor audience reviews. A found footage movie of a trip to the desert to film a music video goes terribly wrong after a group start noticing strange audio/visual occurances.
And honestly it's not hard to see why. The first hour of the movie is very slow, the second hour is absolutely bonkers, barely any dialogue, completely incoherent, extremely difficult to make out what's going on.
But I did think it was a good movie and one that you find yourself thinking about for quite a while afterwards, as it only really starts to make sense towards the end.
I don't want to give too much away but if you enjoy disturbing cosmic horror it's well worth a watch and it's fairly accomplished for something that supposedly cost $15,000 to make.
Not going to be for anyone but definitely it's one I appreciated and found rather disturbing in content, execution and theme.
Could've been a real classic with a proper budget and better execution but for what it is, I thought it was fairly solid.
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Kelly's Heroes (1970)
I love how there was a succession of WW2 films whose scale and authenticity was down to productions shooting in Spain or Yugoslavia, the countries' respective national armies press-ganged into service as Hollywood extras, all while dusting off their ageing stock of cast-off weapons as the rest of the world moved into the Jet Age. Not so much that they don't make 'em like that anymore - they just can't, the world has simply moved on too much. Yet the end result was often was that classical "cast of thousands" effect, instantly giving the genre heft and grandeur; as it was here as real tanks ploughed through what seemed like a genuine Yugoslavian village.
This was thrown on as a reflexive response to Donald Sutherland's recent death: by all accounts perhaps not his most lauded or sophisticated performance, but this has been a longstanding favourite and in no small part formed by Sutherland; oddball by (character) name and oddball by nature, his performance robbed the limelight every time he was on screen, his intentionally anachronistic stoner-hippy tank commander the most memorable aspect to an already breezily singular treatment of WW2 as a workplace full of exasperated stiffs, eager to make a little bank. In stark contrast to the predominance in culture to mythologise the Greatest Generation, half the named characters here seemed on the verge of nervous breakdowns if they weren't simply idling around while the war passed them by; here was conflict prosecuted not by precision and logistics but the incompetent, hysterical or harassed, many just trying to look busy (or in Oddball's case, look like they needed repair).
I couldn't shake the feeling that if this got made even a few years later when Gen X truly started flexing its muscle - or any generation after for that matter - it might have been a more cynical and interrogative, deconstructionist vehicle. That wasn't to say there wasn't a deep well of cynicism here given the motivation of the cast was simple greed - born from being at the "broken end of a bottle", as Big Joe remarked - yet there existed a cheeky playfulness in the entire thing that married the misanthropic with the adventuresome, totalling something more balanced & seductive than it had any right to be. There was no intent towards commentary on war here, no subtext on the military industrial complex, man's inhumanity to man & whatnot: this was a loose sketch doodled with a wink and a grin; a caper written as one of the downtrodden getting one over those in charge; Captains and Generals rendered as buffoons rather than malicious or indifferent.
Or to contextualise more succinctly: at no point in this film was the origin of the Nazi gold ever theorised or explained - despite it being entirely & tragically obvious where it all came from. Its protectors were a group of SS soldiers, later looped into the conspiracy without blinking - and again, without nodding towards their status. A dozen other treatments would either have underpinned the human cost, or just come off crass and insensitive - yet somehow this strange brew pulled it off. The attempted comedy wasn't great, lines often falling completely flat - with the very definitive exception of one Donald Sutherland.
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There's all kinds of brilliance going on in 'Kelly's Heroes', a film that I'll admit to hating when I was a kid. But, by christ, it's one of those pictures that has wormed its way into my heart and I cannot hear a bad word about it these days. It's stupidly great for reasons that will probably be lost on a lot of people, but not least of which is its casual ability to turn 1950's/60's "conservative" era war movies on their head. The fact that there's a hippy in charge of a Sherman - "it makes pretty pictures" - is such a stroke of WTF genius that it's a one in a million thing that manages to, bizarrely, work and in a film where nothing should work.
