THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD @ 75

Captain Pat Hendry follows his orders to investigate an unusual event detected in the Arctic; a massive metal object has crashed in the ice. They've finally found a flying saucer. They rejoice long enough to blow it up while trying to melt the ice around it. Oops. But there's something else. Or someone. They find a humanoid shape through the ice. This time they dig it up and take it back to base. Ice melts. The thing that was in it can be seen attacking the huskies outside. Um...

What follows has the makings of a standard '50s sci-fi/horror as the humans battle the guy in the monster suit. The reason it is not so easily dismissable has to do with the marque of its pedigree. The first thing you see after the RKO card is that of Winchester Pictures, the production company of veteran director Howard Hawks. He is also the films producer and his style casts a shadow over the film. Hawks who proved himself a master of every genre from screwball comedies, to tough crime, war movies and Westerns, brought his pictures in at or short of ninety minutes and never included a scene that didn't need to be there. The credited director is Christian Nyby. We'll talk about that.

What it means, though, is that A decidedly Hawksian approach to blocking and overlapping dialogue as well as tightly choreographed physical action gives this movie its solidity and credibility. Yes, James Arness looks like a vegan Frankenstein monster but you need to see it a few times to come to that impression as he is mostly seen in shadow. The one full reveal  before the final sequence is a jump scare that doesn't allow a critical dig. Val Lewton never showed the cat in Cat People. Nyby did but did it right. The Thing From Another World.

Between encounters, the world in the research station is tensed up by the conflict between the scientists and the soldiers. Captain Pat has more work than he'd signed on for in resisting the increasingly frustrated Dr Carrington. Carrington, while surrounded by boffin types, comes across as a humourless beatnik with his skivvy collar and goatee. It's science vs safety and when the former is treated like the work of a primadonna artist things are gonna get crazy and do.

Before this, we get the world of the military personnel, with added definition from the reported Scott. They're a bunch of jibing blokes in uniform who obey their orders and explain away their mishaps to the brass. Pat gets an extra dimension. He has history with the admin assistant Nikki and their first scene is a marvel of sex talk without talking sex. Pat's blustering machismo is no match for Nikki's sly rejoinders; he can flirt all he likes but he's not going to get anything through force. The scene is a marvel of economic dialogue, pacing and physical arrangement. By the end of it you just want them to get together permanently. This might have fallen into a lifeless chore were it not for the influence of the director of His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby. By the time, in the following scene, Pat exits with a stolen wink at her, we are sold.

This is presaged by the banter of other officers as they play cards back at base as Pat gets ribbed by his history with Nikki. All of it adds to the timeline stretching before the first scene and lets us know we're not going to be mingling with lunkheaded military types who shoot first and shout down the questions later. It's the scientists that get the standoff treatment. Apart from Carrington they are all quite affable but speak in equations and jargon until Pat has to stop them talking. Their talk suggests scholarship in the field which is all it has to do. They're out there in the ice because they have to be. The Jurassic Park question about could and should only comes up when they want to examine the thing that might erase humanity from the face of the Earth.

Let's get back to the question of directorial influence. It's Christian Nyby's name on the chair but there are traits that are pure Howard Hawks. Mostly, this is down overlapping dialogue. Hawks had made the technique his own. You could also point to the economy of coverage and intense physical staging but that could be in any competent director's toolbox. Another example is Poltergeist which says it's by Tobe Hooper but looks and feels like producer Spielberg. Then again, if you want to see Tobe Hooper in Poltergeist, look to the holy rolling aspects of Tangina's performance, a blustering religious performance that Hooper would have grown up with and Spielberg would never have imagined. Once you're there you can find lots of the maker of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre's hands. Similarly, Nyby's close work with Hawks, his deference and conference would have done a lot to make the tight and fast movie we see. I'm going with Nyby's own statement about working with masters and taking heed. It's not a bad way to make your entrance as a director, showing that you can bring the goods in whomever's style. It's a Christian Nyby film.

Another issue to bring up is John Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing. It is not a remake of this film. Carpenter follows the original story by having the thing a body-hopping monster, imitating its host organisms and creating an uneasy paranoia. Hawks and Nyby had to think of the fastest way to create a threat and landed on a physically external being but one with the biological workings of a plant (e.g. regeneration of limbs) that needed blood for life. Not bad on a budget.

