Review: WARFARE

part of my subscriptionDo you remember Eric Prydz's 2000s hit Call On Me? No? Well, if you ever slunk home after a long Saturday night and chucked Rage on, you'll remember the video. A group of beautiful and fit young women compete for the attention of the hunky gym trainer. Gyrations and pelvic thrusts and Californian perfection in the hair, faces and bodies. All the reward is directed at the male who is standing in for those playing at home. Well, that's how this movie about military violence begins. After enough of the Prydz clip the reverse shot is of a wall of soldiers in action gear grinning and leering and cheering: bonding. You will remember this moment as the film continues. You will need to.

This film has a progress rather than an act structure. It is based on the collected memories of the soldiers who participated in the operation and, while an arc does become clear, what we are watching is military procedure without context beyond that of warfare itself. Ok, got it, roll credits.

Well, the rest of the film is a steady build from the crew establishing their base to starting operations to defending themselves against an elusive enemy. The point of their presence and commandeering the house becomes clear as they identify armed suspects appearing in the neighbouring buildings, the soldiers are drawing them out. When a grenade is tossed in through a window the operation changes from a clean-up job to a siege with increasingly traumatic and brutally violent effects on the men.

A multinational cast of young, intense performers gives us a thickening tension and at frequent intervals, we go back to that bonding sleazy pop video. When we're looking into the body of a soldier halved by an explosion with his internal organs exposed or another's legs hacked by weaponry, we recall the doof doof techno rhythm and the beautiful young things grinding around erotically and wish we were back there when the worst thing was what the men no so secretly wanted to do with those dancers. If that bonded the characters, it now bonds the audience to the movie.

The insistence on depicting the real time events highlights the apparent futility of the operation. What does it mean when a single act of aggression renders the soldiers into automatic motion drilled in by training? And where are we looking when we understand that almost all of what we are seeing is the force and equipment of an invading army? When they are threatened our empathy defaults to them. A poignant single shot before the end credits puts this into perspective.

I am gladdened that this wasn't a found footage movie as the real-time feature suggested. The presentation is the cleanest digital video and multiple setups every scene. About half way through I began to wonder when the point was due to arrive but as that mark drove by it became clear that this was the point: noise, danger, life and non life. While I was happy to emote-along the characters closest to my field of vision, I kept thinking of why they were there. I did not support the war in Iraq. This coloured everything I saw between the two credit sequences and I kept thinking of the ever darkening sleaze of the Eric Prydz video and feeling sick that the erotica and the ultraviolence became indistinguishable. A strong piece that yet must beg for indulgence lest its audience should wise up and walk out.

Viewing notes: I saw this as part of my subscription to Prime. It was a robust 4K presentation. It's available for rent at other sources.

FRIDAY THE 13th @ 45 (Spoliers!)

A young woman hitchhikes her way to her job as a cook at a summer camp. After being weirded out by a local preaching doom, warned off going to her destination because of murders that took place there, and then given the ick by the driver of her ride, she gets out and is pursued into the woods to her violent death. Meanwhile, the other young things assemble at Camp Crystal Lake to setup for the advent of the kids. They notice the persistent absence of the new cook (we already met her) and then they, too, start suffering the slings and arrows ... and javelins. Cinema has entered the 1980s.

Sean Cunningham's 1980 teen slasher from a screenplay by Victor Miller was intended as a cash-in after the success of John Carpenter's seminal Halloween from two years before. This is how the film is often dismissed but that really is a disservice. While the parent group is similarly absent, leaving the nascent adults to fend for themselves, the threat of the suburban jungle is replaced with the wilder environment of the forest at night. 

These teens, also, have cleared school, having even less anchor points to the social order. This is illustrated early with the snake. Anyone who has never seen this film needs the warning that it depicts the onscreen killing of a snake by a machete-wielding kid. It happens as part of a panic among the group which is solved by violence. I cannot apologise for it but I can see how it establishes a pragmatism that puts the young adults into preparedness. In the realm of the movie, it's a small crisis brought to a head. It might well haunt more recent views beyond the running time.

For all I prefer in Halloween, I have to admit that the internal politics are given more depth in Friday the 13th. Along with the effective Tom Savini gore of the kills, this cultural aspect is brought to the fore, providing the monster with the kind of grounding absent in Carpenter's shape. In this first outing of the franchise, we don't even catch sight of the killer until the last. At this point we also get the motivation and its twisted ugliness.

A 1950s-set prologue has already given us a kind of standard setter and appears to speak for the film itself by punishing pre-marital sex. This, and a careful misreading of the ensuing movie bears out the common misconception that teen slashers are puritanical thunderbolts, warning the too-young away from the sins of the flesh. This falls apart immediately when you consider the target audiences were the same horny teens on screen who didn't once consider their desires to be preludes to murder. More centrally, it's the deranged monster with the machete that's doing this. As Alex West of The Faculty of Horror podcast once perfectly phrased it: the movie's rad, the killer's conservative.

A glimpse into the future will show how the F13 franchise developed this. The first four display an offroad freedom to the young adults' choices and, while sex is a generic given, they're also adventurous outside of that one. For now, back in 1980, the adults in the form of ludicrous cops and uptight veteran youth counsellors, and crazy Ralph the doomsayer, offer only a kind of dead skin as faces of authority. The result isn't an instant Lord of the Flies but an incursion by the big bad world lashing out from the dark.

It's taken me a while but I've come to appreciate Friday the 13th. When I first saw it during schoolies week in 1980 it was a tearing thrill ride before an eerie walk home though canal-ville on the Gold Coast to the flat I was staying at with other demographically threatened late teens. In a strangely prescient co-incidence, there was a serial criminal known first as the balaclava rapist and then balaclava killer on the loose along the Gold Coast. We were aware of that as we tried to navigate the then forbidding urban landscape of the strip.

This film also carries a surprise for anyone aware of the franchise iconography. It is not Jason who does the killing but his vengeful mother. Her dispatch with a machete to the neck appears to give a second birth to her wronged son whose grisly mutated form polarises out of the lake water and attacks the final girl in what might or might not be a dream. Than he's still out there? she asks the cops from her hospital bed. Yes he was, growing, getting nastier and uglier. But he was also developing and distinguishing himself from a decade of slasher clones who preferred F13's flamboyant gore over Halloween's suspense. And, of course, the Halloween sequels lay down and copied the copy. Jason got his hockey mask on the third go and its assumption was a comment on the society of his victims. Yes, of course, it's fun rather than philosophy but it's fun that got that tiny bit closer.

Viewing notes: I saw this on my birthday of Friday the 13th on Paramount's superb 4K transfer which enhances the always unexpected beauty of the cinematography. It was a birthday celebration and the viewing was ruled by peanut-gallery commentary, but we did take it in in spirit. It has been available as part of a boxset of the Paramount-owned franchise, and Stan used to stream it. Otherwise it's rentable online from a few outlets.

Review: UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

A rowdy French class gets disciplined by its teacher who's at his wits' end. What threw him off was the myopic boy who claims his glasses were stolen by a turkey. Sir bundles them all in the bad closet and says he won't teach them again until the boy has glasses again. This begins an expansive weave of threads as we follow characters through the snowy town who are looking for solutions. 

Matthew Rankin's absurdist canvas contains a gentle but resonant rug-pull about three quarters of  the way through. When it's revelation is clear it changes this film from something I might begrudgingly like to a work of satisfying depth. 

Until that point, though, it ain't easy. Once you've lost count of scenes of children walking against screen filling walls and dialogue whose whimsy borders on painful you would be forgiven for thinking that this is one of those movies you pick on your MIFF pass because you like the venue. When you get to the character dressed as a Christmas tree, your memories of Roy Anderson movies (I don't mean Wes, Roy is Swedish and can be even worse) might come flooding back with the weight of bad exam days.

But there is, in this case, more. I had to begin by telling myself that these separate narratives were like folk tales and the city which is described as zones of colour like beige or grey depending on the brick work is lent a fabulous look by its endless walls and barely snatched images of the white winter sky. This is Canada but it is a Canada whose French component is complimented by Persian rather than English. Don't ask me.

Actually, you can ask me. The theme of the overall arc here is connection. Family, community, culture, generation and location and it is moved with the notion of fluidity (gender, personal identity and more). Rankin, as writer, director and character, wants us to consider the organism of our community and the flow of our lives. The children, in their wild goose quest for a means to free the high value banknote from the ice takes them across town and back from afternoon to night, encounter a cross section of the townsfolk, all of whom have a story or a folky tip to share. Matthew Rankin as character and creator (though this does not stumble into heavy handedness) seeks his familial roots but must intersect with the same kind of undeclared network, even to the extent of connecting with the guide of dowdy civic tours of liminal urban wastes. 