It's a Mad Magazine version of a WWII story and in that respect, it functions as it ought to. Nothing matters and nothing has to matter, because everything's gonna be great baby, and you should stop with the negative waves.
In fact the original poster, painted by the excellent Jack Davis, is pure Mad Magazine.
You'll, genuinely, never ever see another film like it.
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Thought Id found an active thread dedicated to 3D movies 😔.
Recently watched Bladerunner 1982 UHD disk on PS5 with LG OLED. A neon sci-fi feast for the eyes and ears. The sound in particular was really good from the UHD disk.
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Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me - 1992
I only recently started watching Twin Peaks, and watched this shortly after Season 2.
This is a striking piece of work, a psychological horror that is really disturbing at times. It strips away the levity and the melodrama of the tv series and instead focuses on the darkness at the heart of the story.
As this is a prequel, we know the fate of Laura Palmer. The film instead focuses on the darkness of her final days, and the trauma that she endures and suffers through. There's a brutality and a cruelty to it that is truly haunting and we are left haunted by her fate in a truly a masterful performance by Cheryl Lee.
I can see how jarring this must have been for fans at the time, as the film really takes a hard turn into darkness. And yet the course correction after a meandering second season was exactly what was required. The final sequence leaves us exactly up to the start of Season 1, and there is a sad but beautiful moment where we understand that Laura is finally at peace. This profound contrast between darkness and light, underscored by the wonderful Angelo Badalamenti, will stay with me for a long time.
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Also season 3 is very much so in the same style but a bit more insane. It's a spectacular experience but emotionally draining IMHO.
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It's also worth checking out the Missing Pieces material for Fire Walk With Me, it's pretty interesting in its own right. I've seen a fanedit of FWWM tagged "Teresa Banks and the Last Seven Days Of Laura Palmer", which is fairly epic in length at 3.5 hours but makes for an interesting viewing experience. I know someone else has also done a miniseries cut with the same material split across 3 episodes, but I haven't watched it.
Season 3 is phenomenal stuff.
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Yep, Fire Walk with Me was highly divisive when it first came out iirc. But equally it was more Lynch getting a lot more freedom than he could have achieved on TV at the time. Still think that Lynch has one of his darkest scenes in general during season 2, the killer dances with somebody and it's one of the most uncomfortable scenes I've ever seen.
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The Wicker Man (1973)
I loved this when I was younger but haven't seen it in about ten years. I kept meaning to re-watch it after having seen Midsommar and the rise of folk horror when this is one of the originals.
A child disappears on a remote Scottish island and a religious police officer is sent to investigate. He discovers an isolated agricultural community that has returned to pre-Christian religion. His search for the missing child becomes more desperate as his clashes with the island's ways and its people makes it harder for him to go about his job.
The visual quality doesn't hold up (I'm well aware of all the trouble they had with prints and how we are extremely lucky to even have a surviving copy of any sort of the film, as well as the budgetary restraints) and its very much for its time.
Its excellently told. While other filma may add in scenes with lesser characters that fill in the gaps, here, we're seeing the investigation progress in real time; i.e. we only know as much as the main character at any given moment, making the big reveal all the more shocking (though having seen it so many times, I now realise how "obvious" the whole premise is). The tension is built excellently and I'd go so far as to suggest a different name for it as the titular character doesn't make its appearance or isn't even mentioned until the final ten minutes.
The music! Easily, one of the best soundtracks to any film I've ever seen. I imagine the lack of finance forced the filmmakers' hand somewhat into coming up with original music. Its arguably a musical in its own right as the songs are not incidental, they form part of the narrative and move the story along.
The performances of Lee and Woodward are incredible. Lee swings from self-assured and confident to sniggering and deluded while Woodward similarly devolves from haughty and self-righteous to a desperate, blubbering fool who runs out of hope. The islanders as a whole seem quaint and charming but slowly turn into sinister and nasty egoists.