The Thing From Another World is repeat viewing for me. I can easily put it on and walk around in its world of ice and terror with a worldbuilding that involved near documentary quality set pieces and the yummiest hokey sci-fi that makes for a believable threat. The pacing and sheer affability wins every time. No accident, by the way, that John Carpenter shows kids watching it on TV in Halloween. At the time he had no idea he'd be making his own version. When he did he honoured this one by not imitating it. Now that's how influence is meant to work.

Viewing notes: For this review I watched my Warner Archive Blu-Ray copy. This, being a kind of on-demand presentation, is a step up from my old DVD but could still benefit from a 4K remaster. That said, the image is not stressed and the audio is clear at all times. Those issues fade as the engagement of the tale sets in. There is no local release in physical media but you can see it for free on Tubi, rent it from Prime or do a search through Flicks to see who else is making it available. If you've never seen it, treat yourself. 

THE OMEN @ 50 (Spoilers)

Diplomat at the U.S. embassy in Rome Robert Thorne rushes to the hospital where his wife has just given birth. Tragically, the baby is dead. A creepy priest at the place offers a spare they have whose mother died in childbirth at the same moment. Bizarrely, Robert agrees and brings the imposter to his wife's bed. She thinks it's the son she's just given birth to. Soon after, Robert comes home and announces that he's just been appointed Ambassador to Britain. Little Damien, playing with his toys on the floor, is already rising up in the world. All going well, he could be installed in hisjob as AntiChrist by his twenties.

Well, no one knows that yet. Actually there are a few who do. A strange priest visits Robert and begs him to take communion and warns him about his adoptive son. Robert still hasn't got around to sharing this with his wife Kathy who still thinks Damien is her natural child. Oh, and at the boy's fifth birthday party, his nanny calls out her devotion to Damien before hanging herself somewhat publicly. And there's a gruff black dog hanging around who seems to be on the same payroll. Damien smiles and waves to it.

The priest begs a meeting with Robert after telling him that Kathy is in danger. This doesn't end any better than the other encounters after the Father recites a verse about theend of the world, kind of pretending that it comes from Revelation (it doesn't, there's nothing in Revelation that rhymes and is phrased so goofily). When the priest moves off heis caught in an electrical storm that seems to be targeting him. He finds a church but the gate is locked and a long iron spike from the roof is dislodged by lightning and impales him before getting struck by lighting to add the coup de grace.

Now that's just strange as a photographer who's been on Robert's case has taken a lot of photos of the priest and all of them feature what looks like a ghostly javelin going through his body. His pictures of the nanny before she hanged herself also have a presaging mark. He meets with Robert and adds a picture of himself with a line going through his neck. Looks like the priest was on to something.

Ok, so I don't normally put more plot in these blogs than serves the premise but The Omen is more plotty than The Exorcist and needs a little extra push. Add some high profile actors from the era, a whompingly gothic score by Jerry Goldsmith and you get a perfect example of  The Exorcist's effect on mainstream film culture in the 1970s. It's taken a step further by featuring not a demon possessed child but the Beast of the Apocalypse in child form. 

So, rather than William Friedkin's relatively subtle progression from happy kid to head spinning monster we get yound Damien's rage fit at approaching a cathedral, primates in a wildlife park attacking the car he's in and even mild mannered giraffes fleeing from him. The growling dog still loves him and the replacement nanny (a fearsome Billie Whitelaw) brings the pooch into the house to protect the boy. 

While the pacing might drag for anyone young enough to think that contemporary jumpscare fests constitute cinematic horror, Richard Donner and crew do some fancy footwork building the arc of tension to the heartrending final act. The Omen is a fable of power, of the mighty being brought low and the bespoke paths of empowered chosen folk ever more concrete. Gregory Peck in late middle age brings all of his big voiced gravitas to Robert, containing the same wrath he had after that spit in To Kill a Mockingbird. Once he knows what he must do we see his gut churning dilemma on his stony face.

