THE TERMINATOR @ 40

A hitman from the near future is sent back to the Los Angeles of the '80s to terminate anyone called Sarah Conner to prevent the leader of the future resistance movement. The Terminator's bosses are not more human despots but machines that rose after a nuclear war and set about curing the cause by getting rid of all the humans. Well, that's one way to stop global warming. Across town, The Terminator's nemesis Reese is similarly backported to the '80s. The Terminator is a cyborg. He's partly flesh and blood and partly machine. He's good at his job and hones in on Sarah swiftly just in time for her to be rescued by Reese. And the chase is on.

To say that the rest of this sci-action classic is just a long chase sequence would be to insult the thought that went into its creation. Themes like artificial intelligence or robots taking their jobs to disastrous conclusions is as old as E.T.A. Hoffman (but probably older). More recently, every episodic sci-fi fiction featured the thought in at least one episode. In this instance, though, the sentient machines have cast judgement that the reverse was true and humans whose entire existence was a run up to self annihilation were no longer worthy of the planet they had laid waste. It's a proto version of Roko's Basilisk with a kind of  godlike morality added.

It's also a technological marvel of its day. Some things in high definition will look a little creaky to anyone watching freshly today. I imagine these moments will be greased over in any 4K version as James Cameron, like Spielberg or Lucas, tends to update his older titles. The problem with this is that it diminishes the original achievement. The skin tearing and moving around the exposed metal skeleton as The Terminator attempts self repair looks far more like latex than human skin but, however unintended this was, it adds to the alienness of the character. His skin looks functionally designed rather than the end result of eons of evolution. See also, any of the damage sustained by the cyborg who looks near human but might as well be a mechanical shark on legs.

If The Terminator is plagued by anything that might harm it, it lies in the performances. The cast's turns feel as though they had to fend for themselves. It's not just Arnie, Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton are acceptable as the leads because of the plot. You can see they are trying but they don't have the big picture eye of an actor's director behind the camera. This is true of later Cameron films like Aliens and The Abyss. It's worth noting this shortcoming is not limited to Cameron but shared by the likes of Cronenberg and Lucas in their earlier careers. 

As for Arnie, he gets a pass as he is learning 1980s Californian on the fly and his character's capacity for smiling or archness were not about to be called upon. Interestingly, the original casting for the title role was Lance Henriksen (who plays a detective) with the idea being that his grey ordinariness might make him even scarier. Then, Arnold Schwarzenegger's career as a unique looking muscle was very much on the rise, and the similarly buff Rutger Hauer had owned the screen in the then recent Blade Runner. It was the time for icon manufacture. Subtle sci-fi was for Canadians (well, one of them). Putting the one-person spectacle of Arnold was of its time and still works a treat. Also, T2 tries out the everyday guy theory and gets away with it (with Arnie in a different role for balance, it must be said). Also, it is still as funny as intended to hear Arnie bellow things like, "Fuck you, asshole!" 

You might be aware of the accusation of plagiarism aimed at The Terminator from team Harlan Ellison and it's worth a mention. Ellison wrote two of the best Outer Limits episodes in Demon with a Glass Hand and Soldier. Both involve time travel missions with high stakes for humanity. Cameron and Co. settled, having only the dodgiest of legs to stand on. But it's a telling point. The charge of plagiarism excites the wrong people who will spring to lazily won judgement once the word is uttered. But influence is not copying. The Terminator does not deeply resemble either of Ellison's Outer Limits stories. It uses some ideas in them as a departure point but it is no more a rip off than Ridley Scott's Alien is of Planet of the Vampires (an even slighter case). That's all the space I'll give this, here.

But the humans that are meant to engage us leave us cold. They become far more like plot sleepers than Arnie does, even though they convey their emotions and communication clearly. It's only when the action calls for them to be quippy or histrionic that  we notice they are doing more than deliver exposition. Then again, just as the failed effects can suggest artificiality that benefits the film, this sense of humankind being so frail and might well convey an unintended source of empathy, that they really will need to be fought for when the computer networks rule. Am I really suggesting we celebrate this movie for its unintentional features? Isn't that more the realm for the ones we like to ridicule? Not in this case: the failure of a technical maestro to martial convention the way his better rounded colleagues could and did might itself be a poignant commentary on a film about the contest of humans and machines, however accidental. In the highly loaded popular cinema of the '80s, The Terminator stands as tall as it did when it was the massive hit it was on release. Thing is, whether you see it as a critique by distillation of toxic masculinity, a warning to the present about the future, you can always just turn all that off and get into some great action scenes ... and then start thinking about it again. So, yep, still works.