The connections appear and are deftly drawn. The characters are, once knowable as parts of the greater tale, warmly presented. This film wrested my resistance from me the way a grumbling shy kid can be collared into enjoying a party. I thought I would be writing something like Roberto Rossellini makes a Wes Anderson film. Instead, I can report that I was most pleasurably proven wrong.

Viewing notes; I saw this at the Kino in Melbourne on a cold and rainy morning. It felt perfect.

CRUISING @ 45

After a series of murders of gay men in New York, Steve, a uniform cop, gets offered an undercover assignment with the carrot of a promotion to detective dangling. Steve moves into a flat in the West Village and starts meeting the locals and hanging out at the gay bars in the neighbourhood. The job, taking him into an intense world, forces him to confront his own sexuality as he involves himself ever deeper in the scene. His straight relationship starts to come apart and as he gets closer to narrowing in on the killer, he might have to make some big decisions.

Friedkin and his star Al Pacino had both been around the thematic area of crime procedural and undercover work in The French Connection and Serpico respectively. Cruising came at the end of a decade of cinema which New Hollywood had rendered gritty and dangerous. The appeal of the story with an added controversial theme was enough to get this one done as yet another dark big city story.

This film cannot be discussed without mention of the protests around its production and release by New York's gay community whose concern was the effects of damaging stereotyping or worse that might embolden hate crime. With the bullshit of gayness as a lifestyle choice (as opposed to a natural state) embedded in mainstream culture, the concern held water. That the resulting film does not play on this outside of characters' attitudes is a triumph against the times of its conception. Cruising might be many things but it is not a gay bash.

While it might be tempting to view the sweaty, macho and emboldened scenes of the clublife as the last orgy before AIDS, I think it would be missing the point the same way that a film depicting the twin towers might suggest commerce when everything was free. To my mind the flaunting culture of the leather bars is more related to the past, to the obscurity of privileged societies and the supposed decadence of antiquity. The cop cosplay comes across as poignant in the light of scenes of corrupt cops (or just impostors) using their authority for sexual abuse. When Joe Spinell first appears as such a cop in a cruiser car and then, in civvies, in the clubs, Friedkin is extending what he's already started to do with the killers when he shows a number of very similar looking men as likely. This is a microculture as seen by a baffled observer.

Steve is so baffled that his haunted gaze into a mirror toward the end holds questions of his own sexuality and perhaps even culpability. This is why Cruising doesn't play at all like the serial killer movies that dominated crime cinema in the following decade; the deeper the cop goes the less clear the job becomes, the less cultural judgement he is permitted to use. The irresolution is not something that Silence of the Lambs and its copies could tolerate. If anything, Cruising more closely resembles the freaky ambiguity facing Deckard in Blade Runner than anything from exploitation cinema. Friedkin spent marathon hours removing a lot of verite footage from the film (forty minutes). Superficially, this was to evade a lethal X rating but it also improved the film by leanness.

Is the film itself sleazy? It is unavoidably the production of an outsider to the culture who is likely to add more than a dash of exotica but I think the scenes of domestic life around Steve's apartment, the crossdressing sex workers (who come across a lot less freaky than the cops who bail them up). If there is sleaze it gets closest in the depiction of potential psychopathy when the film switches viewpoints and invades the apartment of one of the suspects. Steve invades the apartment and goes through the letters written to the suspect's dead father which include some bizarre and troubling imagery (you want sleaze? I paused the rental VHS for five tape stressing minutes reading the text, back in the '90s!). 

Al Pacino himself might have seemed poor casting but the authenticity of his awkwardness is right there on the screen. It serves him through the rising chill of his relationship with his girlfriend. Karen Allen adds a lot of definition to a role that might have been left superficial. When she plays with his costume it is both an affirmation of Steve's old normality and a creepy absorption of the iconography. If Cruising is a big budget exploitation movie it is a self-aware one.  Of course, I'm writing all this from an Ikea ivory-look tower further away than even William Friedkin was from the culture the film depicts. My judgement for the defence must be read that way. But I can say that, on repeated views, Cruising is a story of self-estrangement delivered cold, a remote surgical procedure, but not a smirk.

Viewing notes: I watched my splendid Arrow Blu-Ray for this review. Cruising has not kept a high profile in Friedkin's output and things outside of The Exorcist or The French Connection are only really served by boutique labels. If you want it on physical media, you'll have to look overseas. Otherwise, it's on at least three streamers for rent or purchase. 

BRING HER BACK: Review

Step brother and sister, Andy and Piper, are fostered out after the death of their father. Andy is a few months shy of being able to apply for guardianship of Piper so they need to lump this development. Laura, at first, seems a little quirky and try hard but she has nerves, too. When the pair venture out and see the third foster child, a little boy with a shaven head, on the floor of the empty pool, worrying the cat, the ick springs up in both of them. It's Ollie, muted by trauma. He gets locked in his room. Laura's offness only gets worse and there are troubling flashbacks or snippets from the most terryfing home movies ever made that give us the ick when we see her, too. You know all this and the film is only about ten minutes old. Bring Her Back is not about a breakneck horror coaster, it's about grind and dread.

The brothers Philippou chose to follow up their breakout hit Talk To Me with something that, while still in the horror genre, could scarcely differ more. Talk To Me was like a classic pop song with some added depth. You can rewatch it frequently and never tire of it. Bring Her Back plunges its hand deep into the viscera of some dark and ugly themes and keeps it there, foraging around. There is none of the humour of the debut but there is also none of the context that might provide it. What warmth there is is kept solely between Andy and Piper. When the bad fires up it keeps on burning.

There will inevitably be grumps from the horror community that this is yet another A24 grief allegory posing as horror cinema. Well, that is a central theme but the concern widens out toward an exploration of family trauma. We have already seen in a prologue that Laura has turned to the occult to recover her dead daughter. The trailer makes a lot more of this than the film does. The tale on the screen is about the unlovely weave of a woman's driven obsession and the urban Hansel and Gretel she has chosen toward that end.

Sally Hawkins gives us a Laura who is easy with her professional counselling skills, susceptible to off-rail whimsy to grasp at the trust of her charges and prone to resorting to some nasty gaslighting. If you know the actor, you'll know her versatility from the pained optimism of Happy Go Lucky to the challenged Elisa in The Shape of Water. Hawkins delivers a figure steadfast in her aim but protean in her constant sense of threat. Her Australian accent is as subdued as her character is in the company of officialdom but breaks into a kind of grinning mew when approaching intimacy, she is flint voiced mother and snarling housecat. This, and at no time does the performance feel pushed. 

The Philippous' naturalism in their casts' performances extends into this more subdued tale and proves essential. This extends to the turns of the younger cast, Sora Wong, Billy Barrett, and John Wren Phillips. This means that our empathy is called upon to deal with graphic pain which is plastered over the screen for its running time. That's a lot in a cinema ticket.

I hope I'm wrong about this but I can't see this attaining the same success as Talk To Me. Without the hooks of that one (the hand prop and ritual, the youth and the energy just in the trailer) we are left with a slowburning grind whose trailer-worthy moments of solid horror promise colour but whose deeper moments keep the pace down and the mood grim. You can like Talk To Me for the fun of it and watch it later for the depth. This one, not so. I think it's commitment to the darkness of the tale that demands fluctuations in empathy and outright revulsion will keep it from mass appeal. However, it also feels like it needed to be made. When you know that its makers turned down much bigger returns to make this disturbingly sincere film, you'll treasure every frame. But to do that, you'll have to want to sit in front of it. What can I say but please do?

 

SHIVERS @ 50 (SPOILERS)

A marketing slideshow for exclusive apartments and subsequent tour for a couple of potential buyers is intercut with a young woman unsuccessfully trying to evade a much older man's pursuit in the same building. When the man catches up to the woman it looks like sexual assault until he strangles her and cuts her abdomen open and pours in a corrosive acid. He then commits suicide. Welcome to Starliner Towers.

David Cronenberg's debut feature includes everything that would contribute to his name being in the dictionary. The police investigation reveals that the older man was a medical researcher whose experiments in engineering a parasite to solve organ transplants have resulted in the creation of a sexually transmitted creature that can drive its hosts to libidinal mania. Guess what happens when that gets loose in an exclusive apartment complex. 

Epidemic horror like The Satan Bug or The Andromeda Strain built tension through the threat of mass panic. On the other side of that was the force of law and science that could save the day. Cronenberg took the problem's point of view. STDs don't punish sex, they encourage it. He also made it an unlovely thing that looks something between a penis and scrotum and a turd. It is ickily transferred through kissing but can also chose any orifice available.

