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.
I watched 37 movies in April. 32 were new to me. Only eight of them were made before I was born. It was the Awesome 80s in April which explains why so many of them were not made before I was born. 18 of them were made in the 1980s.
It was a good month. I feel like I always say that. I guess there isn’t such a thing as a bad month watching movies. Unless you don’t get to watch any at all. But I did watch some good movies this month. There wasn’t anything particularly outstanding in the bunch, but there were a lot of very good ones.
The top actors list is fleshing out nicely. Tom Baker has taken the top spot with seven films. I continue to watch him in Doctor Who, and that’s why his companion in that show, Lalla Ward, is now in the top ten. I’ve actually taken to Letterboxd and started looking at big lists of classic Who stories and then trying to watch the ones I’ve never seen before. Or at least the ones I haven’t logged on Letterboxd before.
The director’s list hasn’t changed all that much. Spielberg has popped in, but nobody has challenged Yves Boisset with his four films, and most of the list is filled with just two film guys. I need to kick up my directing game, I guess.
Here’s the full list.
Dust Bunny (2025) ****
Die My Love (2025) ****
Sleeping Dogs (2024) ***
Doctor Who: Revenge of the Cybermen (1975) ***
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009) ***
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) ****
Mrs. Pollifax — Spy (1971) **
Evil Dead Trap (1988) ***
Nightfall (1956) ****
Cherry 2000 (1987) **
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2025) ****
Doctor Who: Colony in Space (1971) ***1/2
So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious… (1975) ***
Doctor Who: The Horns of Nimon (1980) ***1/2
Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice (2026) ***
Dead Bang (1989) ****
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) ****
Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) ***1/2
Confessions of a Police Captain (1971) ****
The Housemaid (2025) ***
To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) ****
Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Beginning of a New Era (2024) **
Poltergeist III (1988) ***
Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986) **1/2
Poltergeist (1982) ****
TerrorVision (1986) ***
Out of Control (1985) **
The Thief of Bagdad (1924) ****
Spy, Stand Up (1982) ***1/2
La Femme flic (1980) ***1/2
Mad Enough to Kill (1975) ***1/2
Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985) ***1/2
The Lego Batman Movie (2017) ****
Invitation to Hell (1984) ***
Angel’s Leap (1971) ***1/2
Death Ship (1980) ***
We Bury the Dead (2024) ***1/2
I was too young to have seen Raiders of the Lost Ark in theaters when it came out in 1980, but I must have watched it a million times on television soon after. I did see Temple of Doom in the theater. Probably three or four times. I would have been about 11 years old. I loved it.
As a kid I especially loved all the stuff that made the moral majority people clutch their pearls which eventually led to the making of the PG-13 rating. My friends and I would constantly ask each other which thing we’d rather eat – snakes, bugs, or monkey brains. We would pretend to reach into each other’s chests and pull our hearts out. We dreamed of being on that awesome mine roller coaster.
As an adult, I recognize the film’s many flaws. The least of which is not its cultural insensitivity, if not downright racism. Short Round is nothing but a Chinese stereotype, and there is a lot of stuff going on with the Indian characters and the “weird” stuff they eat. You could also certainly complain about the one female character and how she is nothing more than a “damsel in distress.”
I do not think any of this was intentional by the filmmakers in the sense that they were not trying to be racist or sexist. I think a lot of that comes from how the Indiana Jones films are Spielberg and Lucas riffing on the old serial films they used to watch as kids. Old adventure films were rife with racist tropes and inherent sexism.
But I’m also going to table that discussion. I’ll let the experts dig into that stuff. I feel like when talking about this film, you need to mention those concerns and recognize their validity, but at the same time I don’t want to get bogged down in them.
Also this film rips.
It is generally considered the worst of the original trilogy. Spielberg has distanced himself, claiming it was made during a difficult time in his life (he was getting divorced) and it is too dark. I’ll stand by the opinion that it isn’t as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Last Crusade, but those are pretty high watermarks. There is still a ton of stuff to love in this film.
The opening scene in Shanghai, for starters. It begins with Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw, who later married Spielberg) singing “Anything Goes.” Spielberg shoots it like a classic musical. When the song ends, Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) enters. He’s made a deal with a Chinese gangster, trading the remains of some ancient emperor for a precious diamond.
Set in 1935, one year before the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark, making this film technically a prequel. They say Lucas and Spielberg didn’t want Indiana fighting Nazis again, so they set it a little earlier than the first film and moved the locations to Asia. It is interesting that in this film Indiana Jones is all about fortune and glory, and makes no mention of anything belonging in a museum.
With the help of Short Round (Ke Huy Quan), Indiana’s young sidekick, the three of them escape Shanghai but find themselves on a plane owned by the bad guy. The pilots dump the fuel and jump out of the plane, leaving it to crash into the Himalayas. Our heroes jump out of the plane using an inflatable raft as a sort of parachute and then sled that zooms down the snow covered mountain and over an impossibly high cliff and into some major rapids.
This scene is cartoonish in its impossibility. Most of the film will continue in this pattern. Raiders wasn’t exactly grounded in realism, but Temple of Doom pushes the bounds of possibility to an absurd degree. Not that it matters. It is still extraordinarily enjoyable.
They’ll be picked up by some villagers who explain that some thieves stole their sacred rock and their children, and ever since, everything has gone bad. Our heroes head to a palace where they are treated with kindness (and those crazy food choices.) There they will find a hidden passage that takes them to an underground temple and a group of cultists who practice child slavery and human sacrificing.
It all culminates in a wild chase scene with our heroes riding a mine cart like a roller coaster through an impossibly long shaft and then battling it out on a ridiculously high rope bridge.
I don’t know why I’m describing the plot; you’ve probably seen this film. It is crammed full with wonderfully crafted action sequences. Even when it slows down, it’s still entertaining.
You do have to table some of that insensitive stuff, and I completely understand those who can’t do that, but if you can this is a heck of a ride.
Nightfall (1956)
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Starring Aldo Ray, Anne Bancroft, Frank Albertson, and Frank Keith
Synopsis: An innocent man turns fugitive as he reconstructs events that implicate him for a murder and robbery he did not commit.
Rating: 8/10
I was looking for a horror movie to watch yesterday afternoon (because it was Friday), but then my wife sat down next to me, and she doesn’t like horror. So I went searching for something else. The Criterion Channel is hosting three noirs from Tourneur, and I landed on this one mostly because it was short. And I’d seen it before and knew it was good.
I love the way it begins. With Aldo Ray sitting by his lonesome in a bar. Ann Bancroft approaches him, says she’s lost her wallet, and can he loan her five bucks to pay for her drinks? He does, and they have a nice time. Even get a little dinner. Then when they leave, two thugs come at them with guns and take him away.
In flashbacks we’ll learn he was out in the mountains with his friend fishing and hunting. The two bad guys have a wreck near them. Our heroes try to help and find themselves face to face with guns. They’ve just robbed a bank, have a satchel full of cash, and need no witnesses. Aldo Ray escapes. The bad guys accidentally mistake his bag for their money bag. By the time they realize their mistake, Aldo has split, hidden the money, and high-tailed it.
He wandered around the country doing odd jobs, biding his time until the coast was clear. He finds himself in Los Angeles when he meets Ann Bancroft. Meanwhile insurance investigator James Gregory has been on Also’s tail since the beginning. But he’s not so sure if he had anything to do with the robbery.
Anyway, this is supposed to be a short review. There is a nice mix of dark city noir and scenes set in the wide open spaces of the mountains. Aldo Ray is a little flat, but everybody else is terrific and the story is great.
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