Review: A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE

Samira, an end of life patient in hospice, is learning to cope with her lot. One day at an outing to nearby Manhattan, the aliens invade and begin going through all those tasty humans. She variously meets people and witnesses the deaths of many as the audio sensitive bug monsters swarm. This existential whammy gives her pause for thought and she assigns herself a mission of nostalgia, helping and helped by a young man and her own service animal Frodo the cat. That last detail might make you wince (oh, a cute animal) but you won't be if you see the film; this one delivers some stunning suspense and a slow burning sense of death's inevitability.

So, without spoilers, this film's plot has to remain sealed there. What I can say is that the balance between the constant threat of instant death and the quest to experience the best of life is generally enough to divert attention away from the immediate quest's utter stupidity. Then again, when we do recall that we remind ourselves of Sam's failing grasp of life from the get go. At its best the action is white knuckle with the added zest endemic to this franchise of having to be silent through pain and shock which are dealt out in constant flow. At its worst, it can feel a little too much like a game adaptation, with characters virtually winning tokens from dealing with the aliens, and some of the magic-is-where-you-find-it moments felt a little worn.

What saves this from just being another franchise sci-horror is not just a deft hand at action sequences and some fine audio editing, but a pair of fine performances. Joseph Quinn as Eric the law student does a lot of learning along the way and the path is frequently bumpy. It is Lupita Nyong'o's film, however, and her journey through the seven stages of self-grief is constantly compelling. She keeps us aware of why her odd little mission has to do with her entire life's course. We assume that people in hospices have made peace with their fate but that is always a mistake. It's not too much of a stretch to suggest that this whole story serves as a kind of high tension enactment of that process. At only one hundred minutes of screen time, it's not a big ask to sit with her as he rages against the dying of the light.

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN @ 50

Fredrick is so ashamed of his family legacy that he has mangles the pronunciation of his own name. If that's Smith to Smythe, meh, but if it's Frankenstein to Fronkensteen you've got a problem. He's built a credible career as a neurological scientist and can do without all the associations with corpse revival. But then, when a solicitor from the old country approaches him with the news that he has inherited Castle Frankenstein, Fred's curiosity and sense of real estate values get the better of him. Once there, having acquired an assistant and a sidekick, he is seduced by the possibilities and goes hunting for brains and corpses. Doesn't sound that funny, does it?

Mel Brooks had grown up with comedy, clowning around the Borsch belt to high level tv gigs, the series Get Smart and so on. When he was led with one project from a musical to a novel to a movie that he fell into directing he came up with The Producers, one of the most durably funny comedy movies ever. After The Twelve Chairs and then the Western bashing Blazing Saddles, his regular cast leader, Gene Wilder came to him with this story of old school monster movies and lipgloss. Brooks jumped at it and made one my favourite comedies.

It's harder to write about comedy without dragging it into a bog of obvious statements and try-hard joke transfers, so I'll say very little about them (and this might end up very short). Sticking to the film making, though, I can say that Brooks starts with what might have been an acceptable but dull parody of classic Hollywood or something absurdly overblown and self-sabotaging. Instead, he renders unto Caesar.

Young Frankenstein has just enough of the chiaroscuro of the 1930s but not so much that it bleeds over the performances. He gives us a widescreen image rather than the near square of academy ratio. And he offers an ensemble cast who only break through their performances into histrionics when the film itself does. So, this is neither a smugly modern take on an antique form of cinema nor a slavishly reproduced curio (like a proto Guy Maddin). It's a mainstream comedy movie that gives us enough atmosphere of mists, castle walls and thunderstorms to beckon us in and bear a well told, if simple, story that itself serves up some very durable jokes (and a few flat fallers, but you can't have it all).

The variation in performance styles is kept under the rise and fall of Brooks's baton. It can work when Gene Wilder is screaming, Terri Garr is wailing, Marty Feldman's mugging with an understated one liner and Cloris Leachman is flailing like an old Shakespearian all at once just as easily as when Wilder is holding everything he has back or Feldman interrupts with a splutteringly funny ad lib. Contrast this with any horror comedy that misjudges the horror premise's gravitas and goes full camp. A lonely few ever make it to the end of these endeavours. It's a tough blend: do you go funny, here, or scary? Mel Brooks knew how W.C. Fields made a blind man work in a comedy setting by making him a threat. He even repeats the lesson, here. Leveraging the tension of the genre is a friend, not a hurdle, but then it needs an expert to judge, to smooth, to disrupt, to let the chaos break and to cut when it gets too explosive. Young Frankenstein is a cinema comedy textbook.