Outside of the monstrous appearance there is then the extended effect of the parasite. Victims variously enjoy their sexual benefits, become smoothly seductive or in the creepiest moment, speak like spacey cult members. Forsythe's monologue about her dream is so flinty and chilling it borders on AMSR. The subsequent orgy in the pool as everyone is infected is simply the end point of the virulence. The real chill happens when the final stage takes over and the residents leave the isolation of the building and drive in a cortege across the bridge to Montreal, smiling like they've all had full body lattes.

David Cronenberg had come to a very limited notice with two films too short to be features (both around sixty minutes). As a Canadian, his break came from government funding. Unlike the funding that led to Picnic at Hanging Rock to herald the Australian film renaissance, Shivers found its fortune and mass distribution in the drive-ins of the USA. Known variously by Roger Cormanesque titles like The Parasite Murders or They Came from Within, the tale of a massive deadly sexual contagion was a hit. And we thought we were clever with eerie schoolgirls in the bush. That's the other thing about Cronenberg revealed here: he has zero problem with genre cinema, sleaze or grindhouse aesthetics, as long as the idea survives, he's happy. 

Survive it did, through a string of ever slicker projects like Rabid, Scanners, The Brood and Videodrome all produced without a care of achieving conventional accolades, all affecting their audiences profoundly by stacking compelling ideas on top of the sensationalist action. When you go back to Shivers, though, you start to understand the struggle to get to the mainstream polish of The Fly. The effects work is of its time but still top shelf and the action is fluid. The problem is with the performances. Apart from the dream monologue and some of the dialogue about the effects of the parasite (the old man saying he could move them around had me grimacing for days after my first viewing) almost everyone is planky. The exception is genre goddess Barbara Steele whose bug eyed seducer is note perfect. Until you get into the film's rhythm you are constantly frustrated at how all of the future genius auteur was spending all his energy on the effects while surrounded by wooden zombies. 

This is not something that affected his contemporaries to the same degree. John Carpenter had his performance approach nailed during his quirky debut Dark Star. By the follow up it was set. David Lynch produced such committed weirdness that there was no room for shortfall in acting (seriously, there isn't a slight performance in Eraserhead). Cronenberg's problem for Shivers and the next few was that he needed to warm up. That would take a few goes.

I first saw this on VHS where it felt comfortable. I had a routine of catching up with movies I had never seen in the '90s and made Saturday afternoons the time for it. I'd go to Smith St and get a treat or maybe make a pasta and take it all in. I put myself on a course of Cronenberg and recall the effect of the more troubling aspects repeating in my thoughts for weeks after. By that stage, new Cronenberg films had veered from the strident shock and awe of the early films and, while I still went to see them at the cinema, I pined for the rawness of them. For all the sheen and elegance of something like M. Butterfly or Crash, I missed the rough lighting and action of the infected maniacs of Shivers. This might be a punk thing; I have never preferred the slicker option in anything because of the slickness since that democratising ethos. I  can even get a kind of corporate training video vibe in the stiffness of the acting. I still love Cronenberg but I'll take that frisson any day.

ALMOST FAMOUS @ 25

William Miller already feels geeky enough when he's told that he was put into school two years in advance by his weird academic mother. His sister launches out of the family nest as soon as she can at which point she leaves her record collection to William. He devours this and his need to discuss music leads to him meeting the legendary Lester Bangs who is generous with advice and gives him an assignment. At the concert that night, he meets the non-groupie bevy of Band Aids and the band Stillwater and gets backstage. They are going on tour and invite him along. So, he goes back home and finishes his stamp collection. Like fuck, he does.

Cameron Crowe's mid-size autobiographical epic came after a number of projects, writing or directorial, that revealed a deep understanding of youth. It was also where he went after his mega-hit Jerry McGuire. Almost Famous feels like an arrived opportunity at which he throws all of his experience hanging around rockstars as a teenager and getting to work the film industry. As with some other projects I can think of, I would much rather this filtration through fiction than the most detailed tell-all book. Crowe's move to make this was the right time: it was way beyond any need to prove himself. It also gave him a dream cast of solid performers and new talent to play with. Add some licencing coups with the source music and you've got a package that presents as 1973 on a plate. Except, it doesn't feel nostalgic.

Why? Crowe does two things to prevent that. First, it feels authentic. The actors playing band members rehearsed as the band, overseen by Peter Frampton who had been a rock star from the period setting. If the stage sound is much more studio-articulate than it would have been, that's in service of the audience: we do need to see the point of the adulation, even if a real group would have sounded like sludge at the time. Second, Crowe, having been there to document it, knows his era. After the explosive rush of innovation and upscaling of rock music in the '60s, the dearly '70s was a time when the top few established their empires in the stadiums that Led Zeppelin called the houses of the holy. Before it was Woodstock and Altamont and to come was the ravaging tear down of punk. For this moment, the monster bands ruled and the culture shrank around them like the plastic wrap of the merch. Crowe is remembering first hand. The coming of age tale is gravy.

Is Frances McDormand too brittle with her early boomer anti-drugs messaging? Maybe, but that does get balanced by the genuinely on-point things she also says. McDormand was half a decade out from her Oscar-winning turn in Fargo and was taking her pick of the roles. By the time you get scenes where swaggering rock stars are instantly brought around when talking to her on the phone, we really don't need both sides of the conversation (the Billy Crudup moment in the trailer remains a favourite).

Phillip Seymour Hoffman chews it up as maverick contrarian Lester Bangs. While I know that he didn't get British punk (his big piece on The Sex Pistols is remarkably off) Bangs was reliably surprising and funny. Seymour Hoffman was in career mode but was still featuring in the kinds of roles that got him noticed in the first place he approaches the fiery writer as a character study that must have felt like a holiday after his eye popping turns in Boogie Nights and Happiness. His opposite numbers are Billy Crudup and Jason Lee as the leading duo in Stillwater whose artistic ambitions struggle with their egos in a solid display. They wouldn't last a round with Bangs but we don't get to see that.

Kate Hudson, Anna Paquin and Fairuza Balk are the Band Aids and throw a patchouli-scented veil over the self-fashioned mystique they adopt. The dialogue about age and the truth and the ones about life choices (Morocco) ring with the funny and saddening poignancy that crushable youth is wont to choose. Zooey Deschanel's bug eyed youth as Anita Miller is played against her character's whimsy as she races toward a more conventional path to independence. 

Finally, it is Patrick Fugit who must shoulder the movie. He does so with the film's key disarmer, wonder. While quick to put a comically unconvincing grown up demeanour, his frequent moments of joyous witness give the film its durable high. One wrong note in his performance and everything gets exposed as fancy dress. When he learns over time to approach the rock stars, stroking vanity and appealing to honesty or at least the concept of it, it feels like his coming of age through his immersion in the music is the story we are enjoying.

But nothing's perfect. What are we to make of the sequence where the Band-Aids initiate William? Their ages as characters are not astronomical but would we cheer along as much if the genders were reversed? The situation is between William as a cute mid-teens writer and a bevy of camp-followers. The numbers alone would make it a gang bang. If it were younger roadies with a young female writer ... I'll admit that I look around this moment. Such junctions abound in coming of age narratives and are usually euphoric if male and hard and "real" if female. In 2000, this had yet to be expressed otherwise. Then again, Crowe is fictionalising an experience from his own life and effectively has dibs on how it's told.

And otherwise, in the scenes where the Band-Aids are variously energising in a kind of symbiosis or getting their shelf life labels pointed out, the women are designated as essential to the process, whether as muse, or fan or both. That Penny Lane is saved from being a casualty and continues in strength and that Sapphire's short, pointed monologue backstage lands with Russell are indications of even handedness and that the only illusions are those best broken by a business that gives fantasy and takes innocence is a kind of moral to the tale. Is the ending happy? It is temporarily resolved.

I bring this up, even though it doesn't form the central core of the film but it is unignorable on subsequent viewings. I personally am resolved to note it and let it weigh against my unceasing enjoyment of this piece. Almost Famous is a rare example of a film that is actually enhanced by a longer cut. Crowe's re-edit Untitled or the bootleg cut just gives us more of what we want and doesn't lag for a second for any of its forty extra minutes. For authenticity, I watched the original cut for this review.

As a punk in the late '70s, I celebrated the destructive critique of the stadium dinosaurs. This was partly due to my enthusiasm for those dinosaurs a little earlier when I completed my collections of Zeppelin, Queen, Bowie, and many more. The shame of the admission was enough but the feeling was the same. I admired from a foggy distance, the tales of barbaric excess on U.S. tours and wished I could be there will all the names and faces. Punk felt more accessible but there was nothing but recognition on my face as I watched how intently and solidly Cameron Crowe guided Patrick Fugit through his own brush with mystique and power. This film exults rock music without embarrassment or irony because it doesn't need to. In the end it is joy, plain joy.

