I’m a little late with this. I wrote it for Cinema Sentries on time, but they were having a little trouble with their hosting service and so it just now got posted over there.
Chantal Akerman was a Belgian director whose films have been highly praised and that I’ve never seen. This new Criterion set looks like a good place to start. You can read all about that and some other interesting Blu-rays out this week by clicking here.
Kino Lorber, the boutique Blu-ray label has been releasing these sets of three relatively obscure film noirs for a few years now. I’ve reviewed quite a few of them, and while not every film is a classic, or even that good, I always enjoy watching them.
You can read my full review of this set over at Cinema Sentries.
George A. Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead didn’t exactly invent the zombie movie, but it perfected it and popularized most of the genre’s tropes. Ten years later he made a sequel, Dawn of the Dead. That film was a huge success in Italy, so successful that in 1979 Lucio Fulci made an unofficial sequel entitled Zombi 2 (Dawn of the Dead was renamed Zombi in Italy). It was a big hit and the Italian zombie crazy had begun.
Lots and lots of Italian zombie films were made over the next several years. Some of them are great, some of them are terrible, but they are almost all worth watching. The Italians tended to go big – bigger violence and gore, more nudity and sex. What they miss in nuance and social commentary they more than make up for in over-the-top craziness.
They also allowed themselves to get a little weird, to play with the genre in interesting ways. In Nightmare City the zombies are not the slow-walking, brainless ghouls from Romero’s films, but rather somewhat intelligent, fast-moving monsters capable of using weapons and systematically invading places like hospitals and power stations.
It begins with an airplane flying towards some unnamed European airport. The tower gets no response when it asks the plane to identify itself. When it lands the police surround it, demanding whoever is inside come out with their hands up. When the door does open what comes out is a mass of knife-wielding maniacs whose faces are covered in scabs and scars (more like oatmeal and latex if you ask me). Guns seem to do nothing to these monsters; in an instant, they have killed everyone on sight.
Well, nearly everyone. Our hero, a news reporter named Dean Miller (Hugo Stiglitz) was there to interview a nuclear scientist, manages to escape.
What follows, plot-wise is your fairly typical city under siege storyline. The government orders everyone to stay in their homes and lock their doors. The military comes out in force to kill the zombies. Scientists scramble to figure out just exactly what’s going on (it was radiation, stupid).
Our hero rushes to the hospital to rescue his doctor’s wife and then they try to escape the city.
The script is a mess. There is a lot of speechifying about how mankind is a doomed species and how we’ve used technology to play god, etc. and so forth. It is nothing you haven’t heard in a million other science fiction films, and none of it is delivered confidently. The military and other law enforcement presence seems very small. You’d think they’d bring in tanks and jet planes to secure the area, but we see almost none of that. Presumably, the budget wasn’t big enough to bring in actual military vehicles (the best we get is a helicopter).
The violence is a funny mix of really bad to surprisingly gruesome. There are a lot of zombies with knives and hatches but their stabbing and slicing is often completely bloodless. Sometimes they don’t even break the skin though it seems to drop their victims stone dead. But in other scenes, we’ll see a guy get his eyeball ripped out with a stick, or a woman has her breast completely cut off.
There are a lot of naked breasts in this film. The men tend to get stabbed in the neck, but the women seem to almost always have their shirts ripped off and their boobs stabbed.
It is nothing new to have low-budget horror films throw a lot of gratuitous nudity at their viewers, but it happens so often here that it is both hilarious and tedious (and of course wildly sexist).
Despite all of this, I really rather enjoyed myself. You can’t go into a film like this expecting greatness. But director Umberto Lenzi keeps things moving at a steady pace and he has enough skill to not make the ridiculousness too inept. It all comes off as seriously ridiculous fun.
Last week in my Friday Night Horror column I noted that I’d not done a lot of writing for my Frozen in January theme of the month, but that I hoped I’d get back in the groove soon. Obviously, that didn’t happen. I’ve watched quite a few films that fit the theme, but I just haven’t felt the desire to do much writing. I actually started writing a thing on The Martian (a man stranded on the desolate, frozen planet of Mars fits the bill I think – or at least I was gonna try and make it fit) but then a couple of paragraphs in and I couldn’t find the energy.
That happens sometimes. To everyone I suppose. I just get in a funk and wonder what the heck I’m even doing. Once again I’ll hope that writing this column will get me back in the groove.
