THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS @ 35 and HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER @ 40

Serial killer movies have been with us for a long time. Claims of which is the first interest me less than who was the first punk band. Both punk and serial killer movies peaked in their turn after any identifiable ancestors and the main task is to separate the cultural trend from the technically included. So, instead of doing that, I'm going to compare one from before the trend in the '90s with the one that started the trend. 

By the time Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, the term was known but not really hammered into the parlance. What became the joke about anyone a little awkward or withdrawn was more like a reference to a dark and grave phenomenon. John McNaughton's film keeps to that understanding. Its unflinching look at the violence is painful to the eye and its mood is grim.

Drifter Henry stops by Chicago to catch up with his friend Otis. Otis's sister Becky has also knocked on the door, escaping her husband's physical abuse. Becky is drawn to Henry's quiet power, partially because it stands between her and her carnally unrestrained brother. Meanwhile, Henry leads Otis into a life of murder as a leisure activity. I'm not going to spoil either of these movies, here, but you can already see where this is heading and, while you won't be surprised, I guarantee you will be horrified.

John McNaughton's film is stark and dour. Every surface looks like it would soil the lightest touch. These are people whose life decisions were formed in trauma and poverty. The Chicago of the setting is not the metropolis but the lightless apartment blocks and empty nocturnal streets. Becky's attempts to brighten her circumstances with chirpy optimism stop well short of the kind of grotesquerie that David Lynch might have imagined, this deep darkness feels far too grim for such whimsy and her cheery voice only reinforces the dread.

Henry, polite and personable in daily life transforms into an ultraviolent monster at any encountered slight. He goes from tipping the waitress at a diner and paying her a compliment to murdering the married couple at a liquor store. When Becky points out that his story of how he killed his mother changed in the same conversation the tension is unbearble. The moment is crossed, unsatisfactorily but cleared and marked for any future reference Henry might need. With Otis things are much worse. Henry is hard work. Can't suck up to him, can't deviate. In charge but without a plan.

At first the violence is depicted by a collision of lingering shots of the victims' corpses and the audio of the action played back. Eventually, we do see the acts and they are brutal but undramatic. A home invasion scene is dehumanisingly cruel and near impossible to watch without wincing or covering. Henry's policy is to vary the M.O., making detection difficult. This will only continue until Henry is stopped and that might take his own death. 

In The Silence of the Lambs young FBI trainee is pitted against the dangerous mind of a cannibalistic serial monster (now imprisoned) to help with a current case of near equal ghastliness. A bargain forms between the pair, a quid pro quo of expert opinion and personal trauma. While this hazardous pathway is negotiated, young Clarice is heading for a baptism of terror.

Really? Five paragraphs on an obscruity and just one for one of the most influential crime thrillers of all time? Yeah, but that's to do with that influence. The Silence of the Lambs is a film I didn't revere even as I first saw it, out with friends at the cinema on first release. My second viewing was for this blog. While I've softened on my disdain for it because of that, I still think its value lies in what it started, not what it was.

Jonathan Demme's film was made to hit and did so. It spawned a decade of copycat movies, each entering an arms race to produce a killer more brutal, ingenious and impossibly well resourced. I note two exceptions to this: Seven and The Ugly. While both plug in to the exploitative nature of the sub-genre they also both deviate from it in ways that distinguish them from the source point. The rest, The Cell, The Bone Collector, Kiss the Girls, and so many more, filled the form and played along with little to tell them apart by. 

And they mostly hit big, as well, with genius level criminals, elaborate murder methods and forbidding lairs. The dread in Henry had become the Grand Guignol of the big nihilistic '90s. In case you think I'm gittin' all judgey, be informed that I was first in line to see most of these at the cinema and those I missed got rented on VHS. I also got burned out by them and by the time Tarsem's eyepopping art-direction exercise The Cell appeared I tapped out and left the hall.

I am making this comparison because it highlights the irony that the earlier no-budget film is always grim but never sensational and the later one is a massive A-list cast extravaganza masking a tawdry exploitation movie. Silence is, at its best a well crafted dark crime thriller but it is also a movie that happily invites its audience to cheer the choice of victims by a killer who is nothing but an extended open target for othering. There is carefully placed dialogue in the film, between Clarice and Hannibal, that Buffalo Bill is not a transsexual but scenes of him have all the subtlety of bait. The sleaze is not Bill's, it's Demme's and source novelist Thomas Harris'. It's the popcorn and choctop selling sleaze of mega suits tripping on a goldmine. 

What's new? Not that but if any of us is going to laud a movie as near perfect or subtle or profound as Silence has been regarded, where is the love for the first big screen Hannibal in Michael Mann's more complex and harder to love Manhunter from the same year as Henry? It's the Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster pairing along with a massive budget that did that. Next to that, the modestly made but severe and brutal Henry can never compete, though its violence has none of the scary titillation of Demme's film (if you are aroused by the murders in Henry the problem is not in the film). 

Silence created a trend of mounting depravity that licenced its audiences to switch sides after the devil stand-in got too bad and cheered on the good guys when they kicked down the door. No wonder Seven's refusal to allow John Doe genius (he's actually more of an a proto sovereign citizen) made it stand out. No wonder Simon's fear of self is more striking than a committee-designed super-psycho.

I was ready to be humbled by a revisit to The Silence of the Lambs, hoping I'd see more to it a second time, but it just wasn't there. Then again, it did give the TV great The X-Files its base aesthetic (tellingly). Henry, on the other hand punched me in the gut all over again. Its power is palpable in the notes its not playing and that never turns into TV.

Viewing notes: I turned to my old DVD for Henry (scrubs up well for an oldie) and watched Silence on Prime (but its licence just ran out so it's not there anymore. You can rent both through Prime and VOD. You can still get a Blu-Ray or DVD of Silence but you'll have to look online for any phsycial copy of Henry.

TAXI DRIVER @ 50 (Spoilers: it's 50!)

Travis is lost. He got out of the army ok but maybe not Vietnam. It's the mid-'70s and he's still in his mid-20s and he doesn't know what to do. He tries to beat his chronic insomnia with late night porn shows or just driving around. Figuring he might as well get paid for the driving, he gets his chauffeur's licence and a job driving cabs. All good except that this isn't really doing it, either. When you get a tough young man whose was legally killing people in his late teens and can't ever quite see himself married behind a white picket fence, you get one who thinks like this: "Some day a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets." He's not in but he's not out and he's still not getting any sleep.

Paul Schrader's screenplay came from somewhere silmiar. No military service but estrangement from two relationships and a kind of PTSD from a severe ascetic religious upbringing and lost in LA, holed up in a motel, he kept to himself and remembers not talking to anyone else for weeks at a time. Noting where his own thought trains took him in that state, he conjured Travis Bickle, God's Lonely Man, a self-appointed champion looking for a cause.

Travis does try the conventional lane, all but stalking a woman he has seen who is working for a political candidate and simmering up the courage to ask her out. Over coffee and pie Betsy is intrigued if not openly attracted and agrees to see a movie with him. Ok, so the only movies he has any idea about are the ones he tried to use on his insomnia and they go off to one of the era's attempts at legitimising pornography (Deep Throat, Last Tango in Paris, I am Curious) except this one ingtercuts quasi expert panels with clips of orgies. Besty storms out, rails at him when he follows her out. And he still doesn't understand. His attempts at reconcilation result in bouquets of returned flowers, disintegrating in his apartment and a cringing phone call that sees even the camera avert its eye, preferring the void of the corridor.

Ok, well that didn't work, why not centre his attention on her precious presidential candidate. Travis works out, gets cleaner and the tone of his voiceover monologue more delusional and violent. He buys guns, fashions wearable rigs for them and goes to the Senator's rallies. Greatness thrust upon him? He gets chased off but it'll keep. Besides, he's found someone else.

Iris is a twelve year old sex worker wjho almost escaped her bondage in his cab one night. He cases her situation and identifies the bad guys. You know where this is going.

How this story got the attention and then the directorial custody of Martin Scorsese is a compelling story in itself. What resulted from a few years of Schrader hawking the script and Marty building his rap sheet was a perfect storm of cinematic power. Fifty years on, Taxi Driver remains vital, engaging and terrifying. I've known people from more recent generations to be astonished by its vintage. It still feels contemporary the same way that Bowie's Heroes still sounds like the future. How contemporary? Well, when podcaster Jamie Loftus referred to Travis Bickle as the Incel King, in the past few years, I didn't bat an eyelid.