Not everything lands. There are five decades between then and now and yesterday's archness can be today's smarminess. This film survives its moments of awkwardness. Well, there aren't that many - the intersecting of performance, writing and judgement see to that - but that we still notice them reinforces the rule they break. Comedy is tough; it fails more than it works, it can delight one day and fall into contempt the next and ,whatever its fortunes, must be able to get off its bum and try again. Comedy has no friends. It does, however, enhance and if we find ourselves in our praise of it, talking of it as though it were good table service, then even that slight acknowledgement will suffice, until we see the best of it again and it slaps us down with its power. That's what Young Frankenstein does.

AMADEUS @ 40

Vienna 1823. Aging composer Antonio Salieri is saved from suicide by his servants. Later, in a private room at the local Bedlam he is visited by a young priest who has arrived to hear his confession. The priest has heard that Salieri believes he killed titanic composer Mozart. The fresh faced cleric is in for the confession of his career.

Salieri leans in to his tale with a series of comparisons between his plain and philistine upbringing in the middle class and Mozart growing up performing marvels of music for the crowned heads. Then comes the day that, as adults, the two meet in Vienna in a moment of shock for the Italian as Mozart unknowingly reveals himself to be a dirty minded boy with a whinnying laugh that would make a filly blush. A few salient encounters later, before the Emperor and other luminaries, the vulgar upstart embarrasses or insults or utterly miffs Kapellmeister Salieri such that he regards himself to be Mozart's earthly nemesis. The same god who made the monkey a musical genius was the one who gave the virtuous artisan just enough talent to see it. It's on.

When this film was fresh there were many who whinged about the low historical accuracy. They missed a few points. First, the title is not just Mozart's middle name; it's meaning, beloved of god, is how he is seen by the narrator of his life. That narrator, plinking away at an old forte piano in the dust and straw of a pre-compassion mental institution, is consumed with a persistent resentment mixed with a leaden guilt. This is not what you'd call an impartial witness. The Mozart we meet is like one of the sweet toothed Salieri's exotic mazipan lollies; dressed in bright finery, tinkling with giggles and brashly childish, an ungrateful benefactor of divine gifts. The Mozart in Amadeus is created by the lifelong anger of a man who considered himself cheated for eternity. It's not a biopic, it's a fable.

This is why it doesn't play like a cinema biography with a series of great moments in history shoehorned into its timeline. The play by the mythology-fancying Peter Schaffer keeps its focus unwaveringly on legend and what it might mean to us across history. Milos Forman's genius was to dress it up like a pageant but have it play like a campfire tale. There's pomp, ceremony and a dizzying pallet of colours, materials and styles from the 18th century, looking just enough like the indirect sunlight of the formal painting of the day (as well as a fair share of scurrility from the likes of Hogarth) but also pushed into a kind of post punk edge through some very sharp eyed art direction. Never, though, is that allowed to pop through the narrative; this really is not Ken Russell's Mozart.

This limited fluidity allows for some brash casting and performance. Tom Hulce gives us a Mozart in constant nuclear creation, a stream of imagined music running through his head as he swigs champagne, skipping through the streets. Elizabeth Berridge as wife Constanze errs on the side of trashy to make a unit that everyone of us knew when we were in our twenties. One reviewer (whose name I wish I could remember) nailed it when she wrote: "Tom Hulce and Elizabeth Berridge as the Mozarts are so cute and American they're like a couple of cartoon mice." I really can't top that.

Jeffery Jones is so angular and taciturn in his turn as the Emperor that my sister described him perfectly as an axolotl. When confronted with a hint of impropriety or delighted with joyful news he tends to give no more than a tight "mm-hm!" The sense of restraint is intimidating and funny.

Of the performances here, though, it is the one where the Oscars showed that they really could get it right when they tired. F. Murray Abraham as Salieri is a wonder. From the striding younger man to the ancient sage on step from dust he seizes our attention and plays us for the whole running time. The glow in his eyes as he manipulates the priest for his own pleasure comes straight through the screen. In movement, voice and demeanour he is this film's every phase made manifest. Not a line of Schaffer's gloriously showy language rings false. 