Viewing notes: I watched the original, shorter cut of this for the review here. The 4K presentation is extraordinary (though, what a great asset a Dolby Atmos audio track would have been!) As a modern classic, it's pretty easy to find for rent or free with subscription on Prime and Stan. It's also available on  Blu-Ray (with both cuts) and DVD (original cut). 

Review: CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD

Quinn moves into a small town with her widowed father. First day of school, a tall and awkward boy turns up at the doorstep offering to walk her to school. She quickly falls in with the bad crowd. This all happens after a prologue scene which reveals the type of crazy killer and his prey. It's set at the end of the '90s. Cut to NOW (big red letters) and Quinn. So, all the bad kids will get together and have to fight off a psycho clown who emerges from the cornfield. There's your title.

It's a title designed to cause both knowing groans and curiosity in its potential audience. It must have something if it's going to be so obvious with its name and trailer. Like in the old Sara Lee ads, you take the irony and roll it and roll it and roll it again. The exercise is not whether they will go for irony or self-reflexivity, those have been baked in for decades, but what they will serve up by way of surprise.

So, will this one choose the self-aware irony of the post Scream '90s, the deadpan violence of the '80s classics, and will it try for a contemporary angle to justify itself? If it is well enough made with strong kill scenes it doesn't need to deliver much beyond taut suspense and come in around the ninety minute mark.

First, technology: it's a two pronged issue. The setting cuts the mobile signal off or at least makes it unreliable. The teens post their own horror themed videos featuring the local legend, Frendo the Clown which are a mix of found footage and urban exploration shorts, blended enough to satisfy anyone out irony-ing anyone else with notions of self-aware fiction presenting as pov reality. The found footage thrill remains and is decades beyond being called a fad. That it is part of conventional slashers like this is also pre-trodden. If anything, this aspect, which leads to the first discovery of the real threat, is played down.

Downplayed too, are the stereotypes of slasher that form the gang. The alpha chick and her minion are not as hard-arsed as they would have been forty years ago. The secret of the alpha boy is not a startling revelation but rather played for charm. Why are these characters we like so much as caricatures working so easily in this latest instance? Even the recent gung-ho Thanksgiving toned all of this down. Robert Eggers' Nosferatu restored the uber vampire's ugliness and made his sexuality icky rather than disarming. The teen slasher, once the haven of social savagery has been de-bitched by over use. This might make for more realistic group dynamics by softening the conflict but it might also allows the relief of going back to the source well for our antiquated morality kicks. We can laugh at and with the bad stuff when it's from 1983.

I'm not being cynical, here. The remaining thing that this contemporary teen slasher must do to earn its popcorn is to pull a big struggling rabbit out of the hat. It does and it does at the exact point when the main suspect is exonerated. Then it goes full tilt at the shifted power base and this movie crunches into gear (a veiled spoiler that I couldn't resist). Clown in a Cornfield is telling us in letters as big as the NOW announcement at the start, that it comes not to bury the slasher but to fit right into the mutated plug and socket joint that it found in the 2020s.

If the self-aware dialogue and deadpan understatements feel a little soft they aren't unwelcome or laboured. The generational conflict is much better served. It would feel laboured in a previous America (and an Australia we recently avoided) but feels a lot more poignant. Overall the decision to smooth out the edges of the satire was wise as the remaining peaks can still deliver the message from under the lighter surface. Along with Thanksgiving, Freaky, In a Violent Nature and Terrifier, Clown in a Cornfield offers its own time-informed take on this most unforgiving of sub-genres.

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK @ 50 (Spoilers)

St Valentine's Day, 1900. The students of an exclusive girls school go to a local geological feature for a celebratory picnic. When the coach comes back to the school it's minus three girls and a teacher who have vanished without a trace. An extensive search returns empty handed. An unsettling sense of mystery descends upon the land.

This is a story about place and time, about empire and invasion, certainty and conundrum as much as it is about purehearted young women from a bygone era. Beginning with a foreboding image of the rock itself, brooding behind haze and segueing to the sturdy Victorian architecture of the school, we are being prepared for a few collisions. 

The first of these has to do with the toy Europe that colonisation was still trying to make of Australia. The girls in the opening montage, helping each other into corsets or whispering poetry in fragile voices are going to visit an imposed tradition on a place formed millions of years before. The British empire, of which the girls are part is an unnoticeable dot on the geological timeline. One of them, Irma, whimsically observes that all those millions of years of formation was "just for us". 

At the rock itself, they pass the setting of a aristocratic family so enervated by their surrounds that they are virtually reduced to decoration. At the picnic ground where the girls and their wards settle, there is a cake to be cut in a rite that feels more pagan than Christian and the post lunch drowse settles in. The watches stop and the small group of friends who split off to explore, seem drawn by unseen forces which render them into slow motion Botticelli figures. Then they vanish into the rock itself, never to return. The rock was won.

But this is English Australia at the very end of the Victorian eon that grabbed the rest of the world as though entitled. This is not a part of the world where the Eurostralians acknowledge the people who were already there. The following year, 1901, saw Australian federation and a change in the crown but as far as First Nations people were concerned these things were cosmetic. The disengagement with the land by these daughters of the urban rich and squattocracy as they bear their constricting clothing (February in Victoria can be punishing) and shade themselves with parasols, looking progressively less like conquerors of the land than intruders.

That said, the girls are not just presented as animated lace. Sarah the sponsored orphan is a scapegoat, propped by alpha girl Miranda. Her infatuation with Miranda is forgivable for her age but also allowed a kind of creepy intensity. She is barred from the picnic and pressed into learning a stifling epic poem when all she wants to recite is her own ode to Miranda. What might have been permissible teen crush or even genuine love is thus mangled into such corseted constraint that Mrs Appleyard's news that the school will have to do without Sarah due to non payment of fees drives her to suicide.

Mrs Appleyard, a kind of bunheaded precursor to Gary Oldman's Count Dracula, is a brandy soaked authoritarian who would have understood Sarah's claim of love with enough expertise to be horrified by it. Her clumsy attempt to promote it sideways by catapulting Sarah out of the picture resulted in Sarah doing that by herself. Her funereal attire appears deranged in context. The voiceover that tells us the school matriarch was found dead at the base of the rock adds a sliver of ice to an already chilling mystery.

Peter Weir soaks his film in dreamy aesthetics, slow motion, haze and a uniformly gentle pallet while eerie music plays around the sub bass of earthquake recordings. The rich interiors of the established order are rendered with such warmth that it is impossible to see them without wanting to live in them. The contrast with the threatening stillness of the rock with its conquering ants, tall ghost gums and worrying faces in the rock formations. The impenetrable crevices that the heroic males often fail to explore are vaginal but forbiddingly adamant and scratchy. This is not the nature of European art, it is the nature of prehistory, formed on a geological timeline on which the British empire is too insignificant to warrant as much as a dot. Every time we are reminded of the ethereality of Miranda in slo-mo, swirling her curls and smiling enigmatically, we are reminded of how the girls seem to move into the rock itself at the point of their departure.

The mystery of Picnic at Hanging Rock defies solutions. The chill of it arises from its impossibility despite its occurrence. The notion that the story was based on fact bled into the greater community and I can clearly recall people positing theories of what happened as though they were talking about the Marie Celeste. We are watching this very thing enacted on screen and our own urges to have it explained haunt us. Just as Irma pays for the absence of her memory when she returns to the school to bid her old classmates farewell and they set on her with screaming demands for explanation. By the final image of Miranda before the credits, by now a motif as canonical as a Florentine angel, we know that we will never know.

Picnic holds a unique place in Australian cinema. Revered for being the ignition of the Australian film Renaissance and considered the first post war homegrown classic, it has become unassailable. Weir's own director's cut went against the grain by removing material rather than bloating it, as though applying the final touches of mastery to perfection. It has even evaded the kind of damaging hyperbole that has knocked Citizen Kane off the apex position and this is not because it is seen as perfect but rather definite and evidential. We know it exists the same way we know Uluru does.

But it is just a movie. I'll argue that it's a good and durable one. Whether it's the greatest Australian film is a question I don't care about as I prefer the subjectivity that might also forward any other title to the same evaluation. But its place in the culture has determined that the audio commentary on the disc that I saw, by two of this country's leading film academics, not only jokes about deportation for any adverse opinions they might have but that they spend over half the running time talking about the film's context before venturing anything resembling a real time commentary on the action (save for a brief note at the beginning). 