This was from Loftus'  Lolita Podcast which is well worth your ear's capacity. She wasn't laying the charge of incel advocacy, proto or not, at the feet of Taxi Driver as much as exposing its advocacy by that community. Travis' monologues about Betsy are of an idealism that is stretched so thin that the hostility behind them shows through like a radiant ghost: one step of hers toward realistic behaviour would unleash it and indeed does. Is there some inherent decency in his later championing of Iris? Maybe, but the championing reminds me of something I read online. A woman was reposting comments sent her by a stalker who was attempting to woo her but then hoisted his own crimson pennant with something like: ... and I will crush the life from any creep who dares to bother you. Beyond a certain point, Travis his right to your pity. He's a naif only as long as he keeps away from the creepy gun dealer and plans for assassination or urban "clean up".

He's racist, naively puritanical, violent. Scorsese's cameo as the would be wife killer who forces Travis to listen a ghastly game plan that gives him the idea of buying a particular overqualified pistol, is an encounter with a being of equally lethal thought but the will to enact it without more justification than personal vengeance. The scene is there to plant a seed in Travis' head. "If this guy can do it..."

But nowhere does this get weirder or darker than the scene where Iris' pimp, Sport, reassures her of his love and gaslights her fears for her own life and future. They embrace to the sound of a song on the record player as he recites what is often called a Barry White seduction number. It is tender and sounds real, a declaration of devotion from a thirty year old to a twelve year old. The icky boldness of the scene has not lessened. It's a marvel of performance between Harvey Keitel and Jodie Foster (who was replaced by her of-age sister for all intimate and sexual shots) and is a direct contrast between the breakfast Iris has with Travis who, in contrast at that moment, briefly comes across as benign. 

This scene would be impossible to fund in current cinema. One critic's insistence that it shows what the audiences for John Ford's The Searchers never got to see, the possible benevolence of the Native Americans to the abducted Debbie. The hyper-racist ethics of that film could fill encyclopedias but its scaled down redress in this scene might remind us that Ford's film did not embrace the revenger's compulsion (while indulging in its own goofy version of othering). The difficulty of the passage, intentional in production, calls out over decades. It's still there. What do we think? What can we think?

Scorsese's craft sets this story in a New York of neon, sleaze and brutal barganing that has made its way into any film since that needs to convey the Hellscape of urban life. It's there in Seven, decades on, in clear tribute as the aged Detective Somerset tells his own cabby to take him, "anywhere but here." Scorsese and his cinematographer Mike Champman used available light and avoiding towing for the car shots, giving us a Manhattan both crisply beautiful and contagiously ugly. The contrast with the pastels and daylight of the honest world is like salt and sugar. The two collide when the Senator happens into Travis' cab one night and Travis lets loose one of his repulsive rants. The politician's restrained response is delivered through a mask of professional performance less contrived than Travis' gushing fandom.

When the bonds between the authority of the status quo and the self-styled knight errant drive toward the third-act massacre, it does feel like fulfilled action but also catastrophic contempt for all the convention that it professeses to be defending. The coda, after Travis has been media-ed up as a celebrtity vigilante and gets a surprise fare from a clearly revising Betsy, has often been considered Travis' fantasy. That does work but I think in the same year as the Mosaicly judgemental satire Network, a literal take on the ending carries even more poignancy.

Almost forgot, Bernard Hermann's cool jazzy score was his last; he died the day after handing it in. It was unusual in its day for its unapologetic retro flavour when other films of the time were opting for irony in needledrops or going electronic. It used to irritate me but, more recently, it just feels accurate. I love it.

What else? Part of the perfect storm that made this film is the casting. A young Robert De Niro as  Travis brings all his method and intensity to the role, double taking at every point of incomprehension, bearing and revealing a scary personal power. The famous, "you talkin' to me," scene had none of his lines scripted. It came out in rehearsal and Scorsese went with it, adding the disconcerting jump cuts as Travis revises his own routine. Cybil Shepherd gives Betsy the full '70s urban professional woman about town, finding (at least initially) Travis' menace attractive then horrifying. Her pushback deserves a cheer. Harvey Keitel has the thankless task of making Sport palatable and mostly does so through humour but then there is his Barry White moment which still challenges us. Jodie Foster both shocks and rends hearts as Iris, her vulnerability a thin suggestion from exposure. Albert Brooks is correct when he says he plays Betsy's workmate as a guy who can be funny, not a comedian. All of this falls under the masterful hand of one perfect with timing, Scorsese himself who deserves his own cheer as the chilling murderous husband who not only knows what a Magnum 44 will do to a woman's face but also to her "pussy" ("Now THAT you gotta see!). His one scene contains the art of his realisation of the whole screenplay. 

Considering the current critical response by the culture to the Manosphere and its grifting advantage over the faceless and numberless hoardes of keyboard-clicking handles of vengeful construction, it's likely that Taxi Driver will never fall from relevance. Holy hell, my own generation of cinephiles could fire its infamous dialogue between each other as though it was a stock of passwords. If there is a fault to current reception of the cinema of codes it lies in the preference for literal interpretation. This is not a literal text. We are not offered Travis' manifesto-like garbage as touch points, nor Sport's seduction of Iris as cosily as it is presented. Taxi Driver puts it all up there on screen and leaves it to us. We need to read.

Viewing notes: I first saw this movie on a Steenbeck editing desk at Griffith University. I came in halfway and had to supplement that with the VHS when I went home for the holidays. I have seen it at a cinema but mostly on home formats. The result, nothing damages its core. For this blog, I watched my 4K edition which looks as close to the projected film as you'd want, grain in lower light and perfect rich colour for anything else. You can get the DVD for about $10 or rent it from the usual streamers and VOD. 

Review: THE STRANGER

Meursault, young, beautiful and carefree is having a week. He goes from meeting his obligations after his mother's death to picking up a new girlfriend, to falling into involvement with his neighbour's affairs over an Arab woman, to, because the sun was in his eyes, shooting her brother on a beach. It's the Vichy '40s and if you're French you can fly free of the charge of taking out a indigine but at Meursault's trial, the prosecution want to make an example and effectively try him for being disrespectful to his dead mother.

Albert Camus' absurdist story, often entitled The Outsider in English, posits the notion that anyone whose indifference to most of the universe and its team playing crowds will be crushed by them for the insult of refusing to join him. For that reason anyone who reads the novel in their teens or early twenties is likely to identify with every shockingly honest answer he gives to the queries of daily life. His girlfriend asks if he loves her and he rejects the question as meaningless. She then asks if he will marry her and he says sure, why not? and she asks if another woman asked him he'd give the same answers (including the one about marriage) and he says naturally. If this story were told today without reference to Camus' book Meursault might be depicted as being on the austism spectrum. That was never Camus' point. So, how does contemporary auteur Francois Ozon handle it?

Going from the surface, it's set in 1942 and it's in black and white. There is a class divide between the French colonialists and the Algerians. Meursault lives and moves through his days with as little engagement with the rest of humanity as he can manage. He is not a misanthrope nor a Dostoyevskian Underground Man, just someone who communicates only when he has cause and avoids the general annoying flow of life. While Ozon manages to drain the humour from what is a frequently hilarious book, he nevertheless offers a sincere depiction of Meursault's state. 

The indifference which readers for generations have registered as both comical and alarming is splashed across the screen, told not only in Meursault's own evident moment to moment disdain of physical discomfort (the heat is more painful to him than the effect of his mother's death), and the interactions with those around him. Ozon builds this and takes his time. By the scenes where he is publicly reviled for this indifference more violently than his act of murder we are left concerned at his failure to make a case for himself that would not only infuriate the judges and witnesses in the courtroom. 

But then, by the scenes where he grows to understand his relation to the universe and it indifference to anything it contains he finds a kind of perfection that perplexed readers and now audiences of his tale. And what, I wonder, would younger audiences who have not encountered this accessible book make of this film? The trailer that looked like a cosmetics ad with lean and photogenic young people in the sun told nothing of the story. The film itself which works like a Trojan to dispell the impression of the trailer by dumping Meursault into his daily life where we see his detachment and its strange effect. A young man with clear prospects of advancement has so little so say for himself that when he does speak, his lack of connection can startle. Benjamin Voisin in the role uses his prefect beauty for blandness for most of the first half of the film; a man who takes pleasure in wine and sex and the Mediterranean beaches but when annoyed by the blinding glint of a knife, plugs another man with bullets.

In the final act where Meursault gets the chance to broaden and set fire to his self-ideas to reach his state that might be self-negation or cosmic acceptance, he has become straggle-bearded and wild, only very superficially a Jesus but more profoundly a prehistoric figure recognising his place and welcoming the hatred of the world of joiners and judges.

Ozon's insistence on a tension between the growing blandness of the beauty we see and its undercutting existential tension can feel draggy. You can simply sit back and wonder at the richness of the monochrome landscapes, beaches and city life. Indeed, it can feel as though you are invited to. But the Givenchy ad aesthetics here are the decievers, do you fold yourself into that smoothness or work to discern the grind beneath? How close do you get to feeling the apparent ease of Meursault's expressed ennui?

