I love discovering new movies, new actors, and new directors. There is something wonderful about watching a film and finding a new artist to follow. Back in April I got a set of films from French director Yves Boisset. I’d never heard of him, but I dove into the films and really liked him. Now I’ll be seeking him out. That’s kind of awesome. You can read my review of the set at Cinema Sentries.
I’m fascinated with franchises that never really took off. Like a movie gets made, and the studio expects there will be sequels and spin-offs, but the first film bombs, and so nothing comes of it. Remo Williams is titled The Adventure Begins…but it also ended there because the film bombed and there wasn’t a sequel.
That’s too bad, too, because this film is a lot of fun. Fred Ward stars as Remo Williams, who actually isn’t Remo Williams but a NYC police officer who gets into a scrape and has his face and name changed to Remo Williams to help out a super secret government agency. He’s like James Bond but dumber and less cool. Which pretty much sums up the film. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
Radiance Films continues to put out fantastic sets of really good, and rather obscure films from all over the universe. I seem to be watching a lot of their releases of 1970s-era Italian films, and I’m loving it.
Confessions of a Police Captain is a gritty tale of murder, corruption, and a man who wants to change things. Martin Balsam is a corrupt cop who does something bad, and Franco Nero is the prosecutor trying to make things right. It is a great film and this is a great release from Radiance. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
This is a fun little sci-fi flick from director Gore Verbinski, who hadn’t made a film in nearly a decade. You can read my full review here.
And yes I’m not saying much about it here. I have a terrible sinus headache but I want to keep posting all the stuff I’ve written at Cinema Sentries on this pages.
Exploitation films seem so strange through a modern lens. By design, those films are filled with excessive violence, sex, and nudity, things that are often frowned upon today. I loved those films as a younger person, mostly because of those excesses. I love them as a much older person, but I’m much more understanding of the arguments against such things. Still, there is something wonderfully entertaining about films that take things to the extreme.
The title and cover art of So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious…make it sound like nothing but dumb exploitation cinema. In truth, it mostly is exactly that. This is a film loaded with gratuitous nudity, and yet it is surprisingly tender and interesting. I’m not necessarily even against films that are just exploitative and offer nothing else, but I find it fascinating when they do attempt something more.
This is by no means a great film, but it is an interesting one. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.
Mads Mikkelsen has become one of my favorite actors in recent years. I think I first saw him in the wonderful TV series Hannibal, portraying the deliciously deplorable Hannibal Lecter. But he’s been in tons of stuff, from Rogue One to Quantum of Solace and Doctor Strange. He’s one of those guys that just seems to show up in stuff, and every time he does, he makes the picture better. So I was excited to see him in this new film, Dust Bunny.
Bryan Fuller has made some great TV, including Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me, and the aforementioned Hannibal. I had no idea he directed Dust Bunny until I saw the credits roll, at which point I was like, “Oh, that makes sense.”
Put Mads and Fuller together and you’ve got a recipe for a fun film. And it is. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
Lynne Ramsay’s latest stars Jennifer Lawrence as a mother who is, well, let’s just say she’s having a hard time of it. Her husband is gone a lot. She lives out in the woods with few neighbors. Her baby cries all the time. The dog her husband brought home does nothing but bark. It drives her a little mad. It is a bravura performance from Lawrence and a very good (if difficult to watch at times) film. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
Anthony Mann and James Stewart made a bunch of movies together. Many of them were westerns. Several are some of the best westerns made in the 1950s. Ben of the River is one of those. Stewart plays a man with a past who is trying to find redemption by leading a group of settlers to Oregon, where they will become farmers. He meets a lot of trouble on the way. Mann fills it with a lot of action and some beautiful scenery. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
Charles Bronson had such an interesting career. For a while, he was a terrific little character actor in films like The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven, and then he became a star and for a time he continued making interesting (if not great) films, and then he got stuck making dumb action films that wasted his talents as an actor.
Rider on the Rain is a very interesting film. It starts out like a rape revenge film, then turns into a thriller, but it turns into something far more interesting. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.
I suspect if you were to run some statistics on The Midnight Cafe, you’d find that I’ve reviewed more movies from Hammer Studios than any other one, and that Peter Cushing would be somewhere in the top in terms of actors I’ve written about. He is my seventh most watched actor, with some 37 of his films having been watched by me. I’ve written about eight of those films, most of which were Hammer Horror films. I’ve written about 24 different films from that studio.
That seems weird to me because Cushing isn’t one of my favorite actors. I mean, I do love him, but if I were to make a list of my favorites, he wouldn’t be on it. And I imagine if you took my ratings of all the Hammer films and averaged them out, the number you’d get wouldn’t be that high.
I don’t know what that means. I don’t know why I keep watching these films. That’s not true. I do love me some Hammer Horror even while I can admit they aren’t always the greatest of films. It is interesting to me that I keep turning to them and that it’s only been the last decade that I’ve become a fan.
Anyway, Twins of Evil is pretty great.
Cushing plays Gustav Weil, a stern Puritan who leads a gang of dudes who love burning pretty young women at the stake. I mean, sure, they declare them witches first, and there does seem to be quite a few folks getting horribly murdered, lending credibility to some kind of ungodly horror going on, but really it’s just fun to burn girls out in the forest.
Up on the hill in his castle overlooking the village, Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas) dabbles in Satanism (and I absolutely love that all the summaries of the film use that language, “dabbles in Satanism.”) While doing a bit of pretty young woman sacrificing of his own, he accidentally awakens Countess Mircalla Karnstein (Katya Wyeth) from her grave. She immediately turns him into a vampire.
Meanwhile, two twin sisters, Freida Gellhorn (Mary Collinson) and Maria (Mary Collinson), arrive in the village due to their parents dying. They take up residence with the good Gustav, their uncle. Now Maria is a good girl who wants to please her uncle, but Freida is a bad girl. She likes to sneak out at night and get into trouble. When she meets the Count, she’s all over that stuff.
Because this is a Hammer film and one made in 1971, both girls love to show off their cleavage and spend a great deal of the movie in their nightgowns with strategically placed camera angles.
The girls are a pain in their uncle’s neck. He believes them to be evil (one might even say Twins of Evil, actually Gustav says exactly that at one point.) Slowly everyone realizes the Count is a vampire, and Gustav will finally use God’s name in the service of fighting actual evil.
As per usual with Hammer, the production design is impeccable. The sets and costumes look great; the lighting is gorgeous. Cushing is wonderful. Unlike a lot of characters in films like this, he isn’t driven by an insane need for power, but rather he is a true believer. He truly thinks Satan is out there destroying the world. That warped faith drives him to do mad things. One could probably say something about how his Puritanical sense of sex drives him to burn beautiful young women at the stake, but I’ll leave that be. The Collinson sisters are a delight. Madeline especially has a lot of fun as the wild Freida.
Also, as per usual with Hammer films, the script isn’t great. It introduces the vampire aspect but doesn’t do a lot with it. The vamps do recoil from crosses, but don’t seem to mind daylight. But the look of the film and the performances make it well worth watching.
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