THE CHANGELING @ 45

After losing his wife and daughter in a horror crash, composer John Russell must find his way to living through massive grief. He emerges from mourning, moving to a new city and job teaching composition at the local Conservatory. He lands well, finding an isolated mansion to move into for the kind of quiet that allows concentration. But that's not how these stories play out. Things move by themselves. Sounds occur when and where they shouldn't. Curious, and almost glad of the distraction, John goes exploring and finds a walled up room with a lot of dust and webs and a child's wheelchair. There's work to be done.

This was an original screenplay, based on a claimed genuine haunting. Off centre U.K. directors Tony Richardson and Donald Cammell were early choices but both bailed for creative differences. By the time Peter Medak got the megaphone, the script had been through rewrites and he added some of his own. In a very real sense, this tale of failed adoptions might have to do with the film being counterproductively uneven. While it's a favourite to put on on a rainy afternoon for its engaging eeriness, it always gets to a point where I feel like getting up for a break.

That's not to say it ever really drags. The Changeling feels draggy over the course of its reasonable hundred minutes because, as good as he is to watch, George C. Scott's John Russell is so blustery and pragmatic that he never seems to be under threat. Add a plot convolution that plods when it should accelerate and you have something that does actually feel like a story fixed with patches rather than drafted anew as a fluent single treatment.

Medak is no slouch when it comes to effective film making, the chills here as good as you'll find in anything of its era, but he can appear to lose sight of the aerial view of his projects. If you read up on The Ruling Class and that is stars a young and feisty Peter O'Toole you might hurry to it but by the second of its two and half hours you might start cherry picking the good bits of what should have been a  ninety minute satire at the most. Similarly frustrating is the '90s entry Romeo is Bleeding which should have been a sure fire bad cop story in the era of Pulp Fiction and Bad Lieutenant but ends up as cinematic porridge. The Changeling is not as bungled as either of those as it does deliver on its promises as a complicated ghost story, it's just that we could lose about fifteen minutes of transitional or lifestyle scenes (they date it stylistically, anyway, and give it the feel of being a filmed Playboy ad for pipe tobacco). 

It is also not helped by its orchestral score which begins with an enjoyable uncanny piano and strings theme but soon blands out into aural treacle. This is after the likes of Jerry Goldsmith's terrifying score for the Omen and John Carpenter's unsettling piano and synth music for Halloween. It gives the film the feel of a luxury budget production but that's really not always what you want in a horror movie.

But horror movie it is and is quite readily regarded as a classic of its kind. I might question that last point but I do have to admit that the goods it brings when it needs to (that séance scene!) and those moments of development that suggest that the real darkness is not in the haunted house alone, are gripping. You might notice that the worst of my criticisms here are kind of the opposite of faint praise, that my sticking points are quite likely local to me. Perhaps I should just say that, while I would watch something like The Haunting (1963) at the drop of a hat but think about revisiting The Changeling it might be more indicative of its place in my estimation. I love The Haunting. I respect The Changeling.

Viewing notes: I watched my lovely 4K release of this which came with a BD and a CD soundtrack album. This is not currently available to rent or buy in Australia. If you were to travel back to the days of VHS shops you'd be able to get a copy on a cheaper weekly rate. Not everything had got better.

AFTER HOURS @ 40

Bored office drone Paul strikes it lucky one night ... kinda. A chance conversation with a beautiful woman at a café gets him a number and leads him into the worst night of his life as twists, turns, rug pulls and wrong footing have him run the gauntlet in a New York that has replaced the sleaze of Taxi Driver with an affluent bohemia. Not fun.

Griffin Dunne's pet script (he didn't write it, he just wanted to do it) had been passed around forever and, through a series of acquaintances, landed in the hands of Martin Scorsese. Marty had just seen King of Comedy fall through the earth and his first attempt at Last Temptation kicked out the studio door. This looked like money. It was the mid-'80s and cokey crazy was working as well as the teen empire. Movies for those of voting age and up were popping like mushrooms around the time. These days it's a genre called the yuppie nightmare cycle. Desperately Seeking Susan and Something Wild cast rising stars in comedies that could go south or west as long as they smashed a young urban professional against a loopy femme fatale. Susan had two of them including a major pop star. After Hours had five.

It flopped. After the big no show it was injected into the art houses where it did better over a longer time and was quietly absorbed into the mud of the cinema gutter as forces like The Coens and Stephen Soderberg rose and got to work. So what's wrong with it?