I hate comparisons but there is one worth making here as it is with a very distinct approach. Luchino Visconti's 1967 film presents a much more adamant character. Played by Marcello Mastroiani (who even looks a little like Albert Camus), Meursault is fiery. It works because the readers of the book want that mix of stoicism and passion. Ozon's delay of the latter might feel like a drag but it is truer to Camus' purposes. It means that this newer take with its etheral electronic score (and needle drop treat for those who know over the end credits) allows audiences to take it away and let it bake. And it will taste of bread either nurturing or over processed but bread all the same.

CARRIE @ 50

Carrie White is not having a good day. First, she flubs a catch at volleyball and gets bullied by the other kids. Then, in the shower after the game, everything is going fine until she starts bleeding. She's seventeen which seems late but there's no rulebook for menstruation. That's not the bad bit. The bad bit is her mother not telling her anything about it. At all. You'll meet her mother in a minute. Meantime, Carrie heads to the rowdy crowd of teenage girls as though she might be dying, holding out her bloodied hands in horror. Well, they're teenagers and their ridicule is a babel of taunts and jibes accompanied by a hail of tampons from the shower room dispensers. The PE teacher breaks it up and takes Carrie aside, dispersing the rabble. She takes Carrie to the principal for a day pass. While he means well, he fumbles every attempt at soothing the girl including getting her name wrong so many times that her psychic tolerance meter bursts and she breaks an ashtray. Really, really, really, not a good day.

Her mother Margaret is doorknocking for The Lord. She gets past the mat at one of her daughter's schoolmate's place and is dismissed with a palpable embarrassment. Oh, that's why Carrie never expected what her body was about to do. When both are back home and Margaret gets a call from the school about why Carrie's back early, she flies into a religious rage and punishes her daughter with a spell in the household solitary. Meanwhile, the rest of the girls in the team get detention and one incorrigible loudmouth gets her prom ticket withdrawn. She storms from the scene plotting revenge. So, now the crazy religious parent is blaming her for the sins of all the world and the alphachick is blaming her for missing out on the school's big night and all Carrie ever did was start her period.

Brian De Palma's adaptation of Stephen King's book is one of his most blatant genre films but also one of his most nuanced and deep. What looks like male gaze fetishism in the slomo credit sequence with the rich strings and frontal nudity of people meant to be seventeen is completely undercut by Carrie's menstrual flow. De Palma knew perfectly well that any frat boy or suburban dad getting off on all the flesh and play was going to get the ick as soon as Carrie's pubesence gets real. You would be on a surer bet to accuse the detention workout scene with its sassy music and PE teacher banter but by then the rules have changed. If you really want to get aroused by the girls in their gym outfits moving their bodies so stridently you're probably better off going to a specialist cinema. It's not that it isn't there (it clearly is) it's just that it has more context now. 

De Palma was no hack by this stage, having cut his teeth on a good number of apprentice and journeyman titles to reach the high variety rap sheet that included Obsession, Sisters, and Phantom of the Paradise. Carrie was his first outright horror tale but he clearly enjoyed the kind of suburban darkness of King's style. While the dastardly arc of the revenge plot is writ in giant letters of blood, the development on the ground is Sue's genuine remorse for her part in tormenting Carrie. Sue's insistence on getting her jock boyfriend to ask Carrie to the prom is part of this and offers the possibility that there might be more Christian sacrifice here than in all the operatic blustering of Margaret White.

Then, of course, Margaret's big key to sancitmony is her guilt at the sexual pleasure she felt which she associated with facing life as an abandoned mother to a freak of nature. Her evangelistic Christianity is an unpoppable bubble. Piper Laurie's task in playing this is a tough one. She needs to rail and harrangue as though she means it but to show compassion for her daughter in constant battle with her revulsion. Her dialogue doesn't always allow this but there are scenes in which her torment rises to the surface and the loud robot that results is terrifying.

On the other side, the perfectly cast Sissy Spacek, pale and frail with ragged hair and freckles emerges from the shock of discovering menstruation to a being more determined than ever to declare her independence and will. This, however, does not stem the strength of her psychokinetic powers. As we see the prank in construction in the middle act we tense up at its effects. Spacek plays things raw as though the acts of compassion she does encounter from the likes of the teacher and Tommy Ross (a naturalistic and believable nice alpha boy from William Katt) are scarcely credible miracles. She sees them but is ready for pain. If Spacek's mumbling small town girl in Badlands a few years before was the promise, this credible incredible turn is the fulfilment. Both she and Piper Laurie were nominated for Oscars.

On the lesser side of ethics, the baddies also get good casting. Nancy Allen as uber bitch Chris and her minion Norma (a sneering PJ Soles) do their work but show the vulnerability of their characters' age. Chris's boyfriend is a rising John Travolta who was about to have a very good late '70s. His Billy is comedically macho, thick as two planks but in service to Chris's manipulation, a laughing monster.

When prom night rolls around and all the players and their designs start converging we get a Carrie ready to break from her mother's control. Chris's horrible prank is set to go. Those who know and those who don't flood the venue with the urgency of kids on their night of nights. Tommy is convincingly and touchingly kind to Carrie but knows how to play it for real. And then it's time and it happens.

And then De Palma goes into his own mode of split screen and slow mo to draw out the violence of the prank and Carrie's automatically ruthless and instant revenge. Blood bath after blood bath. The setpiece is part of cinema history and deserves its place. The genre would soon shy from large budgets after the success of a mouse that roared (John Carpenter's Halloween) as keeps happening, but until that time the cinema of the suits could produce this biblically proportioned spectacle. It's a wonder.

I won't spoil the final shot nor the showdown between mother and daughter as they are best seen without prior knowledge. What I will say is that from a culture that was busily deconstructing its cold war puritanism with films that exposed it like Network, Taxi Driver and Carrie, we can heed the call as a warning as we witness the rise of authoritarianism, ruling cynicism and unbound bronze age inspired sloganeering. We'd do well to witness and remember Tommy Ross taking Carrie White by the hand to the dance floor, regardless of the ridicule surrounding them as decency (even that required by others) is still the better choice.

Viewing notes: I watched the magnificent 4K treatment of Carrie from Scream Factory. There is an equivalent local release from Imprint but it costs a bomb. There might well be a more afforabvle standard edition down the road, though. Prime offers it with a subscription.

THE OTHERS @ 25

Grace and her two children live in a mansion on Jersey. It's just past world war two and the Nazi occupiers have left but so have the servants of grace's mansion house. Three locals knock on the door and offer their domestic services and, after some confusion, are let in and start work. But there are restrictions. The windows of the rooms are to be curtained off at all times when the children are in them. The children are allergic to light. When one door is open, the other door must be locked. There are sounds of movement in the house when no one should be there to make them. Grace's daughter Anne claims she sees a boy her own age called Victor. The house is bound by fog.

This is a tale of whispers and shadows, of memory recorded and repressed. And it is a story of responsibility. But none of that is served up front. We need to take our time following Grace and her observations of what is happening in her house. We need to listen to the conversation between her children and observe all of their relations with the servants. We are going to be led on a strange journey which won't make sense until the end (beyond its twist) and then will probably stay unsettled in any thoughts you have of it afterwards.

The look of the piece is a kind of magic hour gothic with deep black shadows and golden tones. The score is spare and quite conventional with slight screeching strings stabbing and discordant swells for momentum. But this feels appropriate. There are no jump scares to warrant orchestral explosions. This situation keeps things on a constantly uncertain balance.

Nicole Kidman as Grace gives us a parent on continuous alert. The order she seeks in the running of the day to day keeps dismantling delicately. She doubts her children's claims of what they have seen but has nothing to replace the stories with. It's a strong, sustained performance which can break into operatic histrionics but mostly kept in uneasy restraint. An old acquaintance of mine who had acted in theatre told me that her director told her to imagine that a pearl necklace had broken and scattered around the room and that she should be constantly examining the carpet for the unrecovered gems. Kidman's turn is like that, she attends each sound and quirk of light, thinking it might contain the solution to mysteries. That she never allows this to stretch into viewer fatigue is testament.

The three servants are led by Irish veteran Fionnula Flannagan whose patience and concern boast a gravitas which can only be understood as the darker details appear. Comedy veteran Eric Sykes reels all of his lifetime career's phsyicality to a hulking silence. On silence, Elaine Cassady's mute Lydia is given the thankless task of recieving information she does not like but cannot convey. If they feel clumped there is a reason for that. The story must have them and have them like this.

