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.

Review: THE MONKEY

A family is cursed with toy monkey that can cause violent death. Twin brothers Bill and Hal notice this quality in the toy early as they witness the ghastly deaths of their baby sitter and mother. Hal blames Bill for the latter and a life of savage estrangement awaits them but not before they drop the toy down a well. As adults they go about their life struggles until the monkey resurfaces at a yard sale. Can you say unfinished business?

Up to this point, you are going to need some resilience if you watch this one. It's billed as a horror comedy and the best I can say about that is that you can see it trying. the cast is variously deadpan and over animated in the way that the most excruciating satires are. The screen is splattered with visual jokes that show their working and come to what ought to be explosive payoffs but just feel like polished examples of jokes. It's an Ikea approach of parts fulfilment rather than organic force.

Theo James plays the twins and for most of the film we ride with the good twin and he plays it like old vanilla. The bad twin gets all the lines and art direction to make him compelling but we don't get him until the third act by which time the mechanics of the story take over and things move instead of hang around looking blackly arch. And then it ends.

A friend of mine has a nervous habit. They will rupture a conversation they are having with a correction or contradiction. If that gets through they will keep doing it until that's what the conversation becomes, each time rounding things of with a loud and mirthless laugh. Generally, I can look around this and remember the film of friendship around us but when it gets that oppressive and anti-communicative that it turns into a creepy automatic form of abuse, I need to either let it through until I can escape or start pushing back. When that's a movie that doesn't admit of interaction, the sense of exhaustion kicks in early and remains even through the more appealing passages.

I had tried to get into a cinema to see this but missed the first week when my preferred morning screenings were available. I almost made it to one yesterday but it was pulled by the venue. So I found it for rent online. By that time I had forgotten why I was so interested in seeing it. Looked kind of goofy in trailers, about the same kind of level as Heart Eyes. It wasn't until I watched the credits did I understand my enthusiasm. The Monkey was directed by Osgood Perkins.

Osgood Perkins has made a name for himself with strong, off-centre fare like The Blackcoat's Daughter and Longlegs, stories with horror dressing around impressively solemn and tragic cores. He's just getting better at them. This time he tried a comedy and, like most that try to blend funny and scary he failed and it feels like he assumed that a confident intellectual grasp of what makes a joke work is not enough to actually make it work.

See, this is not just me being tin-eared with comedy. My sense of humour ranges from the elaborate wit of Shakespeare to farting preacher videos on YouTube (try it, they never get old). I also own that just because I don't laugh doesn't mean others won't. The repellent Wes Anderson has legions of fans who think he is a genius. They aren't necessarily wrong but they can have him. But when I see anyone approach a creative project as mathematically as this my resistance bristles and stands firm to repel boarders. That said, I am always ready to be wrong with a first impression. Then, when that impression is only mildly challenged by what I see before collapsing back to what made it in the first place, I admit defeat. This unlovely film wasted me and not in a good way. Please Oz, let's get back to creepy, next time.

Viewing notes: I watched this as a rental stream through Prime. It was a lot cheaper than if I had gone to a cinema for it. All the usual online rentals will offer it for the time being.