First, Griffin Dunne's empathy card starts fading from the café scene in which we cannot believe that Rosanna Arquette would pick him up. Also, Linda Fiorentino's sassy boho artist feels phoned in and the papier mache piece she's working on looks like a year twelve goth kid's project. The taxi ride from his familiar territory to the wiles of the west end of Manhattan is done cranked so it looks like it was shot as a speeding car in a Jerry Lewis movie. The punk club is pure passe try hard unless it's meant to be a yuppie version of one. Look, there's a lot of good moments and observations and the turns of Terri Garr and Rosanna Arquette shine, but the whole thing feels tone deaf.

Trying to care for Dunne's horny creep who tries to pass as an average guy will never work. We can laugh at the uber cool goof artist or feel sympathy for Arquette, recognise the '60s casualty of Terri Garr's character and find a lot of the frustration scenes anxious. But we are supposed to want Paul to make it back to his flat and lick his wounds and I, through more than a few views, have never been compelled to care about him.

This is from Martin Scorsese whose grip on how to make awkwardness and threat hilarious puts him up with the masters of Russian literature (read some and you'll get the weight of that). He who drew both intense eerieness and clumsy naivete from De Niro in Taxi Driver was surely well suggested as the perfect fit for this feast of such moments. Perhaps it's a problem of concentration. While he's so good at finding the horror of the everyday and the laugh in physical threat, when he's only meant to do black comedy or dark farce, he pushes it so far it only works as over egged.

I'm going to admit something that I don't have to: my first viewing of this was a bad experience. I went with a couple of friends to a screening at the long lamented Trak in Toorak. They were down from Brisbane and we were cramming things in. We trammed from The Quiet Earth at the Valhalla to Toorak for After Hours, Scorsese fans all. The Trak was an arthouse, mainstream second run, classics and contemporary indy. If you went there you knew the director's name and reputation. After Hours had been billed as Marty's whacky fun fest. The audience was plummy and comfy, the very yuppies that the genre was aiming at. They tittered at almost every line, even transitional or expositional moments which didn't try for laughs. Soon, everything was like the funniest moment of comedy any of them had ever witnessed. Imagine a Friday the 13th sequel in which everyone screams at every single kill and every scene, even the sex, for the entire running time. They had paid for a whacky fun fest from Scorsese and by the Lord Harry they were going to get it. I was shrivelling from the embarrassment of it, fearing the judgement of my northern sophisticates. We left in silence, even getting a cab in grasping flight.

Horrible but every time I've seen it since the only improvements I can find are in lines and moments that those screeching laughs and belly thunder had covered. Increasingly, it has played as a failure for me, over earnest in its attempt to be light and sharp. It's why I delayed watching Shutter Island because, as a horror fan, I didn't want him to bugger that up, too (he did). Scorsese still had greatness to come. He finally did make The Last Temptation of Christ and it's a masterpiece. Goodfellas reaches great heights and is still untarnished by its boring younger sibling Casino (or its embarrassing grandchild The Irishman). At some point he might have decided that a good paycheck and a reputation just felt better and was happy enough riding on the legend. 

I'll always look out for him in cinema documentaries but the films since 1990 have mostly been well made and bland (there are exceptions but those are few). He'd been such a god at Uni, we knew his dialogue by heart. From the time I saw Taxi Driver on a Steenbeck editing desk I was completely hooked. We  bent the knee for all of them and felt we'd found a cinemaster for our generation (even though he counts as the previous one) some we loved, others we forgave. After Hours was the first one I forgot.

PSYCHO @ 55 (Lots of spoilers)

When the mild mannered but impatient Marion gets a big pile of cash to deposit for her boss she takes it on holiday to nowhere. Maybe it will persuade her reluctant lover to marry her as he always whingeing about not having the money. Maybe it will fund a new start on an Island off California. Whatever, she's ahead of the chase and, tired after a day's driving, wheels into an off highway motel. The nervous guy who books her in makes her nervous so, after an eerie conversation with him she begs to to take the last shower of her life before bed. She doesn't make it to bed as the shrieking old woman in the house by the motel has beds and flesh and sin on her mind and comes in with a butcher knife and that's that.

That's not the end of the movie. Not only has the murder taken a big number of shots edited into a small number of seconds that feel much longer and accompanied that with a relentless screeching of violins at the top of their range which seem to sound like widened eyes, a sequence which deftly convinces us that we've seen a lot more stabbing and a more nakedness than we have, but we've just witnessed the killing off of a character we've had half a movie engaging with.