I chose to watch the theatrical cut for this blog as that is the one having the anniversary. Weir's cut really did tighten the film and while we might be deprived of a short subplot toward the end, scenes of emotional release and more indicative scenes of Sarah's fate, it does play a lot smoother. Rising above version squabble, though, the shorter cut does allow more shape and bulk to the maddening mystery of the girls on the rock and the weird, almost interplanetary, results of cultural collision as it played at the end of the first phase of colonialism in Australia. And, did I mention, it's still a great movie.

Viewing notes: for this blog I watched my copy of the 4K presentation of the film from Second Sight. My copy has UHD versions of the theatrical and director's cuts. I watched the theatrical or original as that was how I saw it fifty years ago, though I prefer the shorter director's cut. As far as I know there is no locally available presentation of this edit. I could find no current physical media disc of any cut and only one streamer provides the film. This odd situation where an Australian classic is not available in Australia is less unusual than you'd expect. 

RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD @ 40

An old hand tries to impress a rookie at a medical supplies warehouse by showing him cannisters containing preserved zombies. He claims they are the zombies from the real incident that inspired Night of the Living Dead. A little larking about results in the release of gas from one of the containers. Across town, a group of teens break into the local cemetery for a party. I wonder if these two plots will coincide.

Yes, of course, that's all that really happens in this film but that's the point. Dan O'Bannon's horror comedy happens in the same universe as Romero's Dead canon and wants you to know it. When one character witnesses the failure of a particular zombie-despatching technique he cries, "the movie lied?" The comedy here is not trained on Romero, though, nor is it a series of Zucker-style parody scenes. There is a solid narrative arc and something on its mind.

I still find the teen gang funny with its mix of subcultures. There's the mohawk punk, the pink haired girl punk with the moniker Trash, the new wave boy in the suit, the sci-fi post punk girl, and the clean cut middle class girl. At first you think that none of these people would be seen dead with each other but this is the mid-'80s when a lot of these looks were old hat and, having been in a scene dwarfed to a tiny minority by a big flabby mainstream in the early '80s, I can swear that anything outside of normie flocked together. Really, though, it's pretty typical American tone deafness for British trends as designed by a filmmaker about a decade older than someone who'd get that. 

Even if unintentional, it just adds to the fun. There is a lot of good conceptual and slapstick gagging going on at the depot and the mortuary, especially when the initial pair of colleagues are on the turn and the zombie fragment is questioned. There are pre-Dawn-remake running zombies (they don't work here, either) and talking ones, and this is the source point for the gasping voiced, "braaaains!" As the scale drops to skirmish level before the telescoped military involvement, things fall into place but the film continues to be nothing but entertaining.

Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead came almost two decades later and lifted the game by focusing on the central relationships, much as Romero astutely had done. The British flavour of dark irony allows it to fulfil both horror and comedy demands in a way that Return cannot. I dislike comparisons in reviews as they are only ever of slight use. However, the difference between these two films is instructive. O'Bannon's plays away from any real mockery of the Romero canon but must heighten the comedy to do so. This means that the zombie prevalence that ends every Romero Dead movie can be subverted for a double take that allows for the sequels that inevitably followed. Wright's film rules out sequels, puts a stridently deadpan cast upon the nightmarish scenario of the zombie plot but raises the stakes for the principal characters while keeping the faith. That makes it durably both funny and suspenseful when it needs to be. Return feels, and will only ever feel, like an 80s curio, however welcome it is with pizza and beer. Shaun stands solid.

That said, if you wanted a zombie comedy of lower concept than Weekend at Bernies 2 with yet some serious genre credentials (Google Dan O'Bannon, you'll have titles to catch if you don't already know). You won't be watching through your fingers but you won't regret the choice, either.

DAY OF THE DEAD @ 40 (Spoilers)

During the zombie apocalypse, a group of scientists and soldiers hole up in a massive underground bunker. The boffins are studying the living dead and performing experiments with them (mortisection?) though no one is quite certain as to the purpose of the work. The soldiers are getting restless and the scientists are running out of time to produce a reason for the doings in the lab. Tensions are high and things are on course to break. The zombies just keep shuffling outside the gate. There is a helicopter.

George Romero's third Dead film (after Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead) was the close of a trilogy until the late '90s. The three are related only by premise - the dead rise and besiege a group of people - but the change of setting offers a difference in approach and theme. Very broadly, Night explored racism, Dawn consumerism and Day the military industrial complex. Because of Day's business with the face off between guns and test tubes it can suggest a kind of coldness of execution but this is a hot one.

An opening dream sequence given as a real event will be repeated a few more times to good effect and allow the film to establish its gore horror credentials. The tension rising from a sole young woman in a micro society of macho men is a constantly unsettling slowburn. The danger of the zombies is established early as it needs to and even the firmly constructed bunker offers only as much protection as a mistake will reverse. And then there's Bub. Bub is the zombie that the chief scientist is rehabilitating with the idea of creating a servant class. He's already experimented on the corpses of soldiers killed in zombie duty and has a whacked out showroom that would fit comfortably into Jeffery Dahmer's daydreams. Yes, it's the science can but should it deal that surfaced more comfortably in Jurassic Park in the following decade.

Romero's characterisation can swing wildly between caricature and grown-up depth and we get the lot here. The soldiers are mostly callous oafs and their officer a scowling, trigger happy paranoid. The head boffin, Logan, is a loud academic type with an entitled bluster. Romero's expert blocking of authority in scenes is clear with Logan's entrance in a scene. He strides in with a loud self announcement, defusing the tension between the soldiers and the junior boffins, prepared to blarney his way out of the threat in the room which soon turns to him. This opens up on the later discovery of the ghastliness of his experiments by which point disgust and morality get explosively confused.

The film culminates in the generic zombie swarm and the deaths of almost everyone at the tearing hands and penetrating teeth of the living dead. Will the final trio get away? The point of zombies that can only shuffle rather than run is that their progress is as inevitable as death and doesn't care much if the living flesh gets devoured or gets away. But when it does catch up ... That's why all three of the first trilogy always work.

The score is an '80s electronic wash very much in the style of John Carpenter's music for his own films except that in this case it just sounds quite dated. Night used sound library music. Dawn had Dario Argento collaborators Goblin and Day quotes a signature motif at one point. Day's music isn't bad as such, but it does push the film into the mid-'80s shelf more than any other production element.

Romero's conceptualising is strong in these films. His output can vary wildly in quality, depending on how much of himself he was able to invest in each. I find Creepshow soft for its slickness but Martin tough for its conviction. It was taken a fair few revisits for me to get on with Day of the Dead as I was only able to retain the cartoony soldiers in memory and let the more textured character interplay fade. It lies there, though, the warmth and heart of what really is a zombie epic with very little subtext or subtlety. From the 2000s on, the zombie trend expanded into disparate universes, all feeding from the rules of the Romero films. He even contributed with updated takes that hinder the reputation of the first three. You only need stop here and smile as the final images play out and you know that you have seen the third and final of a trio of a collective masterpiece. It will feel like seeing it before it was cool.

Viewing notes: I watched my Umbrella Blu-Ray for this review. It's getting on and is not of the crispest quality. To my knowledge there is no 4K of this available nor planned for its anniversary. Pity. This version can be seen on Brollie (Umbrella's streamer) for free or with subscription to Shudder and Prime.

Review: SINNERS

1932, twins Smoke and Stack roll back into Clarksdale after years of gangstering in Chicago. They're here to start a juke joint at the old mill building they buy off the local boss hayseed. Splitting up, Smoke goes into town to organise things like food, booze and signage while Stack runs the backroads, picking up the entertainment, chiefly his young cousin blues master Sammy and allrounder Delta Slim. Meanwhile on another allotment, a severely burned man seems to drop from the sky and runs to a house. The resident couple answer the door with shotguns but are persuaded to give him shelter. Soon after, a group of native Americans come to the door and tell the lady of the house (more gunpoint communication)  that, in the event that they are harbouring the man, he is not what he seems.

Yes, these two threads are going to weave. Meantime, the joint goes off. When it is time for Sammy to display his chops the roof burns off form the intensity and the partying customers and players alike whip up a storm of musical ecstasy which injects their ancient roots to apparitions of the future in one of the most deftly handled cinematic shows of magical realism ever as the Delta blues blends with sub Saharan beats, psychedelia and hip hop and much much more. Witnessing this, outside, now that they are not who they seem are the fugitive and the couple he came to earlier. They have instruments and music, too, even offering to join the revelry within. They beg admittance but, refusal, retire to the shadows and wait.