David Warner as the photographer carries his doom like he's come from an audition rejection. Lee Remick whose screen demise made it into a Go-Betweens song, is the centre of personal strength in the tale as her growing realisation that her son isn't her son and what he is horrifies her. Patrick Troughton, the second Dr Who, as the priest might strike some as overplaying but he is fighting cancer and trying to prevent Armageddon, so ... 

I've been a little lighter than usual as this big ticket horror item doesn't need my help. It is a consummate example of what can happen when Hollywood touches a market pulse and follows through. Then again, between The Omen and The Exorcist, we did get a few generations of mostly blaggy sequels and a trove of copies. And then the no budget Halloween showed all that up and changed everything. When the big end of town regrouped in the '90s to produce more glossy horror they ended up getting twice as embarrassed as the credit card budgeted Blair Witch Project cleaned up. 

My point there is that horror, unlike war movies, action flicks, rom coms and Oscar-worthy dramas, never really stays as scary as it promises the more money that gets hurled at it. The Omen, for all its hokey mythologising, is a solid horror movie, letting the increasingly clear stakes provide their own momentum. It wasn't the last high  profile American horror of the decade but it might have been the last durable one. It can't compete with the likes of Halloween for leanness and raw power but it doesn't embarrass itself  either. Other film markets were busy showing that dream logic and ultraviolence could outrun carefully plotted Apocalypses. But for the Anglophones The Omen suited.

I was too young to see it when it came out but caught up with it in tv and video as a Uni student, along with a bunch of other '70s greats. It got me reading Revelation, if nothing else, and I liked the style of any big movie that could get down and dirty with a big supernatural bedtime story. That's still what it feels like to me.

Viewing notes: I watched my old Blu-Ray of this one which is pretty well presented. It's one of themovies I have where I'll always get the best available. This is its anniversary year so maybe we'll see it come out as a 4K. Otherwise,  Disney+ has this free (with a subscription) and Prime and Apple will rent it to you. It is not available locally on physical media.

DUEL @ 55

David Mann is in sales and has to drive across the state to meet a client. It's all routine. He'll take the highway, stop at a diner, get some petrol if needed and roll on to the meet. It'll take most of the day. Driving blithely along, he gets overtaken by a truck with the word flammable on the back of its tank. Annoyed, he overtakes it at the next opportunity. The truck sounds its deafening horn and the game's afoot. David and the huge, loud, faceless machine are bound together in a death duel. Roll credits.

Well, no. This ballet of road rage, stressed metal and fossil fuel is not so simple as that makes it. You don't have to care about any of the subtext because, though it was made for TV, this is the directorial debut of Steven Spielberg from a story by the great Richard Matheson and there is a vipers nest of theme beneath the action.

As David is driving out of the city he listens to talkback radio. A man is stuck filling in his census form because he has opted to stay at home in a then reversed role marriage. This takes so long to make its point that it forms a kind of introduction to the theme. This is a story of masculinity in contest. David is bullied by his wife and, while his rage is doing the driving whenever the big oily monster of the truck appears, he quickly assumes the role of the victim and the greater part of the film becomes his survival story. You see the boots and the arm of the truckie but nothing else; he is male threat incarnate and doesn't need an individual face. 

The rest plays out as you would expect except that even the young Steven Spielberg applies his skills like a newbie director possessed. Perfectly wound tension and release and the reminder, out here in the badlands, of the civilisation they have broken from. This is a developing master of his art announcing himself. One more and it's Jaws and then it's history.

But there's a problem. This was shot for TV and brought in at seventy-four minutes. With ads, that would get you to an easy ninety. When it was released to cinemas it was with that gap filled by extra scenes. This later version has been presented as the director's cut ever since the mid-seventies. 

When I first saw it on TV, it was the original and, even with the ads, it was rivetting. The longer version I watched for this review, ad-free, felt repetitive, obvious and endless. I kept checking the time. This is comparable to thinking of Bon Scott as the real singer of ACDC when Brian Johnston has been at the mic for decades longer. The longer cut of this film is the version. I still think it drags and overstates.