Till Death stars Megan Fox as Emma Davenport, a woman who at the beginning of the film is ending the affair she’s been having with Tom (Aml Ameen). It isn’t right, she says. She needs to go back to her husband Mark (Eoin Macken).
God knows why. As we’ll soon realize Mark is a terrible person. It is their anniversary and she meets him at a swanky restaurant. The first words out of his mouth are to complain she isn’t wearing the red dress he likes. She’s wearing a nice little black dress and she’s Megan Fox so she looks good. But it isn’t the dress he was expecting so after the meal he drives her home and forces her to put on the red one.
He’s the kind of guy who orders her dessert even though she says she’s full. He bought her a weird steel necklace for their anniversary and immediately puts it on her, but then frowns at the tickets she bought him to the Super Bowl.
He makes her wear a blindfold while he drives her out to the secluded cabin he owns in the woods. He forces her to keep it on the entire way even though it is at least an hour’s drive and she’s complaining it is making her car sick.
There are twenty minutes of this stuff. Of him being a jerk to her while she sits in sad silence. Twenty agonizing minutes just waiting for her to wake up handcuffed to his corpse.
That’s not really a spoiler because it is in all the promotional material, and any blurb you read about the film is gonna tell you that information. That’s the reason I watched the film. But I nearly turned it off before it got there, the film was so dumb.
So he takes her to this cabin. Makes her sit in the kitchen blindfolded (again) while he lays a bunch of rose petals down and lights a billion candles. Then she wanders around the house looking for him – she puts on the record he leaves a note telling her to play – and then when she finally finds him (in the bedroom of course) his words aren’t something sweet and romantic but a complaint that it took her too long to find him.
He then finally says something nice and they have sex. The next morning she wakes up to find herself handcuffed to him but before she can even really ask him why, he blows his brains out.
The rest of the film involves her trying to get the heck out of there. But the thing is, he’s drained the car of gasoline, broken her phone, and removed any sharp object that might allow herself to get free of him. Eventually, some other folks show up and things get even more difficult for her.
That part – woman handcuffed to a dead man in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of winter, with no means of escape – should be really good. But the character and the film make so many stupid decisions I just wanted it to be over way before the credits actually rolled.
To wit: after he kills himself, blowing blood and guts all over her face, she doesn’t scream or freak out. She doesn’t check for signs of life. She almost immediately drags his body over to the phone to call for help. When she finds it dead, she grabs the gun and tries to blow the handcuff chain to bits. She doesn’t check for a key in his pockets or anything. It takes her half an hour to clean the blood off her face.
She puts his shirt and pants on (for all she brought was that little red dress and apparently some skimpy pajamas, but not an actual over night bag for some reason) but not his socks and shoes even though she’ll spend lots of time wandering around outside in the snow.
Over and over she (and eventually the other characters) make the stupidest decisions ever. The film does dumb things too. Like skipping over important or interesting things. I mean how does she get his shirt off of him and on to her when they are handcuffed together. That’s the kind of thing we need to see!
Periodically Emma will make some kind of smart-ass comment. After dragging his corpse around the house looking for something that might help out she remarks that she was dragging his dead body around for years, long before he killed himself. Ha! and so forth. But there isn’t enough of that kind of thing to make her interesting.
I’m not a big fan of Megan Fox and while she isn’t bad here, she doesnt’ have the charm this kind of role calls for. The direction is fine, it keeps things fairly taut and moving. There are moments that are more or less thrilling, but all of the ridiculous stuff happening kept me shaking my head in annoyance.
Though I keep saying that I love making these monthly movie themes and writing about them, I find it easy to slip out of that routine (especially in the writing department) and then quite difficult to slip back in. This time I have a pretty good excuse with Covid, but I’ve felt (more or less) well the last couple of days and yet have not had the energy to write any more Frozen in January reviews, despite having watched several more and (at least in theory) the desire to write about them.
Here’s hoping this Friday Night Horror Movie write-up will get me back in the spirit.
There is a documentary from 2012 called Room 237 which posits a number of theories about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Or rather it features a number of talking heads who all seem to think they know what The Shining is all about. What it all really means.
These range from the somewhat plausible – it’s about the assimilation of Native Americans and the destruction of their culture by rich white Americans – to the crack-pot – it is Kubrick’s apology for helping with the faking of the moon landing.
