TEEN WOLF @ 40

Scott sucks at basketball. When we first meet him he fails his shot at the hoop in front of his schoolmates. The other thing that's happening is his body is changing. He yanks straggles of hair from his chest, his nose can detect a liverwurst sandwich through a layer of socks in his friend's locker and his ears are going pointy. Sent in to buy a keg of beer a a liquor store he scares the old guy behind the counter into selling it to his underage self. Then one night there's a full moon and he finally goes full werewolf and his father comes to him in his own werewolf form and tells him they need to talk.

At first, he keeps this from everyone as he's a teenager and self conscious but, a few accidental moments later, everyone soon knows and in a bizarre twist, he is accepted as a werewolf. His game improves and he is finally getting the attention of the alpha chick. So, as long as he's ok with it, he's a lycanthrope daywalker who's come into his body and style. Well, the alpha chick has a sporty alpha boyfriend whose jealousy is growing faster than the hair on Scott's body. Also, his childhood friend with the tomboy name of Boof is becoming much more than that. And he still sucks at basketball. And now everyone wants him to be the werewolf all the time. This is going to take some working out.

Rod Daniel's amiable teen comedy takes the nebbish coming of age tale a step into magical realism with a more absurdist tinge than anything related to horror. The insistence on Scott's life tests in his basketball skills is a continuing undercurrent that feels warm rather than cute and his growing negotiation with Boof feels natural rather than the brittleness that a John Hughes would have made it. In fact, in its own way, Teen Wolf is an effective counter to Hughes's self-important teenage epics. Not as much as Heathers would prove to be but in its developing celebration of teamwork rather than peer-enforced conformity earns it a lot of points.

Michael J. Fox, still high on his Alex role in the hit com Family Ties and a smash in the recent Back to the Future is perfect casting for Scott. Credibly good looking and affectless, his charisma seems effortless next to most of the cast of stock characters. Jerry Levine slots into the kind of identikit Ferris whacky guy who surfs car roofs and comes up with publicity and money making schemes. Seldom has a high schooler looked so thirty something. Lorie Griffin as alpha Pamela shows promise but is written so flat that all she has to do is look pretty and be casually bitchy. Susan Ursitti as Boof is the only younger cast member that meets Fox on his own level. Her quiet persistence and nuanced longing are masked with the kind of day-to-day relaxed face that her character does a little too well. Of the adults, James Hampton plays a lightly whacky werewolf dad to Scott which offers both gravitas and era-typical bizarreness to a comedy parent.

For a score we get a dominance of what Americans still think of as '80s music with a kind of Neanderthal take on yacht rock broken up by sugary electronics. That's the way you had to sell it at the time, even after some promising looks away like the Risky Business score (mind you, that was Tangerine Dream). What are you gunna do, it works for the party and prom scenes.

Teen movies from this context are dominated by John Hughes whose pontificating style imposed itself on everything not touched by the Spielberg stable. This is what makes a film like Teen Wolf feel so light. The ersatz Ferris Bueller, Stiles feels like a loser without the Bueller sociopathy and when Scott does his more gynmastic turn surfing on the car roof it feels more ho hum than it should. Instead of light I got the sense that this, like everything in the same vein, had to pass the Hughes test to get funded. There is unrealised seriousness here that might have broken it out. It would be years until Heathers and decades until the power of Ginger Snaps but who's complaining, Teen Wolf was a world wide hit which is what it was meant to be, it just happened to have been made at a time when looking away from the assembly line just felt too dangerous.

Review: FRIENDSHIP

Craig corrects a misdelivered parcel to his neighbour Austin and inadvertently finds a new friend. Not just a guy you can wave to as you see them in the street but someone to go on adventures with. Craig is in the manipulation business, designing advertising strategies to keep consumers hooked to products. Austin is a weatherman on TV who smokes, drinks and leads a punk band on his nights off. Austin takes Craig to an urban exploration into the old city sewer system which ends in a warm bonding moment. So, it's a bromance? Nope.