The other thing is the George Lucas style revision of effects in the vision and the audio. This movie has been scrubbed to bare skin and then glazed until it looks like it's been in the Bain Marie for weeks. While the overall effect of this is easy on the eye, it does let the side down. Can't we celebrate this master of movies with his real first step, warts and all? Doesn't that only accentuate how far he has come and how natively skilled he was way back then in his twenties? But no, we have to have it through the rinse cycle before the French polishers get to it. 

It reminds me that if you listen to the first Velvet Underground album on hi-res digital you will just hear how crappily it was produced. It doesn't stop it from being a great record but there is a real disappointment to hearing how it cannot be improved, only made clearer. I'm not a original is always better type and have only disdain for the analogue is better bullshit but when you lengthen a tight action movie with more statements of the obvious and use AI to pretend it wasn't made in 1971, you effectively  change its story; not it's narrative progression, the story of its birth and life as a movie. The job isn't as bad as those that James Cameron and George Lucas done with their back catalogue but it is a misrepresentation. At least the shark in Jaws on 4K is still allowed to look fake here and there. Then again, that's part of its story. Duel's is in danger of being obscured by recent history.

Viewing notes: I saw this as a rental on Prime. The 4K picture was true to itself, as long as you're ok with AI polyfiller. There is currently a reasonably priced 4K double disc available to buy and it does include the original TV version. I'm tempted to get that, just for the old cut but I just don't love the movie that much.

GOD TOLD ME TO @ 50

Unrelated murders happen in quick succession across New York, the only link between them is that the killer always says that God told them to do it. Detective Peter Nicholas just keeps finding questions under the answers but then does find another link: all the killers had spoken to a young man with golden hair. They can't describe his face. One witness says that the man had no face. As Nicholas moves deeper into the mystery he finds what might be his salvation or the opening beats of the Apocalypse.

Larry Cohen's genre bending quest film is a police procedural that gets bitten by a supernatural theme before things get really cosmic. This is from the filmmaker who gave us a killer baby in It's Alive, toxic sweets in The Stuff and an ancient winged serpent in Q. Those were all original ideas and Cohen made a career from exploitation movies that were packed with concepts. So, in addition to the procedural thread, Nicholas' odd marital and extra marital situation, his devotion to Catholicism but his claim of detachment from it, we get a plot that riffs on the Von Daniken God is an astronaut idea to play out to the suggestion of eventual cataclysm. Cohen declared the source material for God Told Me To was the Bible, that he had never known a more violent character in literature than God himself.

But this film is an exploitation movie. It was also released under the title Demon. The Exorcist was only three years old at the time and the possession subgenre was cleaning up at cinemas. But the original title has a tabloid force to it that does a lot of the work. And Cohen was careful not to blame the Devil. The scenes where the killers are confessing shows them chillingly calm and rational. They just don't see what the problem was.

Tony Lo Bianco's Peter Nicholas is reckless to begin with but the forces in the tale that give him self-conflict take a toll on him. Lo Bianco demonstrates great stress and pounding frustration as the initial investigation reveals only infuriatingly difficult questions. As he approaches the difficult truth of his journey and a sense of his personal power becomes evident, his confidence warms and ices us down. It's a performance you might not expect in a film like this.

Around this, the plot races, establishing its anchors and pivots rapidly, ensuring a smooth and quick series of developments. Cohen used everything he had as a film maker to do this. The opening traffic sniping was done guerrilla style without permits and the setpiece at the police parade (with a young Andy Kaufmann in an unforgettable walk-on) was matched between documentary footage Cohen shot and close ups deftly shot and inserted. Handheld sequences are used to heighten unease and add more documentarian vibes. One account featuring a UFO was pieced together from the old sci-fi show Space 1999 but doesn't look like it. What does look like itself is New York City and it's the grimy endless metropolis that also played itself in the same year's Taxi Driver. Cohen takes us into a realm of local religious festivals with Catholic fetishism, real condemned high rise tenaments, and streets that never seem to get sunlight. It's like neither more than superficially but this story lives in the same world as The French Connection and The Omen (another 1976 release).