This does not begin to cover the threads and themes mixing like swirled spun sugar in this dense and rich feast of a film. Also starring are rival musical traditions, the always spiking race relations of the U.S. south, family loyalties and ancestry. Oh, and a cauldron's worth of supernatural threat. You like music in your movies? This one goes well beyond some fine local blues to country and its Gaelic roots, all bedded down with a rich orchestral spread. And then, if you know your electric blues, one hell of a treat toward the end with a heartrending, poignant scene (watch all the credits!) involving one of the characters.

The culture of this film is given without overly easy access. My advice is not to try to get all the dialogue as its a mix of serthren and late jazz age slang delivered smoothly and rapidly and often under the ambient sound. You'll get the gist but the full detail might await your second viewing. I just about guarantee you will want to see it at least once again. I will suggest that if you relax the need to get every line the gist will come to you.

This film was partially shot in IMAX and initially presented locally that way. IMAX films usually have breakout scenes as they are expensive. I have no problem imagining that most of the twenty-five minutes of the larger format is the blues and beyond scene which would be eyepopping. I'll be looking out for any remaining spots at the local outlet.

There is so much to take in with this one that it becomes overwhelming to describe. I could talk about the cast but there's no time to notice any false notes or overreaching in the performances. The cinematic style is a kind of distillation of '70s New Hollywood through contemporary silky digital shooting. And here's the thing, the running time makes it effectively two and a half hours. I winced at sight of that but once it started there wasn't a moment where I didn't want the film and its whole committed world to just keep rolling. That makes for an instant and interesting comparison with my favourite of last year, the similarly individual and long without feeling like it The Substance. I've seen good films so far this year and one that I'll carry for years yet (Flow) but this is the year's first great film.

Viewing notes: I went to the Nova which was fine but I'd planned to see it at the local IMAX. I will do that if it turns up again. I will also note that at my screening there was trailer for the upcoming Wes Anderson film The Phonecian Scheme. Someone must have tapped him on the shoulder and told it was time for him to put a new movie out and he just Frankensteined the last four and gave it a new title. If you like his movies, you'll probably love it. If you do not, you'll probably feel like punching the trailer in the jaw.

THE SATAN BUG @ 60

A heist at a secret military laboratory ends with an artificial virus that could end humanity. The team formed to stop that happening gets into action and ... talks about it for an hour of screen time in a selection of mid century design boardrooms and hotels. Then, as if to satisfy the studio that that's been done, the movie finally does get into action in what ends up being a nifty race against time as Los Angeles emerges as the big target.

If you've seen films of a similar vintage like The Andromeda Strain or Colossus: The Forbin Project you'll be familiar with the scale and play of this film. High stakes declared and discussed in dialogue that quickly starts to feel like exposition as ... exposition. 

What changes is the film of the warning action by the bad guys which is told as an aerial view of corpses strewn along roads and terrain in Florida. This is done like proto found footage with the cast looking on the mass murder in horror as it ticks silently from a film projector on a portable screen. When the screen fills with the images, it is to the same widescreen ratio, making them (not gory but disturbing) unavoidable. After this, the tale proper begins, the lengths the terrorists will go is clear and the suspected psycho at their centre a figure of grim darkness. Now, you want something out of the movie.

The cast is a grab bag of veteran and current television and film actors and does its job adequately. The maverick espionage hero is played by George Maharis whose tanned sexiness works better than the filled role. His female eye candy is the accomplished Twilight Zone alumna Anne Francis who provides something a little warmer and more compelling. Noir star from the '40s Dana Andrews is a kind of paternal overseer. Richard Baseheart does the most as the sneaky baddie who repeats a line about being psychotic but not stupid after Georgie boy has already done that.

Director John Sturges was a good fit as he busied himself with monster actioners (before and after) like The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven, and The Eagle Has Landed. He provides an engaging Johnson era USA of Vegas suited G-men, helicopter exploits and scenery as gigantic as desert highways and L.A. baseball stadiums. This is the '60s equivalent of a Michael Bay splosion fest except there's a hell of a lot more talking. Two of the writers listed, James Clavell and Alistair MacLean were well established masters of the airport novel. The film is MacLean's adaptation of his own source.

I have wanted to see this for a very long time but that is only partly due to the movie itself. When I was a kid, my family used to go on holidays (I remember at least one Easter break) at a beautiful beach house on a cliff at Bingil Bay, North Queensland, owned by our Aunt Peggy. We'd spring out of bed and take the goat track down the side and get to the beach. During the evening we'd play whatever we could while the grown ups lost hours in canasta. There was a book case through which I could see the novel which was decorated with images from the film. The back had the shot toward the end where Anne Francis and the main cast were seen through a plexiglass map. I never opened the book but loved the title and thought the synopsis on the cover sounded great. I really wanted the movie to come to town. This would have been around 1970 to 1972 and that had already happened. Well, last night, I got my wish. All it needs is to lose most of that first hour and I'd be right as rain.

Viewing notes: I saw this free with my subscription to Prime. It's also out on Blu-Ray which looks like the source of the Prime transfer which is very rich and clear. 

12 MONKEYS @ 30

A pandemic has driven the survivors underground. James Cole volunteers to go on surface sorties to bring back life (mostly insects) for examination of what made them immune. It reduces his sentence. That is even further shrunk when he puts his hand up for time travel missions. Have they got it right about what caused it? Could it be prevented? And what is the meaning of the childhood memory that keeps surfacing in Cole's mind? It seems to change every time he thinks of it. Is the future changing the past?

Terry Gilliam's time travel scenario is a minefield of information by which past, present and future are in continual conflict. Cole's ally, Dr Railly is also his guide through the bewildering mess of late twentieth century life. Her link is a fascination with the Casandra syndrome (you know the future but no one believes you, imagine that as a mental condition) is the bridge to her acceptance of Cole's incredible claim of being from the future. Cole's appearances at different points in history and records of the incidents are what convinces her which allows her a bypass of Stockholm syndrome (Cole abducts her) and acceptance of banding with him. Then, there's just the rest of the world. 

Time travel aside (big ask but, beyond the look of the process, it's never explained) 12 Monkeys is Gilliam at the most straightforward that any film of his had been to that point. The Fisher King showed signs of him straying from the mould of the magical epic. After 12 Monkeys the blend became smoother as the spectre of his Monty Python years retreated ever further. I wonder if this was helped by the fact that this film is a cover version.

Chris Marker's 1962 film La Jetée is essentially the same story told in a series of still photos with a brief motion scene toward the end. A man is haunted by a childhood memory which results in the same twist as Gilliam's film. There are many further similarities and Gilliam eventually added a title acknowledging Marker's film as the basis of 12 Monkeys. I would strongly recommend La Jetée. It's not always easy to find but has had physical media releases. I'll insist, though, that Gilliam's movie is neither a veiled ripoff or a misguided mainstream overblown retelling. Gilliam is fascinated by the play of information and how it changes history whether true or false.

At its centre is an impressive turn by Bruce Willis as Cole. Willis had left his quirky tv show Moonlighting to forge a career as an action hero. His big gunned, quipping persona was a more everyman alternative to the Arnies and Segals of the time but he still played it macho and capable. James Cole spends most of the screen time in 12 Monkeys confused and drooling, a sluggish bulk held back by a crippling melancholy. This was the year, too, of Pulp Fiction and his role as a vulnerable loser (but that was transformed by action). It was this role that reminded anyone who'd forgotten, that he had the range and gravitas that would serve him in the later Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. That began here.

Madeline Stow as Dr Railly is almost victim of over-convenient writing as she uses anger to cross the bridge from victimhood to partner in adventure. It's a thankless performance but completely necessary to the film, providing the action that Cole is mostly incapable of. 

Brad Pitt had started the year as Detective Mills in Seven, a role that broke him from aesthetically pleasing furniture to credible performer. His Goines is given as a cartoon monkey, all frenetic gestures and screeching vocals. It's over the top and frequently approaches spinning off but Pitt always manages to reel in his excesses. After this year's turns he could command the course of the rest of his career.

And then there's Terry Gilliam himself who brought a stolen idea into the light and enriched it with confronting thoughts about the information economy that was already gearing up to the constant dynamism we have now where the notion of truth is thin and shifting. The '90s needed 12 Monkeys, not just as a cool sci-fi but as a commentary on our beliefs and their vulnerability.

I saw this at the Russell in Melbourne in early '96 with Kathy. It wasn't a date, we just liked each other's company at the movies. This was the occasion of my last ever Fantale. At some point, watching this movie that has one of its characters extract his own teeth I chomped down through the unforgiving caramel and encountered a rock. I dug it out of my teeth and realised that the sweet had successfully extracted a filling, just lifted it out of the molar. As discretely as I could, I transferred it to a pocket and  vowed to find a dentist the next day. But the worry and the self ridicule!

