Because I’ve had to watch and review so many Shaw Brothers kung fu movies I’ve not had a lot of time for my Noirvember viewings. I did get a chance to watch Force of Evil, an absolute classic of the genre, and review it for Cinema Sentries. It is a great movie, and my review is good too.
I’ve reviewed several Shaw Brother’s films on Cinema Sentries and posted them here before. They made a slew of terrific kung fu flicks in the 1970s through the ’80s. This year Shout! Studio has released three (thus far) big boxed sets of their films. I have the first two and I just finished my review of the first one. You can read that here.
I gotta admit I’m getting a little tired of watching them. On an individual basis they are all mostly great, but after a while they all just feel the same. For the second set, I’m taking extensive notes just so I can remember which film is which.
Harry Fabin (Richard Widmark) is a man constantly on the run – from gangsters, and bookkeepers, loansharks and anyone else he owes money to or has otherwise schemed. He’s always got something cooking, some way to make a fast buck, get rich, and live a life of luxury. The ironic thing is if he actually put the energy he uses on these schemes and put them to legitimate work, he’d have a comfortable life.
Night and the City begins with Harry on the run. He’s making the slip past some unknown assailants across the streets of London. He winds up at Mary Bristol’s (Gene Tierney) flat. She loves him, but she’s tired of his constant hustling. Taking none of his crap, she simply asks him how much he wants this time.
Harry has a part-time gig working for Phil Nosseross (Francis L. Sullivan) smooth-talking out-of-town businessmen into coming to Nosseross’ club, The Silver Fox. One night out looking for chumps he wanders into a wrestling match where he becomes entranced by Gregorious the Great (Stanislaus Zbyszko). He isn’t in the ring but rather is complaining loudly about how fake everything is. Turns out he’s one of the great Greco-Roman wrestlers and these days everything is more WWE than real.
Harry hatches a plan to use Gregorious to become the wrestling magnate of London. Trouble is the current magnate is also Gregorious’ son Kristo (Herbert Lom). The father is angry with the son for getting involved in what he thinks of as entertainment and not real wrestling.
Harry needs money to get everything set up and he borrows it from Mrs. Nosseross (Googie Withers) who wants to divorce Mr. Nosseross but can’t until she’s got herself set up somewhere else. So she lends money to Harry so he can get more money from Mr. Nosseross (he won’t lend Harry money until he has some money himself to put down) which she will use to start a new nightclub.
The plot gets more convoluted from there. But I was never confused. Directed by the great Jules Dassin things run smoothly and clearly. There are some great exterior scenes overlooking most of the popular London spots, but much of the action takes place underground, it dirty bars, back alleys, and run-down gyms.
There’s a terrific wrestling sequence towards the end between Gregorious and another man. It isn’t staged with any flair, it is just two men trying to beat the other one into submission, but it is brutally effective.
I wish Gene Tierney had more to do that look upset at Harry, but she does get a wonderful scene towards the end that makes it all worth while.
Night in the City is a great movie, and a fantastic example of what film noir can be.
A crazy, satanic serial killer is on the loose in Los Angeles. Detective Russell Logan (Lou Diamond Phillips) is on the case. Or rather he’s chilling at home when a psychic (Tracy Griffith) calls him up and tells him where the killer’s next victim is going to occur. But she makes him promise that he won’t kill the killer nor will he allow him to get the death penalty.
Our hero gets the killer but he reneges on the deal to not let him get the death penalty. After he gets the gas chamber Detective Logan starts seeing horrific images and hearing the killer’s voice in his head.
The psychic shows up in person to let him know that the killer’s soul is now inhabiting the bodies of others and the killings will continue until they can stop them.
It is Noirvember and as I noted in today’s Daily Bootleg Post I’m gonna be busy watching a bunch of kung-fu movies over the next week or two. It is also Friday and I’m definitely not giving up my Friday Night Horror Movie. So, I was trying to find a way to blend those two things together.
Theoretically, that’s pretty easy to do. Film noir is hard to define and thus the definition is actually pretty flexible. Neo-noir is even more flexible. Both tend to involve crime, often murder. Sometimes serial murder. Horror films generally involve some murder and sometimes those murders are wrapped up in a murder mystery. A little Googling turned up a list of noir/horror hybrids and that’s how I discovered The First Power.
I wanna say I’ve seen this movie before but none of it rang any memory bells and I haven’t logged in on Letterboxd, so who knows. I definitely remember it coming out and wanting to see it.
