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.