It also draws quite a bit on different themes. The environment, religion, the advance of modern society, the loss of tradition, and morality. I particularly found quite interesting the mirror that is held up towards the end when the police officer is deriding their beliefs when the exact same criticisms could be made about any mainstream religion.
I was glad to find further levels to this film when re-watched. Definitely worth seeing.
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A Quiet Place
Very enjoyable sci-fi horror from John Krasinski. The story is basic but clever, the lack of dialogue adds to the tension and o enjoyed the cliff hanger ending. Will watch part 2 shortly.
Eden Lake
British horror / thriller about a couple who fall foul of a gang of young hoodlums while visiting the aforementioned lake for a weekend.
It's in a similar vein to the likes of Deliverance or Straw Dogs but excludes the SA aspect of those 2. I liked it alot, it's quite tense throughout and it illustrates well how all it takes is one lunatic to coerce others into committing despicable acts. You could see the ending coming but nonetheless it still packs a decent punch.
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The experience of war with a bunch of lads together often has lots of humour and I think that's often a strong theme in war movies especially in the 70s.
Its very 70s movie. In the 70s it's was only 30yrs since the war. Its like remembering the 1990s would be now. How about a gulf war movie where they rob gold. (Three Kings). Its of its time.
KH One of my favourite movies. But it must be quite jarring for a younger audience.
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Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
Very light drama but done with such style and charm kept me watching.
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Not latterly though: watch Kelly's Heroes in a double feature with … I dunno, Fury and you'll see the polar opposite approach to the same approximate idea (soldiers a bit done with fighting); while I think even with its contemporaries KH stands out as a bit of a .. well, an oddball lol. That same year we did see M.A.S.H. to be fair, but there was also Patton while the year prior there was something like The Bridge at Remagen so the WW2 genre was kept fairly straight-faced - and anything post Saving Private Ryan has only doubled-down on that sense of war movies being very serious entities.
As to younger audiences? Hard to know with these things: that comedic, brassed-off vibe might work pretty well with generations who themselves are probably feeling a bit done with slugging it out in the trenches for nothing.
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Well, you only have to look at Brian G Hutton's previous film, 'Where Eagles Dare' to see how much of a contrast 'Kelly's Heroes' is to the normal WW2 film of the era.
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Catch 22 the same year.
1941
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
The men who stare at goats
Air America
There's always been a few comedies along the way. I would say modern war movies sometimes lack the banter that you often use to get.
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Moonraker, Bond. I always remember this movie fondly, very cheesy now, (probably always was) fight with anaconda especially so.
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Five Easy Pieces
I had never seen this before. An early enough Jack Nicholson performance in a significant New Hollywood release of the early 70’s.
Nicholson plays a talented musician who turns his back on his artistic family to find meaning in his life by working on an oil field while hanging around with rednecks and treating his waitress girlfriend like crap.
He returns to the family home when he hears his father is sick, reluctantly bringing his girlfriend along. (Karen Black playing ditzy waitress with relish).
It’s some performance from Nicholson. His character is a drifter, never happy to settle down in a relationship or job. Even though the performance is a bit nuanced there are some great ‘Jack Nicholson moments’ when he cuts loose.
Reminded me of Alexander Payne movies. You can see why it’s regarded as a major American independent film.
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Open Range (2003)
This was a creature less interested in the kind of latter-day deconstruction of the Western Myth (Unforgiven the canonical exemplar there), instead enthusiastically wrapping the more winning parts of that classical fairy-tale of Manifest Destiny in contemporary clothing.
Kevin Costner was and quite possible remains the only filmmaker who can get away with this kind of straight-faced execution of a concept so decompiled and interrogated as to become thoroughly discredited as mere delusion: here was an unfussy and borderline nostalgic tale of heroes and villains writ across the "Wild West"; heroes formed from Costner and Duvall's characters' earthy reflexive decency rather than some operatically heroic burden; while the mostly faceless antagonists were headed by Michael Gambon enjoying himself immensely, his character that standard & transparent representation of modernity encroaching on the time of the cowboy (Gambon also playing Irish too, which seemed rare enough).