It isn’t great. I love me some Lou Diamond Phillips. This film comes at the tail end of his first wave of popularity and it doesn’t work that well as a star vehicle for him. The script is pretty hokey, and it doesn’t lean hard enough on the whole satanic angle.
The killer carves pentagrams into his victims and they do bring a nun in at some point, but he’s never really involved in anything demonic. Most of it takes place in the city in broad daylight which is just weird for a horror movie about the occult. There are some scenes in dark warehouses and down in the bowels of the city’s water drainage. It does some nice things with light and shadow in those moments, but they don’t last.
The film posits that the killer’s soul is possessing various other people but it doesn’t really do much with that concept. Mostly we see him in the original body (played by Jeff Kober), but sometimes we see him in the body of whoever he’s possessing. But there are no scares involved in that. There is never any mystery of who he is possessing.
There are a few good, nut-ball moments like when a homeless woman floats in the air, or when the killer jumps off a ten-story roof and survives, or the fact that Los Angeles apparently has a giant boiling cauldron of flammable liquid in the bowels of their water drainage system, but mostly this is a by-the-numbers early 1990s horror/thriller.
I watched 44 movies in the month of October. Thirty-four of them could be considered horror movies. Twenty-three of them were made before I was born. Only five of them had been previously viewed by me.
Obviously, this was spooky season for me. I do love a good horror movie. I even love a bad horror movie once in a while. Although, ever October I start out watching horror with a fevered passion by by the end of the month, by the time actual Halloween rolls around, I’m kind of tired of them. I’m always ready for Noirvember when it comes.
As you can see from the links I reviewed quite a few of the films I watched. I’m pretty proud of that. Although, as you can tell, I got worse at that as the month wore on. I received a couple of big boxed sets of Shaw Brothers kung fu films a week ago and I’ve been plowing my way through them. Expect a review over at Cinema Sentries soon.
Surprisingly, my wife who doesn’t like horror movies watched a lot of them with me this year. I intentionally watched a lot of Pre-Code horror and Hammer horror just for her.
Unusual for me I watched three films that actually came out in 2023. Two were silly streaming horror films but I did manage to catch Killers of the Flower Moon in the Theater. Of course I did, I’ve been looking forward to seeing that film for a few years now. It is excellent by the way.
Vincent Price jumped all the way to number one on my actors most watched this year list. I’ve watched eight of his films this year. That makes sense as he’s in a lot of horror movies. Brad Dourif also moved into the second-place spot. He’s one of my favorites, and he played in both the Rob Zombie Halloween movies which gave him the bump.
The director’s list stayed the same except for Chang Cheh, who entered the list tied for third with four films watched. He directed a lot of those Shaw Brothers films I was talking about.
Anyways, here’s the list
Halloween II (2009)
Dragon Swamp (1969)
Halloween (2007)
The Flying Dagger (1969)
The Jade Raksha (1968)
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010)
The Thundering Sword (1967)
The Wicker Man (1973)
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
Golden Swallow (1968)
The Assassin (1967)
Saw (2004)
Constantine (2005)
Coogan’s Bluff (1968)
Doctor Who: An Unearthly Child (1963)
The Hitcher (1986)
Theatre of Blood (1973)
The Mummy’s Shroud (1967)
House of Wax (1953)
Lorna, the Exorcist (1974)
Waxwork (1988)
The Iron-Fisted Monk (1977)
Haunted Mansion (2023)
Count Dracula (1970)
Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)
Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
Castle of Blood (1964)
Nothing Underneath (1985)
Murders in the Zoo (1933)
Murder-Rock: Dancing Death (1984)
Marebito (2004)
Retribution (2006)
Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)
Black Christmas (2006)
Thirteen Women (1932)
The Final Girls (2015)
The Invasion (2007)
Totally Killer (2023)
Body Snatchers (1993)
The Night Stalker (1972)
Talk to Me (2022)
Doctor X (1932)
Secret of the Blue Room (1933)
Say what you will about Tom Cruise (and really you can say whatever you want about that crazy mofo and his awful religion – sorry I generally let people believe whatever they want to believe but everything I read about Scientology is just awful) but the dude knows how to make good movies.