Well, it happened in Robert Bloch's novel, Hitchcock must have relished the disruption. His love of gimmickry stretched back to the beginning of his career and would continue to its end. This one allowed the publicity to try the line about cinemas refusing entry to people who tried to come in after a certain point in the run time. But the word was that he killed off his star. The story after this is the investigation by Marion's sister Lila and the reluctant boyfriend Sam, along with private eye hired by Marion's boss. There is plenty of plot to go from that point and it's where the intrigue finds its compulsion in the question of what Norman's game is and what his mother has to do with it.

But as plotty as it gets Psycho is more about that crushed attempt at a family that were the Bates. There is a lot more to this in the novel but most of that is narrated backstory and would have necessitated either an unacceptable narration or flashbacks which might have served to drain tension and pace. Hitchcock's adaptation concentrates on the effect of the family's demise on the rest of the world as it meets it in the form of Marion and the interest in discovering her fate. Norman and his wild mother are the sharp splinter of an old dead tree that yet can tear and kill. 

Anthony Perkins is perfectly cast. His skittish nerves, fragile movements in conversation with strangers remind us of the living relatives of the birds that Norman has stuffed and mounted on the walls. Then, his assured motion in cleaning up after his mother's atrocities give us a different side. We are to learn the most about Norman of all the characters, some of it in a direct lecture by a psychiatrist but as much if not more in these moments of contrast, pragmatism and panic, predation and prey. The shrink at the end sets up the final moment of reconciliation of the facets but it is Tony making the hairs on the back of our neck stand up.

Of the other cast, they are perfectly functional with the exception of Martin Balsam as the detective Arbogast whose worldly face and effortless manipulative powers give him a forbidding strength of his own. I haven't forgotten Janet Leigh as Marion whose intensity belies the good girl grown up. She must stare at us from behind the wheel of her car, emoting as the thoughts of her predicament sound in her head. At one point her face breaks very slightly into something like a wicked smile as she considers one consequence of her theft. I wonder if original audiences thought that this expression made her the Psycho of the title. Her interaction with Norman Bates involves a slight purging for both, a night time conversation that might bond or separate through its awkwardness, it is the closest thing to freedom that anyone in the film gets.

There is a lot to discover about the production of Psycho and I'd recommend you pursue any extras on physical media that you find, or other sources. I won't go over it too much here but to mention a few things. First, Hitchcock effectively paid for it himself. This is why, between Vertigo and The Birds, Psycho is in black and white. The fact that he determined it to be a kind of modern gothic black and white with cinematographer John Russell, is down to his ingenuity. I cannot happily imagine this film in colour. The lower budget allowed for the casting of a few names lower on the pecking order of Hollywood but who came through strongly. It allowed him the shower scene as the original backers Paramount retreated and Hitchcock had to get creative with studio affiliation. It also allowed him to call in the talents of composer Bernard Herrmann whose extraordinary strings-only ride through frenzied violence earned him a doubling of his fee from Hitchcock. Psycho is almost an independent film and features the best of the limitations that suggests.

I first saw this at school. Mr Bowman, an English teacher who took us for an elective on film writing in year eleven, was delighted to screen it against the screen in one of the chemistry classrooms which had tiered seating where we also saw our anti-drug and anti-sex instructional films. At sixteen, it was the most violent film I'd ever seen. Sonny, a darkly narcissistic bully, was sobered by it and blamed the screaming music for its effect. By that stage the local commercial tv station was playing movies like Zabriskie Point and Husbands with the swearing left in. My Nana had spoken of how subtle Hitchcock had been in suggesting rather than showing his violence. She must have seen Psycho but it would have been too inconvenient an example for her lesson. Then again, she was the one who bought me the novel.

Psycho didn't quite change my life, though I was heavily affected by it, but it opened doors that held confrontations soon to become riches. The decade to follow featured a revival of Hitchcock's mid and late period movies as they went back into cinemas, on tv and into home video. We discovered his black comedy The Trouble With Harry, the might of Rear Window and the bizarreness of Spellbound. Psycho wasn't there. It remained a byword for the extreme mainstream. Anthony Perkins presented an Oscar, standing beside Janet Leigh, and joked about taking the rap for the shower scene killing. A vocalisation of the screeching strings still signifies imagined psychosis. But for me, to see it again, I cannot look away from its sadness, that sense of bad paths chosen or compelled that can only lead to great destruction. Marion turns off the main highway to her final stop. Norman lets his mother in to deal with the crisis he cannot confront. In psycho we acknowledge the broken and the bruised of us, their silencing force and their comforting masks. For me, it is Hitchcock's masterpiece.