I'm going to leave one performance out as mentioning it would constitute a spoiler and I want you to see this film. I'll go straight to the children, instead. Nicholas, the boy with the unearthly pallor, is constantly puzzled to the extent of his sleep being dependably uneven and his queries frustrated. His older sister Anne has a wicked cheek, happily taunting her brother's worries and feeding disinformation like a learned brat. But she is also witness to the shapes of the goings on and her accounts of them are true. When she shows her mother what the figures she has seen look like in her drawing, Grace must admit that it does not feel like a child's fabrication. Anne has dealings with the others, most memorably in a scene which breaks the ambiguity. She, herself, is not afraid but is to receive a shock (beautifully played in a double take) in good time. Alakina Mann and James Bentley give us upper crust kids who are resolutely in their childhood, even when it would have been more convenient for them to grow up a little to aid the narrative.

As I say, I will not spoil this one. It's recent enough to discover anew. In the several rewatches I've done of it, I have found fresh details that only deepen the horror of the situation. Like The Innocents or Dark Water, all good ghost stories should haunt us. This one does.

Viewing notes: I watched my local 4K of this and, most recently, introduced it to two friends who enjoyed it. The 4K is gorgeously renedered and supported by an effective 5.1 audio track. It is currently streaming with a subscription on Stan. 

NETWORK @ 50

When news anchor Howard Beale gets retired early for bad ratings he announces that he will kill himself on air on his last day. This sets off a chain of events that will leave media practices from the mid-'70s to beyond today in deep question. 

It's a film unusual in that its by line in the title sequence features not the director or producer but the writer. Director Sidney Lumet was already an accomplished veteran with the likes of Dog Day Afternoon and Failsafe (and far too many more to mention here) and while his direction is superlative, Chayefsky takes the big credit deservedly. Never has such an overly talky movie with such wildly unrealistic speeches felt so natural. He'd already had success on Broadway and Network came out of the deep dark well of experiences in early television he'd been through. These words kill presumptions.

So, because Howard's action gets his friend and boss the sack for allowing it, he is prey to the new and viciously ambitious entertainment director Diana Christensen who wants to turn the news hour into a crowd pleasing rabble rousing. She's already in negotiation with a terrorist group to give them an hour weekly. Her boss, pugilistic corporate thug, encourages this as it allows him to set in for greater control. And that old friend and former boss? He gets his job back due to boardroom politics and is predated by Diana (godess of the hunt, after all) for more personal reasons: no, not love (although there's winter/summer sex involved) but as a kind of contact high.

Meanwhile Howard's explosive rants have become the most popular thing on TV. While he's doing all that soaring close to the sun, he must have forgotten what happened to Icarus. One tirade takes him there and piques the corporate generalissimo Mr Jensen who delivers a deafening sermon on the world of money and how it has rendered notions such as nations and individuality into thin veils. Howard's deal-stopping broadside about foreign ownership and the effect it will have on the delivery of the truth was too far. Jensen's opening salvo to him from the end of a boardroom table is: "You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr Beale, and I won't have it!"

Howard, no longer able to tell if his illusion of the face of God and the blast he's just received are separate things, goes back on the air and bums out the nation with Jensen's "reality. The ratings head for the Earth's core. So, what are we going to do about Howard?

Peter Finch as Howard Beale was the first Posthumous recipient of the Best Actor Oscar. There had been other posthumous awards but that death did not prevent the accolade for such a personal-appearance-dependent gong is impressive (considering how the ones who just don't turn up are always thought weird). While he isn't effectively the lead role (that's more like William Holden, more later) his fiery turn is at the centre of every scene. His range from whimpering, drunken pentitence to screaming public admonition is breathtaking. 

A lesser piece would make him cynical but this film doesn't work that way. Beale is convinced of his righteousness to the extent that he is blind to the exploitation that is driving him to broadcast it. Diana delivers a projection of the news hour as rating raking juggernaut in a turn that is unmistakably sexual (even throwing in a quick watch check which I think is quoting Klute). She's only partially doing that for Hackett (though she knows he's impenetrable from that angle) the rest of it is everything else that she is. Mr Jensen's epistle to the idealists is so sincere it could convince the basest of cynics and does, in fact, turn Howard. And Max Shumacher (am extraordinary William Holden) whose own cynicism is jettisoned when he understands what's at stake if he does not act with the purest of decency. The celebrated fight with his wife when he leaves her for Diana (Beatrice Straight's five minutes, here, won her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress) could be from Strindberg or Chekov (Tolstoy gets a namecheck).

Faye Dunaway won her Best Actress award because, however grotesque her snakedancing turns can get, the moments of vulnerability in her showdown with Max. She grew up on TV. To Max's generation that is hard to imagine but there she is, terrifying proof of ethics drawn from the Wylie Coyote. Intense, yes, but never a caricature. Her other team mate, Robert Duvall is also on eleven, building to explosive outbursts. The moment where he asks a colleague for confirmation and interrupts the answer before it's a syllable old is still funny. As overdriven as things get (and they do) this film never allows its performances to burst the latex into disaster. Nothing gets regrettably whacky.

That is the realm of Lumet's direction. This talky boardroom satire played as straight as All The President's Men (same year) is never less than cinematic. The control room in the TV studio feels documentary authentic. Mr Jensen's lamplined meeting table is a real one. The Manhattan towers visible through office windows are real. Add the conviction of the performances that are rendering speeches that no one would make in real life and you have what a movie looked like at the height of New Hollywood and still does when the crews go into the darkened corners of capitalism's homeground. But then, you also have the escalating scale of the scene where Howard yells his catchphrase, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" and demands his audience at home do so along with him. Teh Schumachers are watching at home and the daughter goes to the window to see. Heads are poking out of the massive apartment block windows, getting soaked by the rain, flashed by lightning as the shots just grow in size. This would never have just been a filmed play with Lumet, it is, as usual, pure cinema.

Since the 2000s Network has been cited as the film that prophesied the future with an accurate prediction of what became reality TV and its instant mass appeal. But it's also a significant timeline point in the dialogue about the notion of the post-truth world. When you think of Howard's rants it doesn't take much to dismantle them. He admits, at several points, that he doesn't have the answers, that, really, he's just angry. All he knows, he says, is that first, you've got to get mad. His stirring speech about the Saudi deal that gets his audience to stuff theWhite House with telegrams of protest works. 

It doesn't need to work because it's true, though, it works because they trust his anger. He cautions them against relying on TV to tell the truth but can give them no better advice than to go to trusted sources. That's still the line in the age of AI, deep fakes, the blurred line between information and the claim of an influencer. The health crisis of COVID-19 was corrupted into a civil rights crisis by people who "did their own research" by plunging into online confrimation bias. Truth as an absolute value is vulnerable to degradation as long as complicity with flattering untruth can hold sway. That's as old as human settlement but it just keeps surfacing. Tim Robbins' satire of a rapidly rising rightist demagogue Bob Roberts in the '90s is forgotten when Network is remembered because Network went as far as that blurring point, the extent where it is genuinely terrifying. We're there yet again. I just know that, first, we've got to get mad.

Viewing notes: I watched the recent Criterion 4K release which has scrubbed up beautifully. They even fixed the weird chorusing in the audio during once scene that I can remember from the movie on VHS and later digital presentations. Beautiful authentic grain with the Dolby Vision pass and audio that keeps things to a controlled vintage state (apart from that unusual for Criterion fix). You can rent it from Prime or watch it already paid for with a subscription and its rentable from Apple. My Criterion was expensive but it's one of my favourite films so I ponied up. For other pyhsical media copies, you could try an online market, chance it at the op shops or one of the online retailers. 

SCREAM @ 30

"What's your favourite scary movie?"

Casey is preparing for an easy night in while the parents are out. She's got herself a movie to watch and some popcorn on the cooker. The phone rings. Wrong number. They call back. It's flirty but starts turning strange. The caller can see her in the house. He starts challenging her with questions about the scary movies she's said she likes. There are stakes in getting the answers right and the penalties are lethal. What follows is a perfect fashioning of an invented urban myth. And that's just the prologue.

Cut to the next day and classmate Sidney Prescott meets the news with a sinking feeling. The year before, her mother was assaulted and murdered by a maniac whose presence didn't go to jail with him. When boyfriend Billy sneaks in through the window that night it's with a jump scare. When schoolfriend Randy at the videoshop answers why the cops let a suspect go he says it's because they haven't seen enough movies. When the killer is stalking the hallway it's to the soundtrack of Halloween, playing loudly from the living room. And so on, to the too many more examples in this packed horror outing. Why? Because this movie isn't just interested in making you scream, it's making history right in front of your popcorn. 

Welcome to Wes Craven's Scream, the pike in the tent at the centre of the '90s, where art and life rip each other off until one character says to another that it's all a movie, you just don't get to pick your genre. Where did that come from? Well, decades of horror parody to start with from Abbott and Costello meeting Frankenstein in the '40s to The Munsters in the '60s, to the Carry On sendup of Hammer movies in '66, Wacko in the '80s all the way past this one to the Scary Movies of the '00s and beyond. It was the epoch of culture jackdaw Tarantino and the misshapen rock revivals on the radio, grunge and Britpop. The difference is, like all the other scientists at the convention in The Fly, they were all lying. 