At a night with some of Austin's buds Craig pushes through the inhibition he feels was holding him back but it ends in him committing a massive faux pas. What started out as a kind of suburban Fight Club inverts to Craig almost switching roles with Austin who turns all normie after a promotion at work. This is really not going to plan. 

Nothing is, though. Craig's family life is introduced after his wife Tami's successful battle with cancer. One of the first things you hear her say is that she would like to have an orgasm again. Craig, trying to cover the embarrassment announces that he has plenty of his own orgasms. When his son and share a child parent kiss it's on the lips. He notices and remarks on it but it's dropped. On an outing with his son at a shopping centre a middle aged man goes by riding a vehicle that looks like a pig with blinking lights. It's also commented on.

These moments not only save Friendship from ever easing off into cuteness they serve the film's modus operandi: destabilisation. Tim Robinson has built a comedy career on social distress with his I Think You Should Leave sketches. Their approach is transported here to feature length proportions. After Craig's faux pas with the buddies, he's given a dry and unpleasant breakup speech by Austin. He tries joining the smokers at work as they huddle outside but the guy's night in he gets them to at his basement lasts only minutes before he throws everyone out. This film does not allow its audience to get too comfy, even with its frequently bleak comedy.

Robinson fights for our empathy and we are surprised to grant it. Partly, this is due to the victimhood he suffers but it's also due to the motivations of those around him. When he disrupts a customer pitch at work what we notice most is that he's breaking through the falsehood of his own career. But then, we don't feel like cheering the self-destruction. He's neither a golden hearted jerk nor a corporate terrorist like Tyler Durden. If anything, his responses are the sporadically overkilling ones of Leo Bloom in the Producers or Sheldon's in The In Laws, given the switch he breaks it.

To the very end we have to guess where things are going as the stakes of personal antipathy between friends and family soar and the means to arrest the damage increasingly fail. Paul Rudd as Austin's change from urban freedom fighter to rat race running conformist is jolting but his counter in Craig's chaos makes it work (or at least explains it as a necessity). Kate Maras long suffering Tami's choices feel like she is waking from a lifelong fog (reminiscent of  Being John Malkovich's Lotte)

There is a scene toward the end that repeats an early one in which the seeds of imbalance are planted. Its warmth and resolve feel like a  genuine reward. This leads to another that suggests a development in the friendship but is left ambiguous. 

I don't know if Tim Robinson can develop or refine his sketch comedy persona further than he has here. His performance is so committed and solid it suggests that his future career could stay at the one-shot that it feels like or into something else entirely. It's definitely not the stuff of comedy franchises. I'll be interested to see where it does go.

This is one for the cinema. Not because of any high vistas or action setpieces but for the density of its psychology that, while not academically taxing is nevertheless sincere and probing and would be easily missed if your phone was there to distract you. It's to be seen without pause and all the attention you can muster. It's a comedy, not the type that makes you chortle but smile with recognition and even sadness. In the year's offerings so far, it's among the highpoints.

CATCH-22 @ 55

It's World War II and Yossarian the bombardier wants out. He asks the squadron doctor to ground him but learns the paradoxical clause of the title. If someone was insane they would not be permitted to fly more missions but only sane people would ask to be relieved of the duty so they are fit to fly more missions. The doctor can't ground Yossarian without compromising his own position. The limit on missions before relief keeps growing, well past the initial twenty-five limit. Meanwhile, the supply officer, Lieutenant Minderbinder is doing deals on goods between the air base and anyone else who'll trade. As a sticky web of rorts and absurdist situations grows the military life looks both like a lark and a huge deadly nightmare.

It was 1970 and any military-based movie that wasn't an old school gung-ho shouter was anti-war and, whatever war it was superficially referring to, always led back to the one the U.S.A. was losing in Vietnam. The conflict that was revealing to Americans through its own tv screens, the wasting decay of old heroism and the way of the good guys, was linked inextricably to anything on screen in a uniform. Claims like destroying a village in order to save it and the atrocity at Mi Lai had rewritten the order and the culture was ready for cynicism and a slap in the face to authority. They were ready, in other words, for Catch-22 and M.A.S.H.