Review: COMPANION ( first act spoilers)

Caution: The publicity material for this film includes spoilers, not just the trailer but the poster. If you want to go into the movie uninfluenced, read this review after you have seen it.

A prologue signalling The Stepford Wives' influence leads to a meet cute between Iris and Josh. Cut to Josh driving Iris to a country cabin to introduce her to his friends. The cabin is a mansion and her friends are one percenters which makes Iris nervous. Once in, the house owner, a Russian wealthmonster, and others greet Iris variously with warmth or sniffy sarcasm; she was right to be anxious. Nevertheless, she does engage in conversation with the others, eloquently speaking of love at first sight over dinner and, later, draws out the sarcy one to reveal the control in her relationship with the house owner. 

The next morning, Iris prepares to go as planned out to the nearby lake to spend time with Josh but he demurs and she goes on solo. The owner appears, escalating a seduction routine into sexual assault which ends in his violent death at her hands. She rejoins the others, coated in blood, holding a knife. Josh gets up and yells, "Iris, go to sleep!" Her eyes roll back instantly until they are white blanks and she freezes. Iris is a robot.

This Gen Z thriller which the publicity took pains to point out was from the folk that brought you the likes of Barbarian. If that made you expect some narrative rug pulls you were right. The revelation of Iris being a cyborg is the least of what follows but it itself follows her opening narration as she glides a trolley down the aisle of a supermarket that the two times she felt truly happy were when she met Josh and when she killed him. That happens within the first five minutes of the film. When the writing is like that the decision about what to reveal in the run up to release must be intense. Robert Eggers had over a year between the announcement of Nosferatu and it hitting the screen. Then again, whatever alterations he made to that well trodden story were only ever going to be at the indy level. Companion's high concept sci fi premise could not afford to risk audience apathy by making it just look like a social drama for the young folks.

That over with, what does Companion offer? The Stepford Wives cornered the market in the notion of male fantasy manifest as magic with the theme of control riding high in the age of second wave feminism. Blade Runner blurred the effect of self awareness in the fabricated human, showing both its power and vulnerability. What's left? Updating the concept from mechanical robots to lifelike hardware controlled by a phone app is good and drives effective plot triggers but it's not much more than cosmetic. Of course, a 21C upgrade was going to be a phone app. What the creative team have done here is dress things up to look like the near future but have reached right back to grasp the essentials: control and its nemesis self awareness.

Queen bitch Kat is frank about the control she and her equally human consort put at the active centre of their relationship. Her conversation with Iris about this involves Kat joking about needing to become a human before she can begin to confront her situation. This is key. Iris doesn't know she's a robot and deflects Kat's innuendos about self-control. As soon as that breach is made, the breakdown of order begins and the rest is spoilable plot.

The fabrication of controlled humans is an ancient one and persists because control is an everpresent issue in human interaction. Iris' naturalness disturbs the couple Kat and Sergei whose relationship is founded on coercion. Their response to Iris doesn't puzzle us and we are more inclined to judge Josh for maintaining an association with a cybernetic sex slave. Kat's comparison between Iris and a sock Josh might jerk off into lands with him. The Jurassic Park question of we can but should we hits straight away.

That this is maintained while the narrative has switched to a sruvivalist thriller until the two thread merge is testament to writing and creative nurture that puts this film a notch above the already impressive It's What's Inside. There is space in the writing that allows for compelling action, more questions of sentience and some very funny dialogue. Add some strong digital cinematography (sorry, I don't miss film grain) and sharp music scoring and you have one of the most vibrant social thrillers you'll see this year.

Jack Quaid tightropes the barrier of average young guy with an emerging selfishness and the thing he becomes quite effortlessly. However, if Yellowjackets, The Boogieman and Heretic didn't convince you, Sophie Thatcher is the current young star of genre stories. Her range of glassy fragility and bad girl toughness makes her characters the ones you'll fix on. This is her film.