Scream was the movie where the characters could recite the rules of the movie they were in, making them ripe for both obedience and subversion: there is no outside the system. Wes Craven, as he had with Last House on the Left, then The Hills have Eyes, and then A Nightmare on Elm St, once again changed the game. He'd already done this to some extent by getting meta with his own creation when he made New Nightmare where he along with the real name cast like Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund found themselves in a Freddie Kruger-verse. But Scream had an extra edge.

Kevin Williamson's idea for the screenplay came from an incident when he was housesitting, saw an open window and feared someone was in the house. He called a friend for support, as he roamed the place with a butcher knife and they fell into a conversation stuffed with horror movie references, including, tellingly, one correcting the other on a reference. The play in this between wit and effortless cultural literacy is all '90s, all Gen X. 

And that's what all those bright young up and comers were, too. This is the horror whose irony, this time, is driven by the sassy wisecracks of of the players whose online meta-cation had already given them armour against the boomer world (this is when boomer became a slur). Wasn't that  happening in Halloween in '78? Not to this extent. When Sidney is asked who'd play her in a movie she rejects the "young Meg Ryan" with, "with my luck, it'd be Tori Spelling" to her friend Tatum, played by Tori Spelling. That kind of wink is as old as the talkies but here it's spiced with the possibility that that would actually happen. 

The movie itself maintains itself slasher credentials easily and is one of the rare moments when knowing audiences can enjoy the horror as they pick up the refs like Pokémon figures. The media are represented by the over ambitious Gale Weathers whose erotic fascination with Sidney's mother's killer is the kind of story that filled newsgroup discussions in that pre-commercial online world and the whacky news rags at the supermarket checkout. Seldom has cultural durability been so finely localised.

Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, Drew Barrymore, Matthew Lillard, Skeet Ulrich, Jamie Kennedy and the rest of the cast call shine in their roles which toughen the average teen and soften the criticism of the nerd. They stroll through scenes  pumping with Nick Cave songs as though in a heightened docudrama.

But, of course, it doesn't end there. This was how you made a teen horror for the next decade. I Know What You Did Last Summer, Valentine, Urban Legend, Cherry Falls, and so on, became the path to un-irony, the self aware young 'uns fighting relentless monsters who could quote Freddy Kruger. Of this, only the TV show Buffy stood the distance because its dialogue was dependably razor sharp, its characters solid and its allegory of the late teen years poignant to the point of heartbreak. The rest (including Scream's own sequels) feel like cover versions.

But other stuff was also in the clouds at the time. Hollywood went back into genre production and made the perennial mistake of  throwing more and more money at something that always worked better in the unsupervised shade of low budget land. And all the massive bloated mammoths that just got less and less scary were deflated by a thing made for a few maxed credit cards on 16mm and home video called The Blair Witch Project.

Scream movies are still being made. I passed on the most recent one but could have sat quite happily in front of it. Too much has happened since, found footage, new French extremity, the pleasing chaos of streaming where sui generis gems like Satanic can be found for free among the knock-offs and try-hards. A new glossy Scream movie just seems like another choctop.

Viewing notes: I watched my splendid local 4K release of Scream in Dolby Vision with robust audio and thrilled to it yet again. It's available, frequently at a good discount, on physical media, You can hire it or have it with your subscription on a host of streamers in great quality. 

Review: THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB

An emergency worker in a call centre gets a call from a girl trapped in a car. Before he can establish the facts there is a burst of machine gun fire and the call goes dead. Oh, it's January of last year and they're in Gaza. Omar, who took the call, has to wander around numb for a few breaths before the girl calls back. She's only eight minutes away, assuming clear streets.

But that doesn't mean they can race out and scoop her up. The IDF are destroying their way from the area and no one can make such assumptions. Besides, there's protocol. The co-ordinator is scrambling around the various points of contact, from the Red Cross to local hospitals still standing and anyone else he can talk to to get the green light for the ambulance to get to the girl unimpeded. Meanwhile, Omar and anyone else at the Red Crescent response center gather around the thread of six year old Hind's voice as she pleads for them to save her. 

Everyone's frustrated. Everyone's angry. They'd run the few blocks if they could  but they wouldn't make it past one or two. They pray with Hind on the line, read her passages from the Koran, attempt to distract her by talking about her life and favourite things. Night is coming on and she is afraid of the dark. The tank that shot up the car and killed the family members around her is coming back.

The audio of Hind's  voice is the original recording. Actors play the parts of the Red Crescent staff. This is mixed with their real life counterparts here and there. The screen is frequently filled with an audio pulse as the sound is recorded, dots that expand and  contract with the sound of the voices. There is not a moment of the running time that allows us to lessen the tension of this situation but writer director Kaouther Ben Hania  provides deftly managed peaks and troughs of action and relief, however slight. We are not given the shock tactic of graphic footage from the scene, staged or authentic because Ben Hania trusts us to be with her film. The cast is unfaltering and we are beside them.

There's little more to say beyond, "go and see this" besides how it will acquaint you further with the frustration, the anger, the futility, the horror, the compassion, the gulf between the lightless ill of military licence, the anguish, the stress, and the clear suggestion that the architects of this destruction felt no guilt.

There is an office window on which the co-ordinator sketches, while on the phone, the various points of contact to negotiate a green light for the rescue. It ends up looking like a loop with a twist in the middle, but it's not smoothly drawn: he's distracted and leaves it looking swollen and misshapen, like a wounded symbol of infinity.

THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD @ 75

Captain Pat Hendry follows his orders to investigate an unusual event detected in the Arctic; a massive metal object has crashed in the ice. They've finally found a flying saucer. They rejoice long enough to blow it up while trying to melt the ice around it. Oops. But there's something else. Or someone. They find a humanoid shape through the ice. This time they dig it up and take it back to base. Ice melts. The thing that was in it can be seen attacking the huskies outside. Um...

What follows has the makings of a standard '50s sci-fi/horror as the humans battle the guy in the monster suit. The reason it is not so easily dismissable has to do with the marque of its pedigree. The first thing you see after the RKO card is that of Winchester Pictures, the production company of veteran director Howard Hawks. He is also the films producer and his style casts a shadow over the film. Hawks who proved himself a master of every genre from screwball comedies, to tough crime, war movies and Westerns, brought his pictures in at or short of ninety minutes and never included a scene that didn't need to be there. The credited director is Christian Nyby. We'll talk about that.

What it means, though, is that A decidedly Hawksian approach to blocking and overlapping dialogue as well as tightly choreographed physical action gives this movie its solidity and credibility. Yes, James Arness looks like a vegan Frankenstein monster but you need to see it a few times to come to that impression as he is mostly seen in shadow. The one full reveal  before the final sequence is a jump scare that doesn't allow a critical dig. Val Lewton never showed the cat in Cat People. Nyby did but did it right. The Thing From Another World.

Between encounters, the world in the research station is tensed up by the conflict between the scientists and the soldiers. Captain Pat has more work than he'd signed on for in resisting the increasingly frustrated Dr Carrington. Carrington, while surrounded by boffin types, comes across as a humourless beatnik with his skivvy collar and goatee. It's science vs safety and when the former is treated like the work of a primadonna artist things are gonna get crazy and do.

Before this, we get the world of the military personnel, with added definition from the reported Scott. They're a bunch of jibing blokes in uniform who obey their orders and explain away their mishaps to the brass. Pat gets an extra dimension. He has history with the admin assistant Nikki and their first scene is a marvel of sex talk without talking sex. Pat's blustering machismo is no match for Nikki's sly rejoinders; he can flirt all he likes but he's not going to get anything through force. The scene is a marvel of economic dialogue, pacing and physical arrangement. By the end of it you just want them to get together permanently. This might have fallen into a lifeless chore were it not for the influence of the director of His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby. By the time, in the following scene, Pat exits with a stolen wink at her, we are sold.

This is presaged by the banter of other officers as they play cards back at base as Pat gets ribbed by his history with Nikki. All of it adds to the timeline stretching before the first scene and lets us know we're not going to be mingling with lunkheaded military types who shoot first and shout down the questions later. It's the scientists that get the standoff treatment. Apart from Carrington they are all quite affable but speak in equations and jargon until Pat has to stop them talking. Their talk suggests scholarship in the field which is all it has to do. They're out there in the ice because they have to be. The Jurassic Park question about could and should only comes up when they want to examine the thing that might erase humanity from the face of the Earth.