That classical texture also bled into the execution, being full of painterly cinematography of those boundless landscapes made for the medium of cinema; Manifest Destiny might have proved to be genocidal twaddle but watching a movie like this demonstrated the seductive quality of the concept all the same. While the narrative's pulse remained steady and relaxed, happy for its path towards that sense of inevitable violent conclusion to include scenes of relaxation, honest drudgery and the kind of masculine platonic bond between its quartet of cowboys - all so that the Inciting Incident hit all the harder. All of which was embellished by a convincing sense of chemistry between Costner & Robert Duvall's characters; the patter was charming & both men felt like they had lived in each other's pockets for years, the script openly noting their Old Married Couple energy.
And what's a good cowboy drama without one of its cast harbouring a Dark & Violent Past? Functioning not so much as a Chekhov's Gun but Chekhov's Moustache, the viewer waiting for when the chain came off Charley Waite. Here, Costner's previously laconic & content Charley had to quickly unpack a prior life he had tried to suppress and if that all reads a little hacky it was to Costner's credit that he undersold Charley's emotional turbulence to never let it overpower the character drama; Costner played him as someone almost more crippled by nervous self-doubt than some tortured soul grappling with some monster within. So sure, when the bullets started to fly - and make no mistake that ambling front-half made way for a top tier, 40 minute shootout - it was time for Charley's expertise to reign ... but it felt more of a cathartic release for the audience than some tragedy of a man luxuriating in his repressed urges. And on a superficial level the shootout was arresting stuff and worth the wait: clean within the chaos, executed in approximate real-time and rendered with a nice balance between robust authenticity and exaggerated style.
I'm fairly confident every time someone mentions 1941, Steven Spielberg gets a notification on his phone, and dies a little inside. Almost definitive proof that the one thing Spielberg can't do, is (100%) comedy.
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Open Range I think is a great Western.
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The Name of the Rose (1986)
I guess I truly am an absolute sucker for ... texture and grit in my movies: not grit in the sense of any clenched-jaw determination blah blah, but a heaving physicality or pungent air that can emanate from a film; where an accidental breath might give you a lungful the film's odour itself. And when that film is a historical fiction, tactility can go a long way to possess the thing of a greater sense of authenticity - of something more than sets and costumes but a magic trick that you might have actually travelled in time.
Now that said, you can cake your extras with mud, mute the colours of your noblemen's robes, or even dial back the cinematographer's aesthetics into something quasi-documentarian; because as Robert Eggers possibly discovered with The Northman, if modernity crept in through your actor's basic appearance (specifically, the botox and surgery altered Nichole Kidman), the spell can be quickly broken. So here, The Name of the Rose hit upon a simple way to skirt that issue of the cast's perfect teeth - or any upbringing that happened in the era of vaccinations and basic personal hygiene.
Hire the absolute, quantifiably ugliest human beings your casting director could possibly find; and if they can't be hired, give them wonky noses, boils and insane hair-cuts.
Seriously: if this film left me with any other lingering aftertaste it was how Sean Connery and Christian Slater aside - the latter intentionally rendered as boyishly perfect - you could watch a thousand movies and never witness an ensemble as manifestly grotesque as this film's monastic order; Ron Perlman wore prosthetics & fake teeth yes but everyone else seemed as they came, bar an exaggerated haircut here & there. So the net benefit of all those almost cartoonish appearances meant that the illusion - of this being an actual monastery from the Dark Ages - felt more robust and convincing than the inspiration that caused me to seek this out in the first place; the Disney / Hulu TV show Shardlake. Also a murder mystery at a Monastery, it had a cleaner and less ... I dunno, lumpen quality in its actors, even as its dressing and iconography felt perfectly convincing. Nobody looked like they survived the occasional plague or three.