Mike Nicholls who had made a name on TV not only with directorial efforts but as part of a satirical improv act with the great Elaine May (this is worth YouTubeing) but more recently had impressed with his transposition of the Albee stage nerve-fest Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf with the world's celebrity divorcees Burton and Taylor and then the middle class shock comedy of The Graduate. Joseph Heller, author of the source novel, knew Nicholls was right after rejecting the redoubtable Richard Brooks and Richard Quine. Nicholls worked with black comedy stalwart Buck Henry for two years on the screeenplay and, though it diverted from the novel, got the author's full approval. 

Nicholl's cast was of the massive kind touted for major event movies but on a more varied scale: Orson Welles, Martin Balsam, Anthony Perkins, Alan Arkin, John Voigt, Richard Benjamin, Paula Prentiss, Bob Newhart, Charles Grodin. Add pop star Art Garfunkel and you have a castlist that doesn't play fair. Is it a send-up or serious? Nicholls' wrangling of this herd alone should earn him kudos but that he manages to allow someone like Newhart his comedic hysteria but Perkins his restrained explosion and so on, while giving Orson any damn thing he pleased, makes this potentially cutesy comedy a multi-textured tour de force.

This is before you get to astounding sequences in which actors have to deliver layered dialogue against the sights and sounds of massive explosions and a Mitchell bomber crash landing behind them. The aircraft management is, of course, done without a frame of anything but cameras and lighting (but that does include some rear projection): when you see planes, you are really looking at planes. One shot of a downed bomber's tail section in the sea as a distant intact one flies closer to the horizon while dialogue continues will inform or remind you that they really just can't make 'em like this anymore.

But none of this visual dazzle suggests the depth of the satire and how it mounts to epic scale toward the third act. Yossarian (an explosive and hilarious Alan Arkin) with his highly localised mission to escape the military and the war might be rendered insignificant by Milo's rampaging and stinkingly corrupt capitalism, but its essential humanity is never lost to us. By the time Milo is marshalling the streets in control of the local sex work, he has secured control of the war itself on the local scale, resembling both a carnival barker and a fascist dictator. Even more, we want Yossarian out of there.

My memory of this film is one of hearing it from behind the wall of the front seat of my father's Humber on a family outing to the drive-in. After Snowden's guts pour out of his life jacket in Yossarian's motif memory, that's how I "watched the rest of hte film. My brother exaggerated the grisliness of the scene and for years I dared not watch the movie. I had seen the bisection of Hungry joe by McWatt in the light plane and thought that was bad. Then again, I was eight or nine (parents, what were you thinking?) It turned up on Brisbane TV in 1980 and I did watch it. The guts scene was edited and the film played fine without it. Two decades later, on DVD, I was ready for it after a bout half a decade of catching up with horror movies I'd missed from the '80s onwards.

Catch-22 was beaten at the box office both by Robert Altman's M.A.S.H. and Franklin Schaffner's Patton, two very different films, but its reputation has since lifted. It has also aged much better than both. The male-gaze leering that feels juvenile and icky in M.A.S.H. is more diegetic here; the bomber crews' lust is offered as comic but is also saddening. Nurse Duckett gives way better than she gets from Yossarian with a double knee to the groin in a scene that calls for both. The sex workers in Rome are given more economic understanding that Fellini gave them two years later. The film has more compassion than a satire's ethical mudget usually gets. Against its example the swathe of late '60s and early '70s knockabout examples seldom come close to matching it for its underlying gravity.

But that's it, the dark undercurrent's energy saves it the way it saved the following year's Harold and Maude from ever straying into the cultural safety of M.A.S.H. (for all its frat boy jibes) or the still queasy unease of Patton. It's Catch-22 that reaches from the past as a response to an exhausting era. When the time came to take a similar look at the first Gulf War in Three Kings, this was the example that led it. 

DEEP RED @ 50

Mark, a young jazz maestro in Rome, witnesses the murder of a co-tenant of his building but is powerless to stop it. As the killer progresses through everyone who gets close to making an identification, Mark is drawn into an investigation of his own as he, too, is now under threat. This takes him on an intriguing journey through darkness.