I’ve enjoyed every single one of the Mission Impossible films (well, ok the second one isn’t great) and I hope they keep making them for eternity. I completely missed Dead Reckoning Part One in the theaters. I miss just about everything in the theaters these days as I rarely make the trip, but I’m looking forward to catching it now that it is out on Blu-ray. Like just about every other big blockbuster hit, this one comes in a variety of formats with a variety of extras.
Also out this week that looks interesting:
Blue Beetle: I am pretty much superheroe’d out at this point, but I’ve heard good things about this one, or at least it seems to be trying for something slightly different so I’ll give it a chance at some point.
The Alfred Hitchcock Classics Collection, Vol. 3: Includes Rope, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Torn Curtain, Topaz, and Frenzy. All in 4K. Calling all of these classics is a bit much.
Nanny: Criterion brings us this story about an immigrant Nanny, piecing together a new life in New York City while caring for the child of an Upper East Side family, is forced to confront a concealed truth that threatens to shatter her precarious American Dream.
John Carpenter’s original Halloween (1978) essentially created the slasher craze of the 1980s. It either popularized or outright invented many of the tropes of the genre – a final girl, deaths coming to those who are promiscuous or otherwise “sinful”, killers’ point of view shots, etc. – and created a slew of knock-off holiday-themed horror films and generally influenced a decade of horror films.
It was followed by seven sequels and then was remade by Rob Zombie, that remake got a sequel and that was followed by the David Gordon Green trilogy which pretended none of the sequels happened and set the story 40 years after the original.
Rob Zombie remade the original film in 2007 and as I noted in my review, it is pretty terrible. Its sequel improves upon the first one a great deal, but it still isn’t great.
Scout Taylor-Compton returns as Laurie Strode some two years after the events of the original film (or the remake of the original film, or…whatever). She’s having a rough time. She’s in therapy, she’s taking a myriad of pills, and she’s having nightmares about Michael Myers every night. In a word, she was deeply traumatized by the events of Halloween night two years ago.
Now, horror movies about trauma may have been new in 2007. Certainly, a great many slasher sequels had the Final Girl return as bad as ever. They were able to shake off the events of the first film and come back after the evil villain with renewed vigor. But that isn’t reality. Surviving an attack by a vicious killer is traumatizing. It likely takes years, decades even, to overcome such a thing.
It is refreshing to have a horror movie’s protagonist have to deal with the trauma of the first film. Or it was back in 2007. I guess. In 2023 it feels like every horror film is about trauma. Hell, even Avengers: Endgame was about trauma. Certainly, the David Gordon Green Halloween films were about trauma. So watching this film now, and seeing how it deals with trauma feels a little old hat.
It isn’t as if Rob Zombie was doing something really interesting with the idea either. As mentioned, Laurie is in therapy, she’s popping pills, she has nightmares, she dresses like a punk goth, and covers her room in hard rock posters and “edgy” things like anarchist symbols and the number “666.” That isn’t a bad thing for this type of horror film, but it isn’t exactly original either.
It doesn’t help poor Laurie Strode that Doctor Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) is back in town pimping another book about Michael Myers. In this film, he is a shallow huckster, trading stories about the murders for fame and fortune. His new book gives the audience new details that have come to light since his last one, including how Laurie Strode is actually Angel Myers, Michael’s sister. When Laurie finds this out it sends her spiraling farther into despair.
Meanwhile, Michael has apparently spent the last two years wandering the countryside, hiding out in old farms, eating the raw corpses of animals he’s killed, and waiting around for the second anniversary to come find Laurie and finish what he’s started.
In Carpenter’s original Michael Myers was the face of evil. He was an emotionless, soulless, killing machine. There is a scene in the original film in which he stabs someone to death, his knife holding the corpse to the wall, and Myers crocks his head just a little as if admiring what he’s done.
Zombie spent the first film examining just exactly what made Michael Myers a killer, completely destroying what made Carpenter’s character so terrifying. He drops most of that with this sequel though his mother (Sheri Moon Zombie) and a version of himself as a child (Chase Wright Vanek) continue to haunt him like memory specters.
What saves this film are some truly scary kill scenes, and some wonderful, even beautiful imagery. The carnage is a bit too visceral and gory for my tastes these days, but there is no doubt he blocks them in really interesting ways.
If you strip away all of the Halloween stuff, if you just look at it as a horror film, as a slasher, I think it is pretty good. But as another entry in the Halloween franchise, it doesn’t really work for me. It is a great improvement on Zombie’s first entry, but there are so many other better films in this series I don’t see myself ever returning to this one.
themidnightcafe.org 