JAWS @ 50

After a teenager gets killed by a shark off Amity Island, the chief of police closes the beach. It's almost the 4th of July and the Mayor knows that the loss of tourist dollars will cost him his position and reopens the beach. Ol' Bitey comes back. So, salty Quint, oceanographer Hooper and Chief Brody set out in a boat that could be bigger to land the shark.

There's more to it but that basic plot created the summer blockbuster, cut the decade of New Hollywood in half and gave us the word Spielbergian. Mainstream cinema was already a love match with unfettered capitalism but Spielberg, starting here, dragged it so far beyond the event horizon of art as business that it's no longer possible to consider film completely divorced from commerce, from satire scale profits and an endless river of merch.

The big thing about that and Jaws is that Jaws is an exploitation plot with a New Hollywood depth and a spotlessly clean lens on enriching the concession stands forever with popcorn epics like it. The big thing is that Jaws is a much greater film than it needed to be. When an exhausted Chief Brody is thawed at the dinner table by his young son mirroring his movements and demands a kiss on the cheek because he needs it, it doesn't contain a moment's cuteness because the warmth of it invites us in. We are the Chief, his son and his wife who is looking on like we are. This is from the era of gigantic disaster movies and identikit genre pieces for the drive-in. Roger Corman could have made Jaws but Spielberg made it future proof and dazzlingly polished: it's like it was made last week but without mobile phones.

The '70s was also the era of the movie brats. Scorseses and Coppolas who had grown up in the cinema as though it were a Sunday School for artists. From them came epics like the Godfather and small but deep studies of crime life like Mean Streets. The Exorcist played like a medical drama rather than a generic horror. Depth was in. The realm that Jaws unleashed went the other way and, for all the Networks and Taxi Drivers that came in its wake, changed mainstream cinema into a big dumb down. I don't mean to suggest that Jaws is a dumb movie, on the contrary, but everyone who suddenly wanted to be Spielberg (and then George Lucas) had less trouble than before selling their dreck for its dollar value.

Jaws plays like a movie brat version of an exploitation film but one made by someone without a degree from Corman University. Spielberg had come through television. He made an effective TV movie in Duel and then a feature film Sugarland Express that even his fans have to struggle to recall (it's a good movie, just not Jaws). So, while he was used to working with tight budgets he'd not made commercial films on next to nothing and Corman's make-the-poster approach. The film is normalised now but it ram raided film culture at the time and has never been out of accessible reach to cinephiles and beer and pizza night entertainment alike.

So by the time Hooper, Quint and Brody board the Orca and chugalug off to sharkville, we know a lot about why they're doing it because in a way that never feels too expository we have lived with the residents of Amity Island that summer, heard their East Coast Yankee accents opine on the situation. If it weren't for the Great White Shark circling around at the beach, we'd all move there tomorrow. Spielberg builds this without the grit of an Arthur Penn or Richard Fleischer, the photography itself squeaks with sponge finish but the sight of the kids behind the news reporter making faces and bunny ears brings real daily life home to the screen. We've walked into the cinema to see ourselves. It felt so much better than getting punched by mafia thugs in an alleyway.

But there's something else, here. Spielberg loves his bad guys and gives them so much screen love that we can forget what the movie is about if only for seconds. A shark fin breaks the surface and glides in a smooth and sexy motion in the foreground as the distant background shows a mass of ant sized humans scurrying from the water. This can be self-destructive (Schindler's List gave the head Nazi glamour and  charisma that the title character could never rival) but here it is pitch perfect. In the third act, when its movements are heralded by the motion of the yellow cannisters pinned to its body, the shark appears malevolent and vengeful. It would not be the last time that a non human character would assume a persona in movie by Spielberg or one of his clones.

And then there is Spielberg Face, the reaction shots that sidebar time itself as characters register things beyond their power and comprehension. Mostly this is wonder, close-ups of awestruck faces, like our own gazing at the screen, rendering our own awe as beautiful as the faces of the movie stars. In Jaws the Face is horror. Brody on the beach locked in a glare of shock as the Hitchcock trick of reverse motion between a zoom and a tracking shot appears to make him and us queasy with panic. The equally famous bigger-boat moment comes later as he comes face to face with the shark itself. In Sugarland Express this even went meta as a movie reflection in a window appears to be projected on a fascinated face. 

This, along with Spielberg's confidence that we will be engaged with mechanics and processes, mark him out for future moments in the cinema with titles that are talked about like news stories. Spielberg takes the manipulative force of cinema to the next level with this, sucking us in to believe that our purchasing power gives us a sense of agency over the film while making us cogs in the process itself. All effective art does this but Spielberg's movies make it a business model.