It is an interesting documentary, but what I really love about it is how it indicates just how malleable Kubrick’s film is. It is as if the director took Stephen King’s novel, and turned it into his own thing, and then when people ask what it all means, his answer is akin to:
It means what you want it to mean. Or it has no meaning. Or I don’t know what it means.
For those who don’t know The Shining is based on the Stephen King novel of the same name. Kubrick did make some significant changes to the book and King famously hates it. It tells the story of Jack Torrence (Jack Nicolson), a wannabe writer who is also an alcoholic, and abusive husband/father. After being fired from a teaching job he lands a job as the winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel – a beautiful resort nestled deep within the Rocky Mountains. The long, meandering road into the hotel becomes too covered with snow to make it financially viable to stay open for five months in the winter so they hire someone to live there and keep it maintained.
Jack brings his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and young son Danny (Danny Lloyd) who has some psychic ability (known as the Shining). The total isolation, the freezing cold (a huge blizzard traps them even further and isolates them more by knocking out the phone lines), and the ghosts push an already fragile Jack into psychotic territory.
The Overlook catered to the rich, powerful, and famous. People who make important decisions and devour depravity. Terrible things have happened there. Things the hotel is all too happy to cover up. In his initial meeting with the hotel manager, Jack is told of a previous caretaker whose cabin fever led him to murder his wife and two young daughters with an axe.
This violence and debauchery has left a psychic impressions on the hotel. Or perhaps, the hotel is a place of evil and it has left an impression on vulnerable people causing them to engage in horrible deeds. The film never gives an answer, it is a movie that wants you to come up with your own.
Kubrick films it in his usual technically proficient, yet emotionally detached way. His use of Steadicam (a fairly new technology) is masterful. Though the camera slowly wanders about the landscape of the hotel (truly making the setting a character unto itself) the geography of the place is disorienting. There are windows where there could feasibly be no windows, and doors that could only lead to nowhere. All of which makes the film deeply unsettling.
The performances while unanimously good, are cold and strange. Early in the film serious conversations are strangely monotone. Kubrick used many multiple takes (the scene in which Wendy swings her bat at Jack reported was shot over 100 times) to intentionally exhaust and unnerve the actors. The music is eerie and avant-garde.
It is nothing like a traditional horror film. While there are images of violence and horror – every character, especially Danny, flash on scenes from the hotel’s horrible past – the film unnerves you with its mood and calculating camera.
I love it. It is one of my favorite horror movies. I’m not alone in that assessment, and I’m sure many of you enjoy it as well. It works perfectly with this Frozen in January theme and I was happy to revisit it tonight.
The 1990s were a great time for music. I freakin’ loved Dinosaur Jr. back in the day. Didn’t love The Breeders as much but I dug this song and a few others.
I heard this on this college radio station earlier this morning. Immediately recognized J. Mascis’s voice. Took me a minute to figure out what the song was, but I was then immediately taken to my happy place.
When I was first thinking about this month’s theme – Frozen in January – it was John Carpenter’s The Thing that came to mind. It is the perfect encapsulation of what I was going for. Its characters are trapped in an isolated place covered in snow and ice. An external force causes an already tense situation into turmoil. The weather and the cold, frozen setting aren’t just window dressing, they help inform the story. I actually didn’t love the movie the first time I watched it, but with each subsequent viewing, I like it more and more. Now I think it is just about perfect.
The Thing is based upon a novella by John W. Campbell entitled Who Goes There?. It was previously adapted into the pretty great film in 1951, The Thing From Another World.
Set in an American research station in Antarctica The Thing stars Kurt Russell (and Wilford Brimley, and Keith David, and T.K. Carter and others, it really is a great cast) as a group of men who are already pushed beyond their limits. The isolation and the freezing weather are getting to them.
This is why, when a helicopter from the Norwegian station flies in shooting at some dog, and then at our heroes, they don’t initially think something is really wrong. They just chalk it up to those guys going stir-crazy.
I’ve seen this movie several times and I always forget how long it takes to get to the scenes I remember. The scenes in which the shape-shifting alien starts wiping everybody out. But before that, there are long, tension-building scenes, in which they try to figure out what’s going on at the Norwegian base. You’d think I’d remember them finding an alien spacecraft but I never do.
