The Friday Night Horror Movie: Guilty of Romance (2011)

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When you watch as many movies as I do you are sometimes going to venture into the strange. You’re gonna watch a few films that make you say “What the Hell did I just watch?” I’m not entirely sure I liked Guilty of Romance. I’m definitely sure I didn’t quite understand it. But I’ll never say I was bored watching it.

It begins with a grizzly murder. A young woman has been dismembered inside a rundown flat in the Love Hotel district of Tokyo. Parts of her body are wearing a pretty red dress with the missing parts being replaced by mannequin pieces. Other sections of the corpse are fitted out in the same manner but in a schoolgirl uniform. The head and sex parts are missing.

Police detective Kazuko Yoshida (Miki Mizuno) is on the case. The story intercuts the investigation with that of bored housewife Izumi Kikuchi (Megumi Kagurazaka). She’s married to a famous novelist. He’s an exacting husband. He leaves at the same time every morning and returns promptly in the evening. When he arrives he expects his slippers to be waiting for him in the entryway and to be placed in a precise manner. He complements her tea-making skills in a way that lets us know he’s chastised her about it before. When she places some Japanese soap (not the French stuff he likes) in the bath, he berates her.

Their marriage seems to be without romance, love, or satisfying sexual encounters. She’s approached by a woman in a shop who claims to be a talent agent. Izumi is pretty enough to be a model she says. The photos turn out to be softcore in nature. Later she meets Mitsuko Ozama (Makoto Togashi) a sex worker who convinces Izumi to join her in that work.

In some ways, the film is about this repressed woman, living a very traditional lifestyle, diving deeper and deeper into sexual liberation.

Kazuko is more modern and liberated. She’s a police detective, a working woman in a field dominated by men. She’s also married, to a man who seems perfectly nice. But she’s had affairs as well. Currently, she’s involved with a man who likes to play domination games.

There is a lot more to the story but to delve any deeper would be to spoil it. The murder mystery takes second shelf to all of the sexual shenanigans. Director Sion Sono is interested in the ways women must navigate their own sexuality, and society’s demands upon it.

It is a deeply weird, subversive film. At times I was quite uncomfortable watching it. Especially early on when Izumi is being pushed into sexual acts she’s clearly not ready for. But the film wants us to be uncomfortable. This isn’t sex for titillation, there is always a reason behind it. I’m not always sure I understand those reasons or can get behind them fully, but I’m glad I watched it.

Recommended, but not for the faint of heart.

Murder Mysteries In May: The Falcon Takes Over (1942)

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A good murder mystery needs a good detective. Well, not necessarily a detective as mysteries have been solved by police detectives, private detectives, federal agents, spies, newspaper reporters, priests, and little old ladies. But whoever is solving the mysteries must be good. Also interesting.

Interesting detectives in good stories often find themselves in ongoing series, solving murders over and over again. Great ones become iconic and get adapted for decades. Consider Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. Sometimes a detective will be quite popular for some time and then be forgotten. Lost to time.

The Falcon was a suave English gentleman detective created by Michael Arlen. He was adapted into sixteen films – the first three starred George Sanders as Gay “The Falcon” Lawrence. In the remaining films Gay’s brother Tom (portrayed by George Sanders’s real-life brother Tom Conway) became the star.

All of the films were b-movies (and I’m using the original sense of the word – films designed to be the second half of a double feature) but popular ones.

I searched for the first two films (The Gay Falcon and A Date with the Falcon) but couldn’t find them streaming anywhere. So I settled on this one, the third in the franchise.

It is very loosely based on the Raymond Chandler novel Farewell, My Lovely. Moose Malloy (Ward Bond) a big, dumb, brute escapes from prison and shows up at a swank nightclub looking for his girl, Velma (Helen Gilbert). The club used to be a dump when she worked there and now nobody remembers who Velma is. In his anger Moose barges inside and questions the manager so fiercely he kills him. He forces a man named Goldie (Allen Jenkins) to drive him away.

Goldie just happens to be the Falcon’s right-hand man. Moose lets Goldie go and after he’s questioned by the police and is removed as a potential suspect he and the Falcon go Moose hunting.

The plot takes a lot of twists and turns with a stolen jade neckless, blackmail, and more murder all showing up. A cute reporter (Anne Revere) joins our hereoes to add a romance angle.

I’m a huge Raymond Chandler fan and his story helps the film a lot. Everything else going on makes me wonder if I’d enjoy these films very much at all. I love George Sanders but he’s fairly bland here. The Falcon is much more akin to Nick Charles in the Thin Man Films (svelte, sophisticated, and light-hearted) than Chandler’s hard-boiled, rough-and-tumble Phillip Marlow. I suspect me knowing the source material hindered things a big as the Falcon doesn’t jive with my notions of who the detective should be in this story.

But it goes off well enough. It is very light, and fun. Allen Jenkins is having a blast, and gets all the best lines. It is a perfectly fine Saturday afternoon type movie and worth watching if you like that sort of thing.