As to the meat of the movie itself? I had read the original Umberto Eco book many, many moons ago so I can only vaguely speculate about the efficacy of the translation; a lot of the novels' complexities and concepts felt stripped back - though isn't that often the case with more intellectual works when they appear in the cinema? And if there was a simplification during translation, what remained was a distinctly contemptuous air for the institution in which it was all set: perhaps the ugliness of its cast was an externalisation of their incurable corruption; a clatter of paranoid, intellectually incurious men, where in a room reserved for "illumination", both the literal and figurative meaning was in little supply - bodies dropping to preserve the status quo.
To quote General James Mattis of all people(!), "... to a totalitarian dictator, an open and inquisitive mind is more dangerous than a Marine with a rifle"; authority requires a population to be empty vessels with no awareness. It's not without reason populists and aspiring dictators love to defund schools or libraries; so it was here too in the feudal era, we saw its most rudimentary, reductive form where a single book would be deemed dangerous. And what was this book that became the McGuffin of the entire conspiracy: some startling polemic perhaps, or heretical scientific theory? No. Aristotle's (lost) book on comedy - because the insecurity of absolute power is such that in simply laughing at power - or at God - we might defuse the totality of its stranglehold.
And acting as the audience's surrogate was Sean Connery in rare form: it was a performance alive with the charisma of the wily rascal, channeling affable Smartest Man in the Room energy without ever dismantling or dressing down those around him. William understood the fragility of being the smiling cynic in a den of dogma & Connery let his physicality communicate any resting frustration with his ostensible peers - switching to impish, boyish excitement towards the very books and concepts derided and condemned by his fellow monks.
Christian Slater seemed present for no other reason than to look youthful and pretty, his American accent a pretty obvious caveat to my previous praise for the film's sense of historical authenticity. While the monks' constant eyeballing of him wandered the wrong size of queazy, and coupled with a really grotty sex scene and constant mentions of just how much the monks were at it with each other, it gave the film a really weird, sometimes uncomfortable sexual energy.
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Deep Rising (1998)
Sometimes you want a steak. Sometimes you want a burger. Yet sometimes, you just want a €2 piece of trash where you suspect the carcinogens just shortened your life by a couple of weeks - but you loved every bite.
Was this high art? Not remotely, but I couldn't deny the cathartic enjoyment derived from this oddball artefact of that brief period in Hollywood when Stephen Sommers seemed to be the man who could deliver; this then The Mummy movies suggested a talent for an alchemy of B Movie schlock and mainstream blockbuster aesthetics - as long as it was on a budget. Van Helsing's more generous chequebook was the crash to earth from which Sommers' career never recovered, all as the Blockbuster itself started moving on past the kind of cheesy swashbuckling thrills he created.
It feels pretty redundant to comment that the mid-budget, 1998 CGI hasn't aged well in the slightest - but like everything else in this film its brazen, unapologetic goofiness kinda charmed its way past my defences; while the constrained budget seemed to force a degree of Jaw-adjacent canniness of when and where to deploy the computer-generated tentacles. Plus, when a film believed even the rifles of the protagonists needed to be 'roided up into handheld mini-guns, you know this production understood the assignment to be as Big As Possible - all while wearing an endearingly stupid grin. The actors themselves got the notes too 'cos while the performances were uniformly broad, they were all committed; Treat Williams knew he was being asked to play Han Solo but never once seemed above it all - while his "Now what?" catchphrase succeeded more through charisma than on paper, including the laugh-inducing mic-drop final shot. Brendan Fraser leading The Mummy was a definite upgrade mind you.
All that praise aside, this was a premise and execution that sorely missed the presence of some prosthetics or animatronics to better sell the deaths and gorier moments: actors reacting stiffly to badly composited FX, or a blatantly CGI ragdoll being swallowed up, just couldn't match the visceral impact of an on-set effect; this was precisely the kind of film that needed a rubber tentacle or two chomping into the (surprisingly stacked) cast. It didn't have to be the level of The Thing, but something tangible & glistening that shared the frame with the actors.
The Bikeriders (2024)
One of these days Comer's gonna come up against an accent she can't nail - but today was not that day.