Let's get back to the question of directorial influence. It's Christian Nyby's name on the chair but there are traits that are pure Howard Hawks. Mostly, this is down overlapping dialogue. Hawks had made the technique his own. You could also point to the economy of coverage and intense physical staging but that could be in any competent director's toolbox. Another example is Poltergeist which says it's by Tobe Hooper but looks and feels like producer Spielberg. Then again, if you want to see Tobe Hooper in Poltergeist, look to the holy rolling aspects of Tangina's performance, a blustering religious performance that Hooper would have grown up with and Spielberg would never have imagined. Once you're there you can find lots of the maker of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre's hands. Similarly, Nyby's close work with Hawks, his deference and conference would have done a lot to make the tight and fast movie we see. I'm going with Nyby's own statement about working with masters and taking heed. It's not a bad way to make your entrance as a director, showing that you can bring the goods in whomever's style. It's a Christian Nyby film.

Another issue to bring up is John Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing. It is not a remake of this film. Carpenter follows the original story by having the thing a body-hopping monster, imitating its host organisms and creating an uneasy paranoia. Hawks and Nyby had to think of the fastest way to create a threat and landed on a physically external being but one with the biological workings of a plant (e.g. regeneration of limbs) that needed blood for life. Not bad on a budget.

The Thing From Another World is repeat viewing for me. I can easily put it on and walk around in its world of ice and terror with a worldbuilding that involved near documentary quality set pieces and the yummiest hokey sci-fi that makes for a believable threat. The pacing and sheer affability wins every time. No accident, by the way, that John Carpenter shows kids watching it on TV in Halloween. At the time he had no idea he'd be making his own version. When he did he honoured this one by not imitating it. Now that's how influence is meant to work.

Viewing notes: For this review I watched my Warner Archive Blu-Ray copy. This, being a kind of on-demand presentation, is a step up from my old DVD but could still benefit from a 4K remaster. That said, the image is not stressed and the audio is clear at all times. Those issues fade as the engagement of the tale sets in. There is no local release in physical media but you can see it for free on Tubi, rent it from Prime or do a search through Flicks to see who else is making it available. If you've never seen it, treat yourself. 

THE OMEN @ 50 (Spoilers)

Diplomat at the U.S. embassy in Rome Robert Thorne rushes to the hospital where his wife has just given birth. Tragically, the baby is dead. A creepy priest at the place offers a spare they have whose mother died in childbirth at the same moment. Bizarrely, Robert agrees and brings the imposter to his wife's bed. She thinks it's the son she's just given birth to. Soon after, Robert comes home and announces that he's just been appointed Ambassador to Britain. Little Damien, playing with his toys on the floor, is already rising up in the world. All going well, he could be installed in hisjob as AntiChrist by his twenties.

Well, no one knows that yet. Actually there are a few who do. A strange priest visits Robert and begs him to take communion and warns him about his adoptive son. Robert still hasn't got around to sharing this with his wife Kathy who still thinks Damien is her natural child. Oh, and at the boy's fifth birthday party, his nanny calls out her devotion to Damien before hanging herself somewhat publicly. And there's a gruff black dog hanging around who seems to be on the same payroll. Damien smiles and waves to it.

The priest begs a meeting with Robert after telling him that Kathy is in danger. This doesn't end any better than the other encounters after the Father recites a verse about theend of the world, kind of pretending that it comes from Revelation (it doesn't, there's nothing in Revelation that rhymes and is phrased so goofily). When the priest moves off heis caught in an electrical storm that seems to be targeting him. He finds a church but the gate is locked and a long iron spike from the roof is dislodged by lightning and impales him before getting struck by lighting to add the coup de grace.

Now that's just strange as a photographer who's been on Robert's case has taken a lot of photos of the priest and all of them feature what looks like a ghostly javelin going through his body. His pictures of the nanny before she hanged herself also have a presaging mark. He meets with Robert and adds a picture of himself with a line going through his neck. Looks like the priest was on to something.

Ok, so I don't normally put more plot in these blogs than serves the premise but The Omen is more plotty than The Exorcist and needs a little extra push. Add some high profile actors from the era, a whompingly gothic score by Jerry Goldsmith and you get a perfect example of  The Exorcist's effect on mainstream film culture in the 1970s. It's taken a step further by featuring not a demon possessed child but the Beast of the Apocalypse in child form. 

So, rather than William Friedkin's relatively subtle progression from happy kid to head spinning monster we get yound Damien's rage fit at approaching a cathedral, primates in a wildlife park attacking the car he's in and even mild mannered giraffes fleeing from him. The growling dog still loves him and the replacement nanny (a fearsome Billie Whitelaw) brings the pooch into the house to protect the boy. 

While the pacing might drag for anyone young enough to think that contemporary jumpscare fests constitute cinematic horror, Richard Donner and crew do some fancy footwork building the arc of tension to the heartrending final act. The Omen is a fable of power, of the mighty being brought low and the bespoke paths of empowered chosen folk ever more concrete. Gregory Peck in late middle age brings all of his big voiced gravitas to Robert, containing the same wrath he had after that spit in To Kill a Mockingbird. Once he knows what he must do we see his gut churning dilemma on his stony face.

David Warner as the photographer carries his doom like he's come from an audition rejection. Lee Remick whose screen demise made it into a Go-Betweens song, is the centre of personal strength in the tale as her growing realisation that her son isn't her son and what he is horrifies her. Patrick Troughton, the second Dr Who, as the priest might strike some as overplaying but he is fighting cancer and trying to prevent Armageddon, so ... 

I've been a little lighter than usual as this big ticket horror item doesn't need my help. It is a consummate example of what can happen when Hollywood touches a market pulse and follows through. Then again, between The Omen and The Exorcist, we did get a few generations of mostly blaggy sequels and a trove of copies. And then the no budget Halloween showed all that up and changed everything. When the big end of town regrouped in the '90s to produce more glossy horror they ended up getting twice as embarrassed as the credit card budgeted Blair Witch Project cleaned up. 

My point there is that horror, unlike war movies, action flicks, rom coms and Oscar-worthy dramas, never really stays as scary as it promises the more money that gets hurled at it. The Omen, for all its hokey mythologising, is a solid horror movie, letting the increasingly clear stakes provide their own momentum. It wasn't the last high  profile American horror of the decade but it might have been the last durable one. It can't compete with the likes of Halloween for leanness and raw power but it doesn't embarrass itself  either. Other film markets were busy showing that dream logic and ultraviolence could outrun carefully plotted Apocalypses. But for the Anglophones The Omen suited.

I was too young to see it when it came out but caught up with it in tv and video as a Uni student, along with a bunch of other '70s greats. It got me reading Revelation, if nothing else, and I liked the style of any big movie that could get down and dirty with a big supernatural bedtime story. That's still what it feels like to me.

Viewing notes: I watched my old Blu-Ray of this one which is pretty well presented. It's one of themovies I have where I'll always get the best available. This is its anniversary year so maybe we'll see it come out as a 4K. Otherwise,  Disney+ has this free (with a subscription) and Prime and Apple will rent it to you. It is not available locally on physical media.

DUEL @ 55

David Mann is in sales and has to drive across the state to meet a client. It's all routine. He'll take the highway, stop at a diner, get some petrol if needed and roll on to the meet. It'll take most of the day. Driving blithely along, he gets overtaken by a truck with the word flammable on the back of its tank. Annoyed, he overtakes it at the next opportunity. The truck sounds its deafening horn and the game's afoot. David and the huge, loud, faceless machine are bound together in a death duel. Roll credits.

Well, no. This ballet of road rage, stressed metal and fossil fuel is not so simple as that makes it. You don't have to care about any of the subtext because, though it was made for TV, this is the directorial debut of Steven Spielberg from a story by the great Richard Matheson and there is a vipers nest of theme beneath the action.

As David is driving out of the city he listens to talkback radio. A man is stuck filling in his census form because he has opted to stay at home in a then reversed role marriage. This takes so long to make its point that it forms a kind of introduction to the theme. This is a story of masculinity in contest. David is bullied by his wife and, while his rage is doing the driving whenever the big oily monster of the truck appears, he quickly assumes the role of the victim and the greater part of the film becomes his survival story. You see the boots and the arm of the truckie but nothing else; he is male threat incarnate and doesn't need an individual face. 

The rest plays out as you would expect except that even the young Steven Spielberg applies his skills like a newbie director possessed. Perfectly wound tension and release and the reminder, out here in the badlands, of the civilisation they have broken from. This is a developing master of his art announcing himself. One more and it's Jaws and then it's history.

But there's a problem. This was shot for TV and brought in at seventy-four minutes. With ads, that would get you to an easy ninety. When it was released to cinemas it was with that gap filled by extra scenes. This later version has been presented as the director's cut ever since the mid-seventies. 