Murder Mysteries In May: The Kennel Murder Case (1933)

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I’m certainly not the only person who loves murder mysteries. Go to any bookstore and you will find shelves lined with them. Turn on the television to nearly any station and you’ll likely find one. Countless movies have been made in the genre. As I noted in my keynote it is an extremely malleable genre. It can be fitted to suit any audience’s needs.

As one might know from my yearly participation in Noirvember I am a huge fan of film noirs and the hard-boiled way of writing. It was actually the Coen Brothers who turned me on to such things. I’d heard their movie Miller’s Crossing was inspired by a couple of books from Dashiell Hammett so I went to the library and started reading him. That led me to Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain which led me to their movie adaptations and the rest is history.

But I’m getting away from myself. The Kennell Murder Case is based on a book by the same name by S.S. Van Dine. He was a conetemporary of Hammett, but his books have greatly fallen out of favor. They were getting that way by the time Chandler started writing a decade or so later. Chandler directly called Dine out in his essay on mystery writing The Simple Art of Murder in 1944.

Philo Vance was the name of Van Dine’s detective. Here he’s played by William Powell (who would find great success a year later in The Thin Man, written by Hammett). In the books, apparently, Vance is a bit of a dandy, an intellectual and aesthete who solves murders by picking up clues the police miss.

Powell (who had previous played Vance in three other films) plays the character like a prototype for Nick Charles in The Thin Man movies. He’s intelligent and upper class but not distinctly so. He’s witty at times but the script isn’t all that sharp.

The plot is basically a locked room mystery. A man is found dead inside his room. The door is locked from the inside, as are the windows. He was shot in the head and the pistol is laying by his side. Suicide is the obvious answer, but Philo Vance doesn’t think so. He just saw the man the day before at a dog race and he seemed perfectly upbeat. When the coroner realizes the cause of death was a blow to the head by a blunt object, and not the gunshot the case is on.

There are more murders and more mysteries that arise, but honestly I was bored from the begining. The pacing is sluggish. The dialogue comes with these odd pauses between lines and the scenes don’t cut out for several beats after everything that needed to be done is done. And as the dialogue isn’t all that clever, and the action not all that well done all of that slowness just makes the film seem like its longer than it actually is.

I always like William Powell, and he’s fine here, but the character is underwritten and the story so underwhelming, that I can only recommend this to die hard fans.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Malignant (2021)

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It is time for both the Friday Night Horror Movie and Murder Mysteries in May. One would think it would not be difficult to find a film that fits both of those descriptions. Murder is horrific after all. But for tonight, I found it nearly impossible. The trouble, I’m realizing is that since mysteries and crime stories are some of my favorite genres, I’ve seen a lot of them. I wanted to watch something I’d never seen before and that proved difficult. I was probably using the wrong search terms.

I eventually landed on Malignant. It was directed by James Wan who has helmed several horror films I’ve enjoyed (namely The Conjuring and Insidious). Even when I’m more ambivalent about his films (namely the Saw franchise) I’m always impressed with his craft as a filmmaker. He definitely knows how to move a camera and create some true cinematic scares.

The basic synopsis of the film – woman begins having visions of terrible murders only to realize they are coming true – has been done many times before, but that type of thing can be effective and with Wan at the helm, I figured it would at least be interesting.

I was wrong. So very, very wrong.

In general, I’d say picking on a film’s plot holes (both real and imagined) is one of the lazier forms of criticism. A film is more than a plot and a great movie can overcome bits in the story that don’t make logical sense. But I also realize that when a film isn’t working for me I tend to get angry at those holes in the plot.

Malignant is a very stupid movie. So much of what happens either doesn’t make sense or is just completely bonkers. But the thing is Malignant is also a film that completely understands how utterly ridiculous it is. Few films from major studios are allowed to have such a ludicrous premise and are given the chance to just completely go for it.

Had I been in a better mood, had I been less tired, or had I been with some friends who enjoyed dumb, stupid, ridiculous horror films I might have allowed myself to just go with it and have a good time. As it is, I could barely make it through.

Murder Mysteries in May

The genre I probably watch the most, the type of movie I’m most likely to sit down with on any given day is the crime genre. I love a good crime story. I love watching detectives (or reporters, or priests, or little old ladies) solving crimes. The best crimes, of course, are murders, and the best type of crime story is a murder mystery.

One of the many things I love about a good murder mystery is how malleable it is. There are a million ways to murder someone and a million other ways to solve the case. There are Agatha Christie-style mysteries in which some high society dame is bloodlessly murdered and an eccentric detective carefully interviews all the suspects and solves the case by putting them all in a room together.

There are hard-boiled stories about gritty murders on skid row. There are film noirs and sexy neo-noirs. There are crime stories that are funny and others that are sad. Some are told matter-of-factly, almost like a documentary, and others are told with stylistic flourishes. I love them all.

So as I was thinking about what kind of movie theme I could have for May I thought about murder mystery, and because I love alliteration Murder Mysteries in May had a distinct ring about it. And here we are.