Kathy and I went to a pub afterwards for a post movie drink and chat. We unravelled what we could of the film as I drank on one side of my mouth. We also talked about Pulp Fiction and what was in the briefcase at the end. I was well into my internet life and spouted a range of fan speculation about it which she'd never heard. It felt good to share this nonsense with someone from the real world.

Viewing Notes: I watched the superb Arrow 4K release of this for this review. A very clean transfer with plenty of fine grain for the film connoisseur and a sturdy audio mix. You can rent it online at the usual places and it's a title that often surfaces on SBS on Demand or the other streamers.

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER @ 65

Young Phillip Winthrop rides all the way from Boston to the mansion of the Usher family to fetch Madeline, his betrothed. When he gets there, she's almost in a coma and her severe brother Roderick wants him gone. When she appears at the door and the lovers meet again, Phillip gets a foot in the jamb and his own furnished room. Madeline is not well enough to travel. In the meantime we get the story of the Ushers and the apparent curse upon the house. Does Phillip really want to marry into them? I mean really really?

Roger Corman's film of the classic Edgar Allen Poe tale was the first of his string of Gothic hits in the '60s. All low budget and glossy looks, these were training manuals in style on spare means as Corman and his cohorts worked some serious magic. They gave their mid-century audiences a near antiquity the way that Poe himself set his tales in a long forgotten Europe that his American readers could thrill in. So much could be said under the guise of distant culture that would alert the censor if set contemporaneously. Twilight Zone alumnus Richard Matheson on the typewriter helped greatly with this.

Today, you might think they look like creaky old tv shows but spare a thought for the people who first saw them. Even by 1960 colour cinema was a rarity, especially on the skid row end of the spectrum. Colour horror movies, even rarer. Chuck anamorphic widescreen into the mix and your ticket is getting you some big time value. Usher cost $300K and made three times that in its first weeks. Creepy atmosphere, Vincent Price and the bankability of the ever popular Edgar Allen Poe had the title raking it in. Did they care about the big obvious painting of the house itself and how the interiors were lit for Jane Austen rather than Poe? Not a bit, everyone was used to it. It even added to the fantasical atmosphere. When Phillip requests that Roderick light a candle in the gloom, the flames don't make even a tiny difference. But if, by that, you haven't taken your cue to imagine more than you are seeing, the way you must in live theatre, maybe you shouldn't be watching this. Corman's disturbed home is one of old order in decay, silk on its way to dust before the house itself is swallowed by the mud of its foundation.

And yet, this is a film about something as vivacious as sex. You get only the slightest suggestion of physicality from the screen but it's there. If the dark vulval fissure on the side of the outside wall doesn't make you think of sex then Myrna Faye's woozy depiction of Madeline will. But this isn't steamy, sultry seduction, it's the sex of private thoughts forbidden from action, the grimy impulses and fetishism that allow Roderick's saucer-eyed protection of his sister look like some very dark matter. Phillip in his muted Regency finery gazing up at the crack in the wall gives us a barely more acceptable form of this. It's not that his thoughts turn sexy, anyone's would, it's that he can't tell the difference between the love he professes and the possession he effectively means.

And if the decadence of all that hazy desire weren't enough, Corman reveals a secret weapon. Roderick shows Phillip a range of ancestral portraits that come with narrated bios dripping with slave trading, addiction, sex trafficking and worse. Each of the paintings seems flown in from much later in the 1960s with their distorted faces and psychedelic colouring. These extraordinary pictures were created by commercial artist and fantasy painter Burt Shonberg whose work feels like a kind of bubblegum Beksinski but no less troubling for that with the damnation and chaos of their faces and settings. This goes perfectly with the atonal lute music that Les Baxter provided to give the Usher's achievements an unsettling sound.

If the younger cast, Mark Damon and Myrna Fahey, sound like they come from the same beach as Annette Funicello and Fabian the dour turn by Vincent Price puts them in perspective. Price uses his emotional elasticity within a narrow range, less abrupt shifts than localised stretches from his dour base demeanour. He's not just fighting the youngsters' rawness but the brightness of the interiors. Then, when the Gothic gets going in the crypt and everything gets a little gloomier, he turns it down to speak matter of factly of the horror of his family. When it is time to reveal Poe's explosive finale, all that camp and affectation are squeezed off screen by the now perfect lighting, close ups on eyes wide and crazy when they should be incorporeal, works as well as anything from the past few decades and almost approaches that scene in Black Narcissus for intensity. Corman saved the gem for last.

And then set the set on fire and then used that footage in every one. Well, it was costly to shoot and by the next one and all after that, who remembers what it looked like? It's the same with the colour and the bright interiors: he paid for it and he'll flaunt it. The fire at the end is disproportionate to the scene the way that waves in a water tank never look like ocean waves. But that's the story and the glory of the audacity. Shoot small and aim high. This model continues to serve those whose movies are made with little but who dream large.

Roger Corman employed scores of creative people in his extended stable and most of them went on to careers including Scorsese, Coppola, Jack Nicholson and many more and whether the title was from Poe or seemingly generated from a theme card shuffle like Monsters of Skull Reef, it was headed for a real cinema and seen by many. As with many working on the fringes, Corman's works found a haven in late night TV and home video. His recent death (2024) left a wake of a massive filmography and waves of influence.

The House of Usher was made the way it was when the dollar for the microbudget exploitationers he'd started with dried up and he needed a new channel of inspiration. In one of those moves that made careers of Wes Craven and John Carpenter, he took a breath, retooled the workshop and changed the way his movies looked and felt. For all the stagey performances and chipboard walls he fashioned worlds that felt like themselves. There are other titles just in this Poe cycle that are held in loftier regard and I can see why. Nevertheless, it's Usher's brashness and energy that remembers when it must step back and breathe before delivering its chills, that draws me back again and again. 

Viewing notes: I watched my Arrow Blu-Ray from the Six Gothic Tales box set which is a must for Corman/Poe movies (though by no means complete). Available to rent through AppleTV.

SEVEN @ 30 (Spoilers)

Detective Somerset is on the verge of retiring when he is partnered with new cop in town Detective Mills on a case that is troubling and looks to only get worse. A serial killer is using the seven deadly sins as a blueprint for his crimes, leaving grisly clues. Is he punishing or preaching? Will he stop at Seven? 

It was 1995 and halfway through two decades, one of time and one of cinema. The Silence of the Lambs appeared at the very start of the decade and scooped box office share, critical acclaim and five Oscars on its way home. This meant that the screens of the 1990s would be stuffed full of serial killer movies, petering out with the likes of The Cell in 2000. Because of the acute curve of the success, this sub-genre of crime procedural developed its checklist traits rapidly, taking pretty much everything from Silence and repeating it with different character names. Until this one.

That's not to say that Seven is cliche-free. The fatigued cop on his one last job and his clashes with a rookie as well as the higher ups are all standard fare. What's missing is the federal agency with its control and collected wisdom. The wizened Somerset is going off his knowledge of culture, history, literature and the infernal dark of human nature. When the FBI appears, it's clandestine and dodgy. There is a clear sense that Somerset and his volatile new partner are adrift in the circles of an urban hell, alone against a malevolence that moves through the constant rain like a a shadow.

The lack of FBI order is important. With it, the more conventional serial killer flick was able to provide a base. This meant that audiences were welcome to thrill to the murders and cruelty against the objects of their disdain, barracking for the killer until the Feds crash in at the end and everybody rallied around them as though they had been all along. The serial killer movie was mainstream cinema as sleazy and misanthropic as it could be without an X rating. Each new entry offered a genius psychopath whose kill scenes quickly grew into impossible architectural wonders with ever more disturbing machinery and motive. Seven includes some elaborate setups but they tend to be more practical and, very importantly, nixes the notion of the comfortably insane killer. 

John Doe is extreme in his obsessive M.O. His meticulously homecrafted notebooks are intentionally kept without date and shelved randomly. The removal of his fingerprints with razorblades is ugly but comprehensible. His clues are as clear as they are taunting. The neon cross over his bedhead in his apartment is, I still think, overdone, but it does illustrate his strangely static idea of religion. That he is an intensely angry citizen keeps him a lot scarier than the wildly unhinged monsters of the sub-genre. The big bust in does not catch him and almost feels like a comment on the fad with its anticlimactic payoff. John Doe turns himself in; this movie has more on its mind than popular catharsis.