By all accounts slick & had the pulse of something authentic and lifted from its source photography, but ultimately it all rang a little disappointingly hollow from Jeff Nichols: the glib summary of it as some broad-strokes construction off the Goodfellas template was inescapable - voiceover n' all to the extent I nearly expected someone to say, "all my life I wanted to be a biker" - but the film lacked a certain connective narrative tissue resulting in a failure to either interrogate or illuminate a world likely alien to most watching. A disconnect so pronounced, I wondered if while Nichols himself was (over) enthused about this culture and point of history, and had eagerness overrode his priorities to translate it into something for the layman to appreciate, emotionally speaking? Goodfellas at least had a classic structural trope of the dangerous allure of the gangster life & flying too close to the criminal sun - that sense of a reckoning approaching with each decision taken ... but here? Sit me down and ask what I now understood of the biker culture & I'd struggle.
For sure Jodie Comer's performance was magnetic, Austin Butler's own possessed of some kind of old-school Hollywood alchemy, and even Tom Hardy's accent wasn't too distracting for once, showing good energy as this sad-sack, hulking bear; but nothing seemed to come together and by about the midway mark it all lost whatever momentum it had, ambling to a deeply unsatisfying conclusion. Rare enough films end & I genuinely find myself thinking, "oh, was that it?". Even internally within the thing, Hardy's character seemed unmoved while his own club of tough-guy cosplayers became suffocated by actual criminality and scumbags; nobody seemed to have any motivation or sense of agency. I've said it before but if the film didn't care too strongly about these things, why should I?
Like cosplay itself, the film's texture looked authentic and striking, but it was all as deep and tough as cardboard; all poses and affectation with no heart.
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Deep Rising is one of my guiltiest of guilty pleasures.
IIt has some really, really, gory moments too.
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Late Night With the Devil
Its an interesting take and its brilliantly framed. You can really appreciate how much they put into the backstory and how true to life it was in a while range of different aspects.
The pacing was a bit off. It felt like they were throwing a lot into the final act after going fairly slow. I didn't get the air of tension that I was expecting. I did appreciate the final twist as I felt I was being led in a different direction and I'd have plenty of ideas about what the makers wanted to say with it but don't want to give too much away for any future viewers.
The performances were good, though I felt the host was a bit forced when playing the host. As a real person, he was more believable. The sidekick and the cynic were a good pairing, while the girl was incredible.
A decent watch but Ghostwatch was more enjoyable.
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The Menu
I dimly recall missing this when it was originally released, then hearing some good things about it before it seemed to be forgotten. I'm very glad I finally got around to watching it, because I thought it was great - lean, taut, and very tidily & cleverly presented, with good performances across the board. It's not subtle, nor does it need to be. The ending is, perhaps, a bit on-the-nose - but it works perfectly for what the film has been doing since the beginning. I can't help think it would make a great double-bill with Pig.
Antlers
Another one that I missed on release, this one got a more muted response. I was somewhat surprised by that as I thought it was really quite good - tense and using an ominous atmosphere and mounting dread for much of the film, and with a central performance from a child actor that really made and sold the (admittedly unsubtle) thematic through-line for the film very well. Given its subject matter (which I won't spell out explicitly as it's better to go in without knowing) the use of effects was done very well.
Lord of Misrule
Happened to notice this as a recent addition on Shudder and took a punt on it. It's nicely atmospheric and generally well made, but I couldn't help feeling that the entire film is stuck in the shadow of The Wicker Man in that the plot is pretty much the same, but somewhere in England rather than an island somewhere off the coast of Scotland. The pacing also felt off to me, although for a change it was because the film tried to get things moving too quickly - I felt that it needed another 10-15 minutes at the start to establish the setting, characters and their relationships better before jumping into the Inciting Incident. Still, you can do a lot worse than "well-made but unoriginal" when it comes to horror films.