I first saw this as Demon on Brisbane late night TV in the early '80s and marvelled at how the genre turned on a five cent piece but it all still felt like the same movie. When things get cosmic from halfway through, there is no contradiction. The sight of the ethereal (and scary) Bernard Phillips rests as effortlessly in the look and feel as the visit to Sylvia Sidney's abduction victim and implant receiver. Sandy Dennis' exhausted but manipulative wife could be a few blocks away. When the time comes for whizbang special effects we get physical performance and lighting. There is peril inside a burning building which might make you worry for the cast and crew for its authenticity. Cohen might have been judged a B-movie hack but takes the hard road to get this story told.

There wasn't an option for buying a copy of a film wasn't an option then but I vowed to be in the queue of the Schonell or Valhalla or any art cinemas such as they were, to see it for real. Decades later, when the market expected punters to buy the new digital home video movies for themselves, I sought a copy of the Blue Underground special ed. Then, I saw and heard it in as close to a cinema experience as I could have dreamed of. It was a marvel all over again. Larry Cohen left as a few years ago and when I knew of it I garthered a few friends to watch the 4K, some had seen it, others not, and we talked about it all night after the end credits rolled.

Viewing notes: I watched my Blue Underground 4K with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos sound and luxuriated in this film's look and feel and the weight of its conceits. This is not locally available in physical media but can be bought overseas in fine editions. It can be hired through Prime for $2.99.

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 6: JASON LIVES @ 40

Tommy from Parts 4 and 5, returns to Crystal Lake (now Forest Green) from his stay at a mental health hospital to kill the already dead Jason Vorhees to prevent him from ever returning. He and a friend dig up the grave and Tommy impales Jason with a fence spike which catches a bolt of lightning which brings Jason back to lethal life. Good one, Tommy.

And then it's kill kill kill, thrill thrill thrill and then the credits. Except that this part takes up the challenges of the previous one (which I won't be spoiling) and runs with them. The franchise holds its own from the first to the fourth better than most comparable horror franchises of its time. The second sequence begins with an acceptable twist but then we're really only retreading the formula with a few threads of commentary on the times to extend it. Where once there were hillbilly families and bikie gangs there are now white collar paintball teams. The summer camp is back, having been absent for a few installments, and this time we get the kids who go to it, not just the counsellors, adding a potential quarry for the man in the mask.

Also, there's the Tommy thread which has to do with indentity and agency as defined by suspicions against him. This is difficult to detail as it involves spoilers for gthe previous two parts but I can say that it's treatment of Tommy's predicament lifts it from the generally disappointing Part 5. If you remember that this is part six of a slasher franchise, Jason Lives does its job with some inventive kills that include character setups sufficient to prevent the murders from simply adding to the kill count. And there is the line, early in the piece: "I've seen enough horror movies to know that any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly." Ten years on and that self-reflexivity became de riguer with Scream and its imitators.

What is there left to say about this installment in time, as its own film? It's lean and muscular and does what it says it will do. Neither particularly profound nor trying to be, ressurecting the monster and leaving him at the door to any number of sequels, the way everything should work.

I witnessed the origin of the F13 franchise as a one-off during Schoolies Week in 1980. It worked great magic. I'd seen Halloween the year before at the drive-in and its memory towered over this. Much later, when I relaxed my cinephilia with the admission that I love horror movies, I caught up with both franchises (along with Nightmare on Elm St, Hellraiser and a few others). 

Comparing the descendants of Halloween with F13 is a sobering exercise. While Halloween kept going off its own rails by copying the thing that copied it (F13) and strayed into potentially interesting territory with the third installment, once it relaxed into dishing up the kind of slasher movies that the original's imitators did, it lost touch with its inspiration and became the game it had changed. F13, for all its callous copying and base exploitation, kept showing it could try new things. That's pretty much why I bought a blu-ray set of the first eight plus the 2007 remake as I knew it would feel less try-hard than a comparable set of Halloween. F13 doesn't beg too much but does get on with it. That beats a fading current of nostalgia any time.

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 @ 50

When a raid on an outlying police station ends in the theft of assault weapons and the death of gang members, the gang vows revenge. The next morning, newly commissioned Police Lieutenant Ethan Bishop starts his day with the assignment of taking care of decommissioned police station for its last night. A man is driving with his daughter to pick up her nanny through the streets of the same rundown neighbourhood as the station and the gang headquarters. The gang prowls the streets in a