The Giallo genre, a series of crime films popular in Italy from the '60s to the '70s, was on the wane in its native country. Dario Argento had made his start as a film maker with one only five years before (The Bird With the Crystal Plumage) and had contributed two more, neat and deadly entries. Whether he was wanting to revive the flagging genre or finish it off with a cinematic mountain, what he achieved was one of the most articulate and ranging examples of it with sumptuous sets, eyepopping kills, arresting music and solid central performances.

David Hemmings is paired with Daria Nicolodi (co-writer of the later Suspiria and future spouse of Argento) and they have a ball colliding with each other until the sparks turn into arc lighting. The closest Hemmings had come to the slapstick antics on screen here was the mime scene in Blow-Up. In Deep Red his character endures frequent indignities at the hands of the impossible new-feminist Gianna, her difficult car with the glove-box filled with airline booze bottles and whose power at arm wrestling leads to some hilarious embarrassment. 

This plays against a frequently grim series of murders. No one in Gialli ever seems to get shot. They get decapitated, pierced by shards, knifed, sliced by sliding doors, alright, but I can only think of one case where a gun is used for a kill in the decades of the genre. The medium at the start is despatched by knife and then finished off with the glass of a broken window. There is death by boiling water, death by impact with a marble fireplace and a range of others as this high strung movie gets on with it.

Goblin's score tread a fine line between insistent electronic motive and outright prog rock. Both fit perfectly. There is also the eerie lullaby that plays over the mid credit sequence that pits the sharp violence against its disarming major/minor tonality. The motif was a direct influence on John Carpenter's theme for Halloween with its pressing grind and pealing piano figures.

As to plot, Gialli never boasted particularly tight examples, preferring to mix cultural shock value of "deviant" sexuality and decadence. Argento writes a coherent story and (you'll see this on a repeat viewing) plays fair by matching an early, easily missed detail, with a later revelation.

Now, all this gush aside, it should be noted that by current standards, Deep Red is a snail of a thriller. Personal investigation stories will, by necessity, have stretches in the middle act where everyone has to stop and take stock of the mystery and its dangers before racing to the finish but the Italian genre liked to ask its audiences in for a coffee or a drink, a red herring on toast and then a big finish followed by a coda no one saw coming. Deep Red's middle act is a lot of chemical bickering between the leads as the kill setups get more elaborate. This makes for a fascinating atmosphere but it doesn't hurry. 

What it does do is widen the style, growing increasingly baroque in detail. The location of an old murder case that might be pertient is found through horticulture. A victim is distracted by the sight of one of the ghastliest walking puppets you are ever likely to see. He is a target because he discovers something hidden on a bathroom wall. When Mark discovers the child's horror drawing of the historical murder behind the plaster of an old house, he is led back to the scene to investigate a detail he missed only to discover an even more horrific scene. 

All of this actually does add up. If his next film (Suspiria) threw narrative cogency out the window in favour of heavy violence and even more style, Deep Red plays like the highest that Giallo ever got as a rational film genre. I'm leaving out the treatment of the character Marco's gayness as it deserves more attention than I can give it, here. I will say that, along with other LGBTQ depictions in Argento's films, it is far too easy to characterise him as othering these characters in order to execute a Hollywood style punishment. It's not advocacy but it is live and let live. It wasn't all Fellini.

It is, as the saw goes, a pleasure to live at the beginning and end of an era. You could do worse, assuming you can find them (probably only on physical media now) than Deep Red be paired on a film night with Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace. Both are strikingly visual and bracingly violent crime thrillers with aesthetic sensibilities more attuned to the realm of old master painters and Jacobean revenge playwrights than 20th century filmmakers. If that sounds good to you, track these down. You will be holding on to them, if you do.