The themes of great vs mediocre, immortal vs earthly come to a head during the scene were an ailing Mozart is dictating the score of his Requiem to Salieri. There is just enough music theory in the dialogue to indicate that two professionals are at work, one feverishly calling out his thoughts and the other writing them down. It is the moment when Salieri witnesses first hand what has caused him such awe. He almost kills the flow of thought from the sick bed with his befuddlement until Mozart clarifies as though revealing how he has worked a magic trick. In those moments the depiction of genius and its astounded reception themselves astound. Mozart is writing his own death mass to Salieri who intends to present it as his own work and yet the desperate need to get it recorded transcends the earthly filth of envy or arrogance. This scene, once again, made me well up as it did when I first saw it in the cinema and every viewing thereafter. As film craft it is an impeccable result of deft narrative that has brought these two figures from the lofty distance of the court to commoners into such a compelling intimacy. It is a perfect scene.

It's this that Amadeus wants us to know, not Mozart's life and times. Prague stands in perfectly well for Age of Enlightenment Vienna, the splendour of the Classical era stage, the joyful suburban vaudeville, all the contrasts that present Mozart's world would work all by themselves but the enmity between the fleeting fire of genius and the gutters of the everyday is what keeps the story running. As for history, this is not even trying.  It's myth. Playwright Schaffer even buys into the legend of the masked messenger who delivers the commission for the requiem which has its roots in Mozart's guilt at disappointing his father who died before it was resolved. (Tom Hulce's bloodless fear at their first meeting is magnetic.) If we might tsk at this or that historical impossibility we would do much better to remind ourselves (as the film is happy to) that we are hearing all of this from an old man enraged at his own mediocrity; not insane, consumed.

I saw this in early 1985 with my mum. She had wanted to go to A Passage to India which I thought looked dull (I know it's by David Lean but it still looks dull) so I talked her around. It was long but there was an intermission. We were both spellbound by it and went for coffee and cake afterwards. Soon after, I took my sister and her husband to it and I delighted in their awe. It remains one of my favourite cinema experiences. This is helped by my own fandom of Mozart. 

Mozart was my childhood hero. I was a classical-only listener from the age of ten to thirteen and the gateway drug that led to my first record purchases (Mozart and Bach) was the serenade Eine Kleine Nachtmusik which we had at home. While at thirteen I soon learned to at least profess devotion to the crap I heard on Countdown if I wanted to survive high school. I actually took to rock music pretty readily and kept with it. However, I have time and again, wound it back and returned to Mozart and the gang, even venturing into the twentieth century composers (so, take that, Spotify!). Amadeus didn't get me back into Classical era music as I'd already started that with 4MBS while at uni and the crazy bargains at the Record Market in town. What Amadeus did for me was make me a deeper listener as I came to appreciate the lives and times that forged the sound, whether it was joyous celebration or pleading to an indifferent deity.

F. Murray Abraham won the Oscar for his performance and thanked Tom Hulce from the podium. The costuming category featured a group of models in eighteenth century finery who strode in stately pomp before the music turned to some cod Chuck Berry and they all broke into the Jive. That joke felt more exhausting than hearing any bedroom guitarist play Anarchy in the U.K. as a ballad or a classical piece as metal. Abraham's win almost erased it from memory. 

In 2002 Milos Forman expanded his own creation. I had bought a lovely double digipak with the feature on one disc and bonus material on another. The extras included a string of quite wonderful scenes removed from the cinema release. I watched them once. When I had a cull of my DVDs about ten years later, I gave this away, having replaced it with the Blu-Ray. The Blu-Ray featured the director's cut which included Forman's protests that this was the way he'd really wanted it. My long but magnetic favourite movie epic had become like almost all of these revisions, a bloated mess that dragged like a school play. There is a moment in one of Salieri's monologues where he recalls with exquisite ache how the sight of Mozart's first draughts were perfect: remove a phrase and there would be diminishment, add one and it would be overdone. If only Forman had heeded this lesson.

These extra scenes (a whopping twenty minutes of them) variously render Salieri far more of a monster than he needed to be, Mozart ruder and more pathetic than he needed to be and robbed Abraham's performance of a astutely judged wicked grin. The changes were too drastic for seamless branching to be effective so that's how the film was presented without  a choice for the viewer to watch the original. 

This happened with a number of other modern classics like Apocalypse Now and The Exorcist (whose version you've never seen became the only one anyone could see for years) and like those the Amadeus extended cut rewrites history with an implied lie that this interminable soapy drudge was the same film that won eight Oscars. Forman, no longer with us, cannot offer comment nor a wish to release the original and best. There have been mutters afoot that a fortieth anniversary edition on 4K will appear and it will feature the cinema cut as the primary one. While I'd love that, it's already June 2024 and no one who might release it (WB or Criterion) had done so much as mention it.