Fincher's unnamed American city is drenched with rain. Its shadows are deep and filled with darker detail. All surfaces look grimy and worn, even in the police station. Mills and his wife live in a flat that needs a lot of work and shakes as subway trains pass by. The sex club that becomes a crime scene feels like a near extension to the life in the streets and offices of even the cleaner parts of town. As he did again in Fight Club, Fincher imbues the demeanour and voices of his characters with a kind of palpable fatigue. Everyone is cranky and sleep deprived but, as the sex club manager says when asked if he likes what he does: "No, but that's life, isn't it?" 

This city could be anywhere and almost at any time. When John Doe delivers his monologue on the idea that his victims were innocent, he could be writing an epistle. Seven's effort into examining the town as a living organism as a terminal patient had not appeared before in this run of movies that increasingly reduced themselves to good genius against bad genius with action endings. When John Doe proposes his deal and the rain stops the scene switches from the unbreathable claustrophobia of the alleys and dives to the bare desert stage under the high tension wires of the climax and there, in the bareness of the featureless earth the final two moments of destruction are revealed. Hamfisted symbolism? Sure, but what a relief from the last minute battering ram of an FBI raid. John Doe's scheme was not suicidal even though it meant he'd be dead at its conclusion, it was the preaching that Somerset identified at the start: his envy was killed by Mills's wrath. No serial killer movie had ended  like that. Even at cost of his own life, the bad guy won, no switching back to the law team for the audience.

The casting for this one was also illustrative. Morgan Freeman was well into a decades long career and had starred memorably in the recent Shawshank Redemption. After this he was awarded gravitas rights to any lead role that could accommodate him (including God). His turn as the world weary Somerset is a primer in how to freshen a cliched character. At times his performance is documentary perfect. There is a look he gives Mills early on. We only see it from behind but we imagine it effortlessly. His three stage laugh at the shaking flat feels natural. The double take at the whole bottle glass of wine that Mills has handed him is laugh out loud funny. And through most of the running time he is shouldering the darkness of the life around him, knowing that it's just only ever degrees of that for all of life.

Brad Pitt had an interesting 1995. His brief career had included noticeable turns in Thelma and Louise, Johnny Suede and the hilarious stoner in True Romance but the most he'd done prior to Seven was the vacant Louis in Interview With the Vampire. Seven and Twelve Monkeys turned him into an explosion of notice and guaranteed stardom. Is his performance in Seven overbaked with its James Dean mumbles and De Niro lash-outs? Maybe, but there's a mass of tiny nuances in there, as well. They can be as subtle as the industrial soundscape sizzling under the dialogue almost constantly. It's not just the operatic blast of the finale.

Gwyneth Paltrow also shows range and skill as Mills's wife, stepping back into a kind of midwest everywoman with a plain show. It's when she talks in private about her pregnancy to Somerset that she shows what she can do. She listens to Somerset's personal story with natural attention until he throws it back to her and she barely controls a break into tears.

The surprise for me was Kevin Spacey. I'd never heard of him when I saw this at the cinema, taking up half a row with the usual gang o' friends. His dramatic entrance as John Doe at the police station, murmuring and then screaming and then falling back into his studied calm recharged a movie that wasn't wanting more energy. The dialogue in the car which he dominates is constantly chilling, especially in moments where his demeanour breaks and his face suggest the expression he would wear as his victims breathed their last. After seeing this, I got a backlog of his prior movies and went through them. While he betrayed a number of traits common to all amounting to a smarmy urbanity, he brought a managed rage to John Doe we wouldn't see again until House of Cards. John Doe's control and its breaks are extraordinary.

But Seven is more than performance and plot. Fincher's oppressive city sounds like a construction site. Howard Shore's low brass bam bam bam chords are flown in from his work on Silence of the Lambs (not really, but almost). It might seem trivial to mention the typography of the credits and titles throughout the film, announcing the day of the week but they became the way dark crime cinema and television was expressed with their juddering handwritten look as through the names and roles were thought up by an enraged brain. The title sequence supports this with its montage of what we'll come to know as John Doe making his notebooks, shaving his fingerprints and messes of crime scene photography. This felt like a galaxy away from the slick perfection of the Silence of the Lambs credits and titling and, once crossed, it was a line that took years to cross back.

Seven was numbing at the cinema. I recall my small gang zombie shuffling out of the cinema at a week night screening without our usual wordy yapping. When I was asked my opinion out on the footpath, walking to my tramstop the best I could muster was: "Better than Silence of the Lambs". Still, I retain that opinion. A friend of mine at a catch up drink talked about it and derided its persistent ugliness. I reminded her that it was about the ugliness of human behaviour but she wasn't convinced. A future girlfriend told me that she'd got out of a screening in the city and walked for almost an hour to her flat and only when she opened the door had a sudden panic at leaving herself so vulnerable.

I kept going to serial killer movies, watching them grow increasingly feeble and try hard. I'll note the exception of Simon Reynolds' wonderful The Ugly but even the visual splendour of Tarsem Singh's The Cell felt like window dressing on the Titanic. The sub-genre had printed through by the early 2000s and would soon be replaced by torture porn which had even fewer scruples about exploiting the worst in its audiences. That, too, is a epochal memory. I got into the phenomenon of the serial killer for a few months, buying every book I could find on real cases and dredging an internet only too eager to share such genuine horror until I exhausted my capacity for it and couldn't bear the thought of it. Seven, with its break with a sleazy convention, its shift of the depiction of murder from act to aftermath, and concentration on morality, remains one of the best illustrations that the peaks of genre are non conformist. Along with The Ugly and Henry, it is the only one of its kind that I'll revisit. Gotta count for something.

Viewing notes: for this review,  I watched the recently released 4K remaster that is still available in a swanky steelbook at time of writing. Seven has always looked good on home video and now it actively stuns. Fincher has added a few things via AI and CGI but they are not instrusive. The grain was always very fine with this one and needs a little squinting to see but is still there. Seven is available on all digital disc formats and via streaming on Stan and Prime by subscription and rental through the usual outlets.

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA @ 40

Trucker Jack Burton wins a bet with his friend Wang Chi who can't pay up straight away but if Jack can give him a lift home he can settle. Oh, he needs to pick up his arranged marriage wife from the airport. Things get a little confused and the missus to be gets abducted by a gang. Jack and Wang are hot on the trail which leads to a weird world of wizards and underground bunkers. Cue title.

By the middle of the decade John Carpenter had a swag of genre hits and cult titles up his sleeve and took to this when its writers gave him the gig. It had begun as a western but then had been modernised until it was set in present day San Francisco among the Chinese community and the netherworld below it, featuring martial arts and magic. There's not only a lot of Hong Kong style wirework but the technique itself is mentioned in dialogue.

There is little point in describing the plot of this one. The action takes over, allowing for some character development, and doesn't stop until the end brings the inevitable pairings and scissions before the credits roll. That makes it sound shallow but this movie's glee at throwing out tough situation after tough situation will keep the shortest attention span occupied for its whole runtime.

The cast does their best to stretch their cartoony characters to fit the colour and art direction. Dennis Dun adds more depth here than to his gawky goof in Prince of Darkness two years later, and makes a lot out of his action hero by accident. Kurt Russell surely has the most fun out of his boastful and bumbling self-appointed action king role, getting inadvertently injured more than anyone else and being wrong in most of the decisive decisions he makes. Standing as he did beside the Schwazeneggers and Stallones of the era, he presents something like what an action man might be like in real life, all one liners and incompetence. And then there is the young Kim Cattrall, the weak link who can't quite resolve the jarring mix of Marilyn Monroe and Kathleen Turner and ends up short of her character's comedy and decisiveness. But it is James Hong who steals everything as Lo Pan the sorcerer, an evil ancient man here and a feeble old man by the light of day, whose lust for immortality is grounded in more fleshly lusts that might have reminded the likes of Kim Cattrall of more than one casting sessions when starting out.

In a few ways, Big Trouble is like a funny presage of the more serious idea of Prince of Darkness with a pair of forces drawing together for an apocalypse. More pertinently, if you were to watch all of Carpenter's movies back to back from Dark Star to They Live, Big Trouble would be a welcome action comedy between the solemnity of Starman and the sci-fi doom of Prince of Darkness. If it is neglected in his canon even by fans it's surely not because of underperforming at the box office (the mighty Thing also had that honour) but more from the inconvenience of its jutting out. Christine is better recalled even if it is less Carpenter than Stephen King. Perhaps fans just wanted more Snake Plissken or MacReady from Kurt Russell or found the refusal to overly stereotype the Chinese community against the times. Nevertheless, it's one of Carpenter's most persistently fun from all his works and does its job with every viewing.

Viewing notes: I watched the Disney+ presentation at Blu-Ray resolution and sound which is superb and fitting. You can still buy a well polished DVD at a low price point.