Viewing notes: I watched Arrow Video's stunning 4K presentation of Deep Red in its extended cut. I could have chosen a 5.1 audio track in Italian of the cobbled English/Italian hybrid. This is a splicing of elements discovered long after the first edits were released, a reassembly that meant that a number of scenes suddenly go into an Italian dub. I have always found this easy to get used to and highlights David Hemmings' full performance (he dubbed his own part at the time). It's only offered in 2 channel but it's worth it.

AMERICAN PSYCHO @ 25

In an early scene, Patrick Bateman takes us through his morning skin routine, a complex series of named products and tasks, that allows his privileged youth to remain vibrant and beautiful. He is also warning us of the implication of the title, ending with, "I simply am not there." As we follow his progress through the culture of 1% Manhattanites, with its multitude of micro-aggressions and abstracted savagery, we see how he responds to this rarefied stress with acts of extreme violence. If Patrick is driven to atrocity by such means what happens when they get too much for him?

Brett Easton Ellis' dark satire on yuppiedom in the '80s was considered unfilmable for the intensity of its graphically described violence. Screenplays, including one by Easton Ellis, came and went until almost a decade after its publication, this adaptation was released. So how did it go?

I recall a conversation in the '90s where a friend proposed Oliver Stone as director and the still young enough Robert Downey Jr as Bateman. It was a thrilling idea, the kind that can take a conversation from fat chewing to the corners of inspiration. We imagined scenes from the book we'd read in annihilating colour on screen. The novel was a must read at the time, a book deemed taboo here but bold there. 

The original cover art gave us a Bateman in a suit. His face was either a mask with darkened eyeholes or his face crowned with a film of bloody red. Out of context, you'd take it as a tribute to Francis Bacon. It looked fearsome. Then, when I read it, I found it to be wincingly violent but also constantly humorous in the same way as his debut novel Less Than Zero. The violence, though, is flavour and emphasis, not purpose. That is what Mary Harron understood.

Easton Ellis' uber privileged are shown as shark-like competitors in bespoke clothing, suggesting that Bateman is only enacting what his friends and colleagues only dream of doing if they weren't already performing an abstracted expression of it in their business dealings. In one of the few passages addressing his childhood in the novel, Bateman is afflicted by rage. We don't need that here and a lot of that has to do with the casting of Christian Bale.

Bale at twenty-six presented an unblemished beauty strengthened by near constant exercise. His blankness is perfected rather than undermined by his narration and has Bateman perform his smile which is free of any genuine joy. If you've ever known someone who engages in conversation in order to pounce on points and finish their ridicule with a weird blurting AI laugh, you will know this characterisation: a life-draining continuous antagonism. When we see him prepare to attack, we don't need to see the results. If anything they would detract from the effect of Bateman's remove (even from his own actions). Harron continues the mystery of the scene with the coathanger from the novel in that neither explains what he used it for, only suggesting its gravity through the results, knowing that we who read and see and fill in blanks are going to supply the worst we can. And when we do, we are, however temporarily, kin to Bateman.

The rest of the cast are also astutely chosen to give us an elite New York that is intimidatingly urbane and dangerous to approach with the likes of Jared Leto, Justin Theroux and Reese Witherspoon. Chloe Sevigny also impresses as the timid but observant Jean. Willem Dafoe turns up in a role that shows he really can do restraint, as the quietly canny detective who understands more than he reveals. I can't finish this without mentioning the work of cinematographer Andrzej Sekula whose compositions go from sumptuous lifestyle brochure perfection to the ugly over lighted moments at venues that are rinsed with discomfort.

American Psycho is the kind of literary adaption that comprehends its source material. The book that might have got its author cancelled if it appeared more recently and the film based on it both prove both funnier and less extreme than feared. The thread of wavering identity, the rupture between a fantasised wish fulfilment and diegetic reality is nauseously blurry. It recalls another supposedly unfilmable novel made a few years before. David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch threw the issues with forming a literal report of Burroughs' eyepopping satirical epic by creating a companion to it. More recently Luca Guardaningno's take on the much shorter Queer managed to overstretch the source and make an unsatisfying thing of it. Guardangnino is currently at work on a remake of American Psycho. I won't be in line for that one, though, as Mary Harron has already made this one.