For this blog I repurchased an original DVD release, which is the sole means of seeing it in its true form. The seller knew what he had and priced it accordingly (not outrageous but for more than an old DVD normally goes for). I paid up and received a relic of the early era of digital video: a flipper disc (content on both sides) in a snapper case (mostly paper with a plastic clasp). Once again, for the first time in decades, I watched one of my favourite films the way it was meant to be seen. Old compressed and noisy transfer aside, it was a marvel. I choose this as my favourite from the director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Firemen's Ball, an artist whose adaptability gave him a highly distinguished career in the empathy engine medium of cinema where his touch at its best was light and whose trust in the stories he was realising was profound. All of his best qualities as a maker of cinema converged at this point to produce something very possibly eternal. So, release the original bloody cut in 4K, you bastards!

Viewing notes: as aforesaid, I was compelled to buy an old copy on DVD to watch this in its original and superior edit. The transfer is plagued with noise and compression artefacts but the movie still plays gloriously. There are people in there twenties who might love this film but have probably never seen it properly. Argh! Currently, there is no means of seeing this cut legitimately outside of a retro cinema screening or an old DVD.

FRIDAY THE 13th: THE FINAL CHAPTER @ 40

Back just before the halfway mark of the '80s, this title probably felt likely. The second half put a lie to it and any attempt at closing off horror franchises. But this one promised a conclusion, Jason wins or Jason loses, end. Also, they could stack it with the hits, a clip show slasher (maybe even bloopers). 

A crime scene team cleans up after the last movie's partying. A group of teens drive out to Crystal Lake for times wild 'n' fun. A young family welcomes them as they drive up to the house next door. A studly young man turns up with a tent and claim to be a bear hunter. Jason kills some people.

The young boy in the family is a budding effects and movie makeup artist, building ghoulish heads with moving parts. Trish gets in with the teen crew. Jason has made his way back home. The teens throw a party. Cool and normal.

And then what you expect to happen happens. By this stage it had become lore that slashers punished the promiscuous. The horny teens that had led to Jason's fate in the first film and their later counterparts were all killer fodder, whether Jason, Michael or whomever popped up in a mask to find them. Because of this slasher films were considered conservative. Here's the problem with that: it doesn't work. Not all horny teens get butchered. Some virtuous maidens do. 

There are a lot of kills in this one you could attribute to punishment: pervy teen gets stabbed through a screen while watching stag movies, another gets a harpoon to the crotch and so on. No one in the target demographic munching up a storm of popcorn as the blood was splatting on screen was turned off sex by any of the kills of these movies. Most '80s slashers were knock offs of Halloween and, if a trend like death-sex was perceptible, it made it to the timeline. Not even that made them moral majority mastodons: the movies are wild, the killers are the puritans.

The cast includes one of the decades Coreys (Feldman) and future go to weirdo Crispin Glover. The latter as a girl-shy teen who instantly grows into a young sophisticate with a single event. The former, the one who makes the masks but also comprehends the true meaning of Christmas (or Friday the 13th) finds a way to confront the killing machine very effectively in a climax that develops the one from Part II. It is in this stroke of canniness that this entry in the franchise distinguishes itself. The slasher film that uses both the bluntness of the sub genre and figurative thinking to turn horror cinema to the mirror might well have been the final chapter and be respected for that. You will not be surprised by the final shot but that, too, is reflection. Then they just went ahead and made more. 

Viewing notes: I saw this on Blu-Ray boxset but it is available through Stan (all F13) or to hire from Prime, Apple, Google etc.

THE WOMAN IN BLACK @ 35

Young London solicitor Arthur Kidd, travels to a remote coastal town to see to the estate of a local aristocratic woman. While in town, he rescues a child from death by crushing logs and, attending the woman's funeral sees the figure of a woman in black in and around the church when he'd been told there would be no mourners. At the house, he makes his way through the masses of paper to find anything that might need action. 

Routine stuff but on a stroll around the house, he comes upon a small ruined graveyard and, stung by a sense of dread he turns to find the spectre of the woman in black glaring at him with pure malevolance. He runs back to the house and locks himself in. At the end of the day, as he waits outside for his ride back into town, the seamists roll in and in the white void he hears the sound of a carriage crashing into the sea and the screams of a child. When the air clears and old Kekwick clops up on the transport. Rattled, Kidd goes back to the Inn in town, determined to unravel the mystery.