Personally, I believe Jaws is on the same level as any film considered canon. Fifty years have done nothing to reduce it and it stands equally with anything you can name a classic. It's the rest of Spielberg I have a problem with. After a number of equally effective movies he turned his crowd pleasing power to more serious fare, chasing the respectability dollar and critical approval and maybe, just maybe that best director Oscar that would elude him for decades.

It's not just the cuteness of so much of it that repels me. He didn't just infect his own movies with it but all but contractually mandated it for those pressed into service like Joe Dante or Tobe Hooper to the point that if a movie wasn't a teen slasher or high school romp it was a Spielbergian festival of adorability and the adorability always felt pressed out of machine tubes like sludge in fast food joints. His movies became the most beautiful tacky get well cards on screen. But he ceded the throne of cute to the execrable Wes Anderson who is lauded now for the same bullshit.

(Similarly, I have beef with John Williams as a film composer. He's perfectly adept at scoring movies and his grunting bowed strings for Jaws is a masterpiece but Spielberg used him again and again to slather the speakers in schmaltz. Not his fault? maybe not but if he was told to sludge it up on purpose, couldn't he have done something more than he did? For all his skill and orchestral talent most of his scores sound phoned in.)

The assault on respectability is another issue. Whether it's The Color Purple, Saving Private Ryan or Schindler's List, Spielberg feels lost among all the heavy messaging and just wants to get back among the gadgets and how stuff works so what we end up with is epics made of a few setpieces and a lot of meandering. It's like someone who never smiled trying it out from a YouTube video; there is a creepiness to Spielberg's pursuit of gravity. 

The truth is he was already doing it in his action adventures where the dysfunctional families and dark authority were just part of the plot and crunched along like popcorn. Jaws with its humane treatment of communities, shared fear, belly laughing irony and pure white knuckle suspense gave us the whole meal. I can't feel nostalgia for Jaws as it's never been out of reach. Seeing it again doesn't feel like putting on a golden oldie because it will sweep you up in minutes every time. To be fair, most of his movies do this, regardless of what I think of them, but this is the best of them all.

Viewing notes: I watched my 4K Universal copy of this. It is presented with Dolby Vision and Atmos and could only be bettered by a screening of a good print at a cinema. Jaws is locally available on a dual disc 4K/Blu-Ray pack and is average price. You could pick it up in a sale for a lot less than thirty dollars. It's worth it.

THE FOG @ 45

An old salt tells a group of kids around a beach campfire about a ship that wrecked from a false light during a sudden fog which lifted as soon as the damage was done. At the stroke of midnight, things in the nearby Antonio Bay township go haywire, alarms go off, things move by themselves and, over the horizon, a luminous fog is rolling towards the coast. Things could be better.

John Carpenter's third feature followed on the heels of his first hit, the monster Halloween which started the following decade's strain of teen slashers. The Fog was intended as a kind of fame rider: it didn't have to reinvent, it just had to draw them in. Drawn in they were with a huge margin of the production cost tenfold, even more and for longer on the new home video market. Carpenter was unconvinced by his own work in this case, thinking it muddled and unclear. He reshot scenes and added others. From this you might expect a mess but you'd be wrong.

The various threads of character driven arcs slowly converge as the plot progresses and one of the emergent properties of the whole thing is a more definite sense of setting than Carpenter had ever achieved (and his first one was in space!). Antonio Bay with its haunted servos, lighthouse radio station, antique church and small town seaside houses, feels like a place the way that the LA of Assault or the Haddonfield of Halloween don't quite get to.

Is it unrealistic that a lug like Tom Atkins could bed the barely in her twenties Jamie Leigh Curtis? How come all those bids in the prologue are out at midnight listening to an old man spin yarns? What's stopping the ghosts at the physical doors? Aren't they ghosts? Well, do you want it realistic or atmospheric? Sometimes you can't have both. What sticks through those holes in the upholstery are the setpieces like the attack on the fishing boat, the various single attacks on homes, heralded by ominous knocks at the door. And under all of this is the slow revelation that the tale told in the prologue left out some very dark details.