I think that is a testament to just how incredible the back half of this movie is. One of the many things I love about The Thing is that, unlike most of the films I’ve watched in this series, it really uses the freezing, isolated setting to help build the tension. As things ratchet up with the alien, we fully understand how there is no escape. Nowhere to go. No one will come to their rescue.
The alien is a shape-shifter so it can look like any one of them. No one knows who is human or something else. Carpenter makes us feel every moment of that horror.
The practical effects do look a bit unreal. I think that’s a big part of what I didn’t like about it on my first watch. They aren’t natural or realistic looking and that can take you out of the moment. Now I find that part of the film’s charm. The alien isn’t supposed to look real, not when it’s shifting into a chest cavity that can chop your hands off. It is supposed to look, well, alien. And cool. They look so cool. I’d love to see a behind-the-scenes look at how they made them.
John Carpenter really was a master of horror for so many years. The more I watch his classic films (and I’ve seen most of them several times) the more I think he’s one of the best who ever did it.
Whenever I watch a movie I inevitably go to Letterboxd to see what other people think of it. Letterboxd is like social media for movie nerds. You can log movies, see how many movies by an actor you’ve previously watched, check out stats (it is what I use to write all my movie journal posts), write reviews, and much more. You can also follow other users and when you do it will automatically show you their reviews.
I follow a lot of movie critics and various other users whose reviews I like to read, or who tend to have similar tastes as me. It is always interesting to see what others think of a movie I’ve just watched. It is especially interesting when their opinions differ from mine. It is fascinating to me to see when people hate a movie I loved for love a movie I hated.
I thought Death Hunt was dumb. It is the kind of movie they made a lot of in the early 1980s – silly action films with a couple of big stars, a little sexy, some comedy, and a lot of gunplay and explosions. I’m not necessarily opposed to that sort of thing as you can see from my reviews of various Burt Reynolds movies, but I have to be in the right mood.
I guess I wasn’t in the right mood yesterday when I watched Death Hunt because looking at Letterboxd most of the reviews I saw seemed to think it was a pretty fun movie. You can read between the lines that no one thinks it’s an actual good movie, but entertaining isn’t always good.
Anyway, the film is set in the Yukon Territory way up North in Canada in the 1930s. Albert Johnson (Charles Bronson), on his way home from a long stint in America, comes across an organized dogfight. The losing dog is badly injured and its owner, Hazel (Ed Lauter) is ready to do it in. Albert stops forcibly stops him then pays him $200 and takes the dog home.
With Albert gone Hazel finds his courage and reports the incident as a dog theft to Edgar Millen (Lee Marvin) of the local Canadian Mounties. Edgar is of the old and grizzled but fair and kind variety (in the Lee Marvin type).
Edgar knows Hazel and figures his story is bupkis, and tells him to go away. Hazel doesn’t like that and takes a group of his buddies up to Albert’s cabin to give him what for. Albert, being played by Charles Bronson, takes their what for and gives it back, leaving one guy dead on the ground.
Now that a man’s dead Edgar has to investigate, but instead of going to Albert alone and having a chat he takes an entire posse with him, including Hazel and his friend – all armed to the teeth with shotguns and rifles. His cabin surrounded Edgar walks up to Albert’s place to ask him to come alone peacefully. When he refuses Edgar lets the men shoot the cabin to bits. When that doesn’t work he throws dynamite at it, blowing the thing sky high.
It was probably at this point that I gave up on the film. Blowing a man’s house (and presumably him) to pieces isn’t good police work. Especially when you know that the killing you want to arrest him was probably self-defense. But the film wants them to have a chase and so that’s what it gives them.
Amazingly Albert survives the explosion and hits the road (or rather the icy mountain paths) with Edgar hot on his tail. The rest of the film becomes one long chase.
Made just a couple of years after Death Wish, Death Hunt is clearly trying to cash in on that film’s success. But Death Wish had a specific point of view. In those films, Charles Bronson is a good guy driven to revenge by evil criminals (don’t get me wrong that film’s morality is wonky as hell, but it does have a point of view). Here Albert is a rather dubious character and as noted Marvin isn’t exactly clean cut so there isn’t an obvious person to root for. Except the film clearly wants us rooting for someone, it just doesn’t seem sure as to who. This brings it all to a finale that just kind of whimpers where it ought to bang.