The Woman in Black, set here in the 1920s, was a novel from the '80s with a vaguely turn of century setting. Heavily original thinker in horror and sci fi, Nigel Kneale, wrote this adaptation for television. The post war setting is poignant, allowing Kneale some ways out of writer problems. Quite a lot of the novel is given over to letters. Even as late as the '80s the worst way of doing this was to narrate them over scenery or perhaps action but this forces considerable truncation and the burden of this correspondence is taken up with a complicated backstory. Kneale puts the narration on wax cylinders. Antique by the '20s, this device nevertheless lets us hear Mrs Drablow's storytelling, Arthur's own journaling and hints at the wealth and engagement with the world by the Drablows in having such a luxury to record their days and ways. 

The period also allows us to see Arthur as a compassionate professional in taking the difficult case of an ex army officer damaged by gas attacks in the Great War. He winces at the sound of the laboured breathing in the office but he is kind and forthright with the client. Kneale is pointing to the worldly horrors of war technology, how they are matched by the otherworldly ones at Eelmarsh House.

The backstory of the causeway haunting and the vengeful ghost that emerged from it must be pieced together by the alert viewer. This can go against the dense atmosphere of the production but the good news there is that as long as you have the basics you can easily sit back and enjoy this one. I only got the full story of it when I finally read the novel (in advance of the blithering 2012 feature film) and was happy to read through all the letters. By the time you're following Arthur running down the house's corridors or hearing with wide eyes the clopping of hooves through the mist, you're taken up with the thrill of it which allows only so much backstory concern to seep through.

The other side of this atmosphere is a very cosy warmth in scenes of vintage train travel, country inns and town markets. One of Kneale's (and director Herbert Wise's) admirable restraints here is to follow the source novel and dismiss the old Hammer Horror traits of the grumpy local yokels warning the city slickers "not to gaaaugh there! We told yer. Don't gaaaaugh therrrrre!" The people of the town might be a little roughshod but they're not cliches. James Watkins' 2012 Hammer production shoehorns this rubbish into it, along with a mass of cattle prodding jumpscares which were in high cinematic fashion at the time (and now used by the laziest minds in cinema). Kneale's Woman in Black has one (count it) jump scare which is fully earned and silences the most jaded genre fan when seen for the first time.

I seen this too many times to really be affected by my favourite scare (in the manorhouse cemetery) which is a sudden appearance. It happens in one long take and the ghost appears behind Arthur. The entire effect in those pre-CGI days would have been about physical blocking; the actor would have hid behind a prop headstone and, with the camera and Adrian Rawlings in the right places, was suddenly and terrifyingly there. Even the close ups, which you don't expect, of her blue glaring face which might be goofy, are unnerving. I couldn't watch the scene in isolation for years, even in a brightly lit room. The effect has waned on me a little but there's a trace of it still there and when I saw it again for this, I braced myself when the scene approached.

 For me this is a rainy night standard, especially when showing it to someone for the first time and best if it's cold enough for an open fire. It might help if you aren't too spoiled by the 4K pristine images of streamer movies and can settle into a vintage look and feel. It's not quite as bane bones as a '70s Dr Who episode but it's not the over egged garbage of the 2012 remake. What you'll get, if you're happy to settle into a well told ghost story, is a purely pleasurable journey into dark intrigue with atmosphere to bottle. But you must be ready to settle, that's how it gets you and that's how it works. And this still works.

Viewing notes: I have sad tidings bout this one. I first saw this in the '90s on a VHS rental. A little later I got a copy of the U.S. DVD release, by then out of print. During the plague in 2020, I was delighted to get the beautiful restoration on Blu-Ray from U.K. label Network Releasing. Finally, a respectful and well presented high def way to watch. What's more you had a choice of seeing it in a tastefully reframed widescreen or the original tv ratio of 4X3 with ad spacers (I watched it this way to see it closer to the original way, without the ads, o' course). Did you notice my use of the past tense there? That's because Network Releasing who were great for a host of U.K. tv and cinematic physical media, went bust last year and their back catalogue was either destroyed or distributed otherwise, not to be taken up by any other label. So, that will leave U.K. Prime for the streaming or (just checked) a second hand copy of the Network disc for over $200 AUD. Meanwhile, the jumpscare crazy bullshit version is there to play at a click on most  streaming services. But, not even for giggles should you watch that one.