Antonio Bay, about to celebrate its centenary, was founded on mass murder and theft. It's not just the locals who are coming along to the statue unveiling. The familiar American story of an official telling of sins of the fathers presented after bleaching is familiar to Australians, as well. If Carpenter treats it lightly, having established it, it at least has been brought to the fore for the viewer and compels the final act of retribution. The film might not have the terrifying force of Halloween, the slowburn siege of Assault on Precinct 13, or the dizzy black comedy of Dark Star, but it does have a door to open: what's on the other side might well be someone who doesn't think you deserve a home.

The cast list is like a roll call of Carpenter collaborators past and future. Jamie Leigh Curtis plays to one side of the main narrative but is welcome for that. Her real life mother, Janet Leigh, is in running cope mode throughout and kept barely in the safe zone by assistant the wonderful Nancy Loomis. Assault's bad guy, Darwin Joston is a coroner. Tom Atkins breaks his Carpenter affiliation cherry with the roughnecked but gold hearted truckie. And so it widens. Everyone does a good turn.

The locations are stellar and if you get a local release of the 4K, you will be rewarded. A few process and matte shots are given a little too much clarity which would have been invisible on VHS but the shots of the bay to the horizon and the winding seaside roads are breathtaking. Antonio Bay doesn't just feel real, you want to live there.

Crowning this is another John Carpenter electronic score. Few elements of the movies of the late '70s and early '80s got closer to the intersection of the times in music and the times in the cinema than these. The score for the Fog with its underplayed piano theme, builds dread with a quiet assurance. It's the kind of thing that still gets a mention if a recent film goes out on a limb and uses synthesis. And that goes for the film itself. No, it doesn't quite have the chops of the great moments around it, but it holds its own and improves a little with each viewing, reminding that Carpenter's name was one like Cronenberg or Lynch, that made the ears of moviegoers prick up. I say moviegoers rather than cinephiles because Carpenter served this up to mass audiences in a way that few others could and still maintain such a solid cool.

Viewing notes: I watched my local Studio Canal 4K release from 1999 and it remains a stellar transfer which does justice to the source. At one point a pack of four '80s Carpenter titles was made available in 4K (without the Blu-Ray discs or extras) which went on sale for $19! Never seen it since and would've bought it just for back up discs. But the individual double discs are still available retail in Australia. Fun fact, I'm writing this on the anniversary (local time) of the premier screening of the film.

Review: WOLF MAN

Blake has survived his childhood with a survivalist father in the wilderness to be a freelance writer with wife and daughter. When he receives government certification of his father's death despite the body not being found, he has an idea. Going out there and staying at the farm might help him get some closure on the relationship that been so alienating. He persuades his career journalist wife it might also be good for the family as a bonding experience. So, off they go, into the wilds of Oregon and get lost. Happily, an old childhood acquaintance is there to help but this doesn't end well. Soon, the family are hurrying to the old farmhouse, pursued by something savage and large. Blake's wound begins to trouble him more than being painful. He begins to see the world through very different eyes.

Leigh Whannel's follow up to The Invisible Man shows him tackling another distant relative from the old Universal horror stable. This time, instead of cleverly removing the veil of subtext to the theme (Invisible Man's domestic abuse) Whannell plants the family unit a little under the surface as the monster story takes front and centre place. He avoids repetition by confining most of the action to a single night as Blake succumbs to the infection and metamorphoses into the wolf. His draining ability to communicate with his wife and child being the dysfunctional family theme to the fore but never at the expense of the threat.

Christopher Abbott again displays a great capacity for believable pathos as Blake. Parts of his transformation where he understands he can no longer talk are quietly heartrending and echo the sadness of his husband and father trying to keep a family from collapsing. Julia Garner as his wife Charlotte must tread deftly between showing her contempt of her husband without us giving up on her. Matilda Firth is natural as young Ginger. 

The remaining character is less the werewolf than the wilderness whose lightless confinement is brought close to our eyes. The barely visible treeline is all threat. The sight of the condensed breath shimmering over the edge of the lookout shelter seen in the prologue and later, at crisis point, is a Spielbergian touch that proves very effective in consolidating the powers of the monster.

This one has got some lukewarm reviewing around the traps but I was constantly engaged by the human threads and alerted by the action. While Whannell's Upgrade and Invisible Man provided a lot of tech bravado and ticked the boxes and beyond, Wolf Man is kept to its tasks and boundaries and presented something effective and manageable. That sounds like faint praise but, really, it's a sigh of relief that more wasn't made of what is always a simple tale that delivers a clear tragedy.