I’m putting way too much thought into all of this, more than the creators of the film seem to have done. It is all meant as a good time at the movies with a little comedy and some big action and good stars and nothing more. This is too many words already, but I should mention Carl Weathers plays Lee Marvin’s good time buddy. Oh, and Angie Dickinson plays Marvin’s love interest, who has so little to do I almost forgot about her.
I suspect if I had poured myself a couple of drinks and invited some friends over I would have had fun with it. But sitting alone on my couch while my wife is upstairs with Covid and my daughter is hiding out in her room I found it all kind of vapid and annoying.
Sometimes you watch a movie knowing ahead of time it is going to be bad. You do so thinking maybe it won’t be that bad. Maybe it will at least be entertaining. And maybe, just maybe, it will defy expectations and actually be pretty good.
Mostly, you turn out wrong.
Or maybe that’s just me.
I knew going into it Whiteout wouldn’t be good. It actually has a kernel of an interesting idea – a lone US Marshall in Antarctica must solve a murder. But that’s also the kind of snappy idea that Hollywood all too often screws up.
I should have known not to watch it when I realized it stars Kate Beckinsale. I don’t actively hate Kate Beckinsale. I don’t think she’s necessarily a bad actress. She just has a habit of starring in a lot of bad movies. I don’t know if she just has bad taste, or she’s rarely offered anything any good or what. Maybe she has a terrible agent. But looking through her filmography I see very few movies that I either thought were good or that look anything like interesting.
But, like I said, this film has a setup that could be really cool so I took the plunge.
The biggest problem with the film is that it doesn’t know whether it wants to be a mystery, a thriller, or a horror film. It even throws in a bit of World War II conspiracy for good measure.
Beckinsale plays Carrie Stetko, the sole US Marshall in Antarctica. Most of the base is preparing to fly out. Winter is coming and at the bottom of the world, winter is long and hard. Minimal staff is required.
Stetko usually stays but this time she’s leaving. As is her friend, the base’s only doctor, John Fury (Tom Skerritt). As an example of just how poorly this film thinks things through that is the base’s only law enforcement agent and doctor leaving for several months. There is no indication that anyone is being sent to replace them. While most of the personnel do leave for the winter, not all of them do. What happens when a crime is committed or someone needs healthcare?
But of course, the film doesn’t think about this because it knows those two characters aren’t going to be leaving the base. A crime will be committed and someone will need medical attention and they will stay.
A body is found lying face down in a remote part – a “no man’s land” of the continent. His face is smashed to bits so it is impossible to tell who he is. Stetko and Fury investigate. Stetko realizes he must have taken a great fall. She knows this because, as we see in a flashback she once shot a man causing him to take a tumble out of a high-rise building.
The film loves its flashbacks. They pretty much all surround that one event in Stetko’s life, but the film doles it out like it is some great mystery that will reveal some insight into this current case. But really it is a pretty simple thing that lets us know what she’s doing in remote Antarctica in the first place.
The murder leads them to a remote station which then leads them to a WWII airplane buried in the snow. This should be an interesting mystery, a weird surprise for the audience. Except the film began with us watching the plane crash and showed us why. The only mystery left is what was in the box on the plane that everyone winds up fighting over. It might be old nuclear stuff which would be bad. Really bad. I guess.
Then Robert Pryce (Gabriel Macht), a United Nations security agent shows up. He’s there awfully fast for a guy who wasn’t in Antarctica before the movie began. Making us think perhaps he’s the killer. He’s not, but the movie likes throwing red herrings out like that. Anyone who has seen an episode of Law and Order will be able to figure out who the Big Bad really is before he’s revealed.
Oh, also, there is a huge storm rolling in causing the entire base to be evacuated in a few hours. Because this film doesn’t have enough going on, it needs to add that into the mix.
It is based on a graphic novel so maybe some of the script problems come from the source material. All of the plot twists and turns might work better in a comic. I’ve just started reading the book and it does seem to be more of a mystery than anything, and it definitely doesn’t begin with the plane crash so I’m prepared to say most of the film’s problems do come from the script. But only time will tell on that front.
Beckinsale isn’t bad. I don’t think she’s a particularly bad actress. But she doesn’t elevate the material either. And the material is bad. It is too much of everything and not enough of something specific.
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