Wrong Turn 2: Dead End
I remember going to see Wrong Turn at the cinema and finding it a pretty dull affair. So it was only on hearing a very positive review of the sequel on a podcast that I considered watching the sequel, and I'm glad I did. Where the first film was by-the-numbers and entirely recycled ideas and plot developments, this was a much more fun affair, shot through with dark humour and great use of Henry Rollins as one of the protagonists. Tonally it's similar to something like 2001 Maniacs, in that it's a slasher but it's clearly having fun with it and not taking itself too seriously. Needless to say I won't be watching any further sequels.
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The Thing (1982)
You know, I reckon if it wasn't an alien, it might have just happened on its own: while you could legitimately argue this film's lacked any substantive depth in its characterisation - the cast identified more by appearance and broad-strokes physicality than anything emotional - you also got the sense that these individuals were already a hair's breadth from falling into division and/or violence without the catalyst of some grotesque organism invading their bodies. I never once got the sense that Kurt Russell's Mac or Keith David's Childs ever liked each other, even before it all went a bit tentacular.
Now. I say "invading their bodies", but was it that The Thing absorbed their bodies instead? Did they know they were being taken over? Or was it some kind of clone pretending to be human? It was never remotely clear & remains one of the enduring qualities of this film: you were never quite sure about anything - not even the rules. And given how much the Horror genre loves its rules, this film's very structure defies convention.
And perhaps that casual disdain for the mechanics of the threat was because being so primally transgressive and vomitous to behold, it didn't matter. The viewer felt the key point: don't let it touch you - and don't trust the man next to you. Yet equally, this wasn't a structure so loose that a cursory investigation unraveled the entire internal logic either; the lightning in the bottle was no matter how many times you watched, there was always this unshakable kernel of uncertainty at the heart of it. Up to the point Rob Bottin deployed his macabre set-pieces it was never entirely clear at what point a character stopped being human; rarely clear when the switch happened or how. Yet equally, it never felt like the film was cheating you either. John Carpenter's opus was a picture suffocated top to bottom by a crystalised form of tired paranoid anxiety, and with a garnish of red herrings here & there made sure to externalise a degree of the paranoia onto the viewer itself. You're just never sure of anything - including that All Timer ending.
And to the gore, I've often wondered if that's the element that has perhaps curtailed any proper mainstream adoption of this as an important "canonical" work: no question 40+ years later and bar a little stiffness in the puppetry, the dripping, twisted befouling of the human and dog form still packed a punch that might easily cause nightmares; perhaps though that extremity of vision meant the film will forever remain more niche and less embraced in causal Best Of lists than it should. I respect how gore and body horror isn't for everyone.
Yet as perfect as the picture remained after this umpteenth watch, I couldn't resist snorting at some of the details on the margins: the largest being how Blair's computer - in the early '80s and the middle of the Arctic - had advanced software to calculate the probability of global infection by alien organisms? It was such an obvious bit of expositional lamp-shading that couldn't escape coming off clunky - and slightly redundant too given how viscerally immediate the threat was in the first place. We didn't need to deploy the whole "Computers are Magic" to establish the threat; the scene in the dog pen should have been more than adequate. Also: why would an Arctic base ever need flamethrowers? <so-the-movie-can-happen />
Might actually give the sequel-prequel another go: it's production problems are storied but I only gave it one go & maybe the intervening decade has been kind on the 2011 flick
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Hardcore (1979)
George C Scott stars as a small town business man whose daughter disappears and after hiring a private detective, he uncovers a hardcore pornographic film with his daughter in it. The father then sets off to california to try and locate her.
This is an unsettling film, the viewer really empathises with Scott and his growing sense of desperation hits close to home. The 70s is when porn exploded in the US and Hardcore paints an utterly bleak portrait of the industry and the drivers / suppliers of the material. It's chock full of lurid red lighting, nauseating neon signs and women being exploited for as little as 25c.
One can only imagine how many parents there were during this era that went through what Scott did but never found the answers they were looking for. For a movie with little in the way of graphic content, one still feels like having a shower after viewing.
7/10
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