When I first saw it on TV, it was the original and, even with the ads, it was rivetting. The longer version I watched for this review, ad-free, felt repetitive, obvious and endless. I kept checking the time. This is comparable to thinking of Bon Scott as the real singer of ACDC when Brian Johnston has been at the mic for decades longer. The longer cut of this film is the version. I still think it drags and overstates.

The other thing is the George Lucas style revision of effects in the vision and the audio. This movie has been scrubbed to bare skin and then glazed until it looks like it's been in the Bain Marie for weeks. While the overall effect of this is easy on the eye, it does let the side down. Can't we celebrate this master of movies with his real first step, warts and all? Doesn't that only accentuate how far he has come and how natively skilled he was way back then in his twenties? But no, we have to have it through the rinse cycle before the French polishers get to it. 

It reminds me that if you listen to the first Velvet Underground album on hi-res digital you will just hear how crappily it was produced. It doesn't stop it from being a great record but there is a real disappointment to hearing how it cannot be improved, only made clearer. I'm not a original is always better type and have only disdain for the analogue is better bullshit but when you lengthen a tight action movie with more statements of the obvious and use AI to pretend it wasn't made in 1971, you effectively  change its story; not it's narrative progression, the story of its birth and life as a movie. The job isn't as bad as those that James Cameron and George Lucas done with their back catalogue but it is a misrepresentation. At least the shark in Jaws on 4K is still allowed to look fake here and there. Then again, that's part of its story. Duel's is in danger of being obscured by recent history.

Viewing notes: I saw this as a rental on Prime. The 4K picture was true to itself, as long as you're ok with AI polyfiller. There is currently a reasonably priced 4K double disc available to buy and it does include the original TV version. I'm tempted to get that, just for the old cut but I just don't love the movie that much.

GOD TOLD ME TO @ 50

Unrelated murders happen in quick succession across New York, the only link between them is that the killer always says that God told them to do it. Detective Peter Nicholas just keeps finding questions under the answers but then does find another link: all the killers had spoken to a young man with golden hair. They can't describe his face. One witness says that the man had no face. As Nicholas moves deeper into the mystery he finds what might be his salvation or the opening beats of the Apocalypse.

Larry Cohen's genre bending quest film is a police procedural that gets bitten by a supernatural theme before things get really cosmic. This is from the filmmaker who gave us a killer baby in It's Alive, toxic sweets in The Stuff and an ancient winged serpent in Q. Those were all original ideas and Cohen made a career from exploitation movies that were packed with concepts. So, in addition to the procedural thread, Nicholas' odd marital and extra marital situation, his devotion to Catholicism but his claim of detachment from it, we get a plot that riffs on the Von Daniken God is an astronaut idea to play out to the suggestion of eventual cataclysm. Cohen declared the source material for God Told Me To was the Bible, that he had never known a more violent character in literature than God himself.

But this film is an exploitation movie. It was also released under the title Demon. The Exorcist was only three years old at the time and the possession subgenre was cleaning up at cinemas. But the original title has a tabloid force to it that does a lot of the work. And Cohen was careful not to blame the Devil. The scenes where the killers are confessing shows them chillingly calm and rational. They just don't see what the problem was.

Tony Lo Bianco's Peter Nicholas is reckless to begin with but the forces in the tale that give him self-conflict take a toll on him. Lo Bianco demonstrates great stress and pounding frustration as the initial investigation reveals only infuriatingly difficult questions. As he approaches the difficult truth of his journey and a sense of his personal power becomes evident, his confidence warms and ices us down. It's a performance you might not expect in a film like this.

Around this, the plot races, establishing its anchors and pivots rapidly, ensuring a smooth and quick series of developments. Cohen used everything he had as a film maker to do this. The opening traffic sniping was done guerrilla style without permits and the setpiece at the police parade (with a young Andy Kaufmann in an unforgettable walk-on) was matched between documentary footage Cohen shot and close ups deftly shot and inserted. Handheld sequences are used to heighten unease and add more documentarian vibes. One account featuring a UFO was pieced together from the old sci-fi show Space 1999 but doesn't look like it. What does look like itself is New York City and it's the grimy endless metropolis that also played itself in the same year's Taxi Driver. Cohen takes us into a realm of local religious festivals with Catholic fetishism, real condemned high rise tenaments, and streets that never seem to get sunlight. It's like neither more than superficially but this story lives in the same world as The French Connection and The Omen (another 1976 release).

I first saw this as Demon on Brisbane late night TV in the early '80s and marvelled at how the genre turned on a five cent piece but it all still felt like the same movie. When things get cosmic from halfway through, there is no contradiction. The sight of the ethereal (and scary) Bernard Phillips rests as effortlessly in the look and feel as the visit to Sylvia Sidney's abduction victim and implant receiver. Sandy Dennis' exhausted but manipulative wife could be a few blocks away. When the time comes for whizbang special effects we get physical performance and lighting. There is peril inside a burning building which might make you worry for the cast and crew for its authenticity. Cohen might have been judged a B-movie hack but takes the hard road to get this story told.

There wasn't an option for buying a copy of a film wasn't an option then but I vowed to be in the queue of the Schonell or Valhalla or any art cinemas such as they were, to see it for real. Decades later, when the market expected punters to buy the new digital home video movies for themselves, I sought a copy of the Blue Underground special ed. Then, I saw and heard it in as close to a cinema experience as I could have dreamed of. It was a marvel all over again. Larry Cohen left as a few years ago and when I knew of it I garthered a few friends to watch the 4K, some had seen it, others not, and we talked about it all night after the end credits rolled.

Viewing notes: I watched my Blue Underground 4K with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos sound and luxuriated in this film's look and feel and the weight of its conceits. This is not locally available in physical media but can be bought overseas in fine editions. It can be hired through Prime for $2.99.

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 6: JASON LIVES @ 40

Tommy from Parts 4 and 5, returns to Crystal Lake (now Forest Green) from his stay at a mental health hospital to kill the already dead Jason Vorhees to prevent him from ever returning. He and a friend dig up the grave and Tommy impales Jason with a fence spike which catches a bolt of lightning which brings Jason back to lethal life. Good one, Tommy.

And then it's kill kill kill, thrill thrill thrill and then the credits. Except that this part takes up the challenges of the previous one (which I won't be spoiling) and runs with them. The franchise holds its own from the first to the fourth better than most comparable horror franchises of its time. The second sequence begins with an acceptable twist but then we're really only retreading the formula with a few threads of commentary on the times to extend it. Where once there were hillbilly families and bikie gangs there are now white collar paintball teams. The summer camp is back, having been absent for a few installments, and this time we get the kids who go to it, not just the counsellors, adding a potential quarry for the man in the mask.

Also, there's the Tommy thread which has to do with indentity and agency as defined by suspicions against him. This is difficult to detail as it involves spoilers for gthe previous two parts but I can say that it's treatment of Tommy's predicament lifts it from the generally disappointing Part 5. If you remember that this is part six of a slasher franchise, Jason Lives does its job with some inventive kills that include character setups sufficient to prevent the murders from simply adding to the kill count. And there is the line, early in the piece: "I've seen enough horror movies to know that any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly." Ten years on and that self-reflexivity became de riguer with Scream and its imitators.

What is there left to say about this installment in time, as its own film? It's lean and muscular and does what it says it will do. Neither particularly profound nor trying to be, ressurecting the monster and leaving him at the door to any number of sequels, the way everything should work.

I witnessed the origin of the F13 franchise as a one-off during Schoolies Week in 1980. It worked great magic. I'd seen Halloween the year before at the drive-in and its memory towered over this. Much later, when I relaxed my cinephilia with the admission that I love horror movies, I caught up with both franchises (along with Nightmare on Elm St, Hellraiser and a few others). 

Comparing the descendants of Halloween with F13 is a sobering exercise. While Halloween kept going off its own rails by copying the thing that copied it (F13) and strayed into potentially interesting territory with the third installment, once it relaxed into dishing up the kind of slasher movies that the original's imitators did, it lost touch with its inspiration and became the game it had changed. F13, for all its callous copying and base exploitation, kept showing it could try new things. That's pretty much why I bought a blu-ray set of the first eight plus the 2007 remake as I knew it would feel less try-hard than a comparable set of Halloween. F13 doesn't beg too much but does get on with it. That beats a fading current of nostalgia any time.

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 @ 50

When a raid on an outlying police station ends in the theft of assault weapons and the death of gang members, the gang vows revenge. The next morning, newly commissioned Police Lieutenant Ethan Bishop starts his day with the assignment of taking care of decommissioned police station for its last night. A man is driving with his daughter to pick up her nanny through the streets of the same rundown neighbourhood as the station and the gang headquarters. The gang prowls the streets in a car, armed with those assault weapons. The girl is shot dead getting an ice cream. The man escapes the scene and, after some near lethal encounters makes his way, raving in shock to the station. The gang can kill two birds with one stone. Oh, and a group of hard criminals is being transported by bus including a notorious murderer and a very sick prisoner. It's not the babysitting gig Lt. Bishop expected but then he did tell his boss that he wanted to be a hero.

Reading that, it's a ton of plot but watching the movie it never feels like it. John Carpenter's second feature film but first that didn't begin as a student film finds him ready to rock. All those narrative threads above are woven seamlessly through a personable first act which ends in atrocity. The seige story that follows forms the pattern for Carpenters next decade finds place here as a compelling play of tension and character development. Assault is overshadowed by both the cheeky space adventure prior to it (Dark Star) and the horror masterpiece that followed it (Halloween) but it offers great rewards for the repeat viewer.

A significant debt, aside from Carpenter's confessed Rio Bravo, is the independent source point Night of the Living Dead. This might well have guided the casting of a black actor for Lt. Bishop (Carpenter doesn't mention it in his commentary) but it definitely suggested the middle act discusison of whether to go upstairs or to the basement for best defence. While the gang members are not zombies (the sleek choreography of their movements gives them an extra spike of threat) the sense that they are as relentless drives their scenes. They are also, poignantly multi-racial. Closing in on an ethnicity would have distracted from their purpose as pure antagonists.

However, once you understand these precursors any overriding influence of the history of cinema vanishes under Carpenter's confident helming of the action and tension. If you think of Dark Star as the college film that escaped, Assault emerges as among the strongest of debut features. This is also where Carpenter began his practice of shooting in the widescreen ratio of 2.35:1 to add a sense of cinematic value. At no point, however pulpy or B-movie it gets, the film never looks less than prime.

Then there's the world building. The Los Angeles invented suburb of Anderson is all bungalows and dried untended lawns. The gangs have driven everyone indoors and the paved empty streets look post apocalyptic. The comparative cosiness of the station offers visual sanctuary until it becomes a target and the quarry of the gang and then it resembles something more like a disintegrating prison. The sense of abandonment by the rest of the city's law enforcement adds a clear saddening hopelessness as the night progresses.

On characterisation, this is a film with dual leads. We have already met Lt. Bishop but it is his nominal antithesis who takes co-ownership of centre screen. Napolean Wilson, the mass murderer accepts his judgement and potentially lethal punishment and it is strangely disarming. He is the chief wit in the film and the moment of respect that passes between him and Bishop gets us hankering to see them bounce off each other.

Austin Stoker's Bishop is a strong leader but beset by doubts on his first job as an officer. His fluent physicality deepens his openness. Darwin Joston as Wilson manages to squeeze charisma out of his every dialogue exchange and maintains a strange mix of effortlessness and intensity. Laurie Zimmer as Leigh is Carpenter's first properly drawn female character. Zimmer plays her as someone discovering the reason she has bravery and confidence when faced with lethality. Carpenter would get Jamie Lee Curtis to do to opposite in Halloween two years later. In this early go, Zimmer gives Carpenter an early win. She's magnetic on screen and the swelling connection between her and Wilson feels deliciously dangerous. 

So, if John Carpenter's first fully fledged outing as a feature film maker stepped beyond good for a rookie to announce the emergence of a stylistically easy action guy where did he have to progress. The next decade would be a career yoyo with global hits like Halloween but anti-zeitgeist flops like The Thing. Cartoony adventure with Big Trouble in Little China but ideas-heavy sleepers like Prince of Darkness or the prescient They Live filled his screens. His self-effacing blu-ray commentary leaves his description of Assault as an exploitation film but we are looking at an engaging, characterful action feast that can be gripping and eerie by turns. Oh, it's also one of his strongest music scores, fully synthesised, brooding, menacing and relentless. When weirdo trip hopper Tricky used it for his Bomb the Bastards rap, he just let the theme music play without adding anything more than his own vocals. That's a bow of tribute.

Viewing notes: I watched my excellent Umbrella Blu-Ray of this film and hope that someone puts out a 50th anniversary 4K. Meanwhile it can be rented from Apple, Prime and YouTube. Umbrella's BD (which includes a director's cut of Dark Star as an extra) is out of print. 

THE FLY @ 40

Seth Brundle picks up journalist Veronica at a science and technology convention when she tells him everyone says their invention will change the world and he says, "yeah, but they're lying." He does have a point. He's developed a matter transporter which he demonstrates back at his digs in the rusty quarter of town. She talks her skeptical boss (and romantic ex) into putting her on the story and one night when Seth gets drunk and jealous he puts himself through the machine, not noticing the stray fly that's followed him into the pod.

The Fly is often cited as the moment that David Cronenberg met the mainstream but he'd already done that with The Dead Zone (which even fans forget, however unjustly).  What The Fly more accurately signifies is Cronenberg bringing his trademark body horror to Hollywood. The one before Dead Zone was Videodrome which would not have flown in Hollywood with its paranoid themes of controlling media but The Fly was a remake of a '50s move (incidentally, one set in the Canada of Cronenberg's childhood years) and felt like a bankable update the way that Body Snatchers had in 1978 or The Thing in '82 (though that one didn't hit).

Regardless of what they thought they might have been in for what the suits and the public got was the work of an auteur glad to have a roomy budget and one careful not to waste a cent. What they also got was one of his most toughly visceral outings, an unflinching look at bodily disintegration and mutation. Cronenberg consciously chose against an allegory of AIDS which he felt would not only date the film but provide an irrelevant distraction from Brundle's story. To that end he encouraged his FX and makeup crew to concentrate on the effects of human aging, rendering Brundle's transformation all the more universal.

As it had in almost all Cronenberg's previous films, the exchange between strange technology and corporate interests gives way to the most profound aspects of the horror. The exclusivity of the Starliner housing development in Shivers serves as a perfect incubator for the sexually transmitted parasite. The pop psychologist's cultish manifestation of his patients' rage in The Brood gives literal brith to an army of homicidal monsters. In The Fly the initial entry point of greed is through fame, Brundle's in the science community and Veronica's in the publishing world, but the obvious commercial potential of the invention is there to begin with and, while not exploited in the running time, is clearly pointing to the future.

What doesn't point to the future is the effect on Brundle as he edges toward life as Brundle-Fly. Going from constant sexual arousal, climbing the walls, predigesting his food with acidic vomit, he is soon enough filling a display case of his unnecessary human features. They adorn the glass shelves of his museum of human history. The shedding of his humanity is reduced to a series of squelches and tearing dead tissue. As he narrates to a video camera how he is changing, we are increasingly aware that he is travelling on a one way ticket. This is a major departure from the '50s original in which rthe hapless Dr. Delambre continually resists his new state. Brundle not only accepts it but, thinking his new strength is a result purely of transporting, encourages Veronica to try it. When it's clear that he has fused with the insect his chief drive is curiosity and excitement. Only when this turns into deterioration does his philosophical acceptance emerge. Before the catastrophes of the final act, this is the scientist and his examination of his own passing.

The casting of the film included real life couple Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum who were about to have very good '80s and '90s. Goldblum exhibits the nervous intellect that still keeps him famous and it is perfect for Brundle's mix of rapid thought and frenetic self-effacement that gives the character his depth. He'd already delighted audiences with his similar turn in The Big Chill and this is his rarified version. Geena Davis with her sharp intelligence and warm deeper voice provides a presence that can complete the picture, beat for beat. This film always feels like a two hander rather than Goldblum's showcase and that is down to Davis' presence.

Also starring is the work of Cronenberg's workshop of effects and make up masters who served up a wealth of grotestquery that outdid all of Cronenberg's previous body horrors put together. From the mangled baboon to the various stages of Brundle's disintegration, to the maggot baby (with Cronenberg himself as the obsretician) to the final mess of a thing that yet invokes our pity and sorrow. All of it looks both physical and a little dated but dramatically so strong that we effortlessly watch along. 

The Fly saw David Cronenberg, the maestro of the weird idea in contemporary city life, reach the point where it felt he was finally comfortable with his actors. He's already worked with many highly accomplished casts but their performances can feel, in those earlier films, on the stilted side. With the young power couple at the centre of The Fly for the first time we know warmth in his stories. That final ingredient that makes The Fly more easily rewatchable than anything he'd already done (though my favourite will always be Videodrome) and it was an experience he took to almost everything he did thereafter that didn't require a cold touch (like Spider or Cosmopolis) completing the pieces to allow him to move between the mainstream and the personal without stylistic compromise. It depicted a terrifying transformation but it resulted in his own creative one. 

Viewing notes: I don't know if there will be a 40th Anniversary 4k of this in 2026 so I went ahead and watched my old Blu-Ray which is a superb transfer with clear impactful sound (frequent collaborator Howard Shore really got to play around with a big orchestra this time). On Disney+ with subscription, rent from Apple, Prime and Youtube, and out of print in Australia but always affordable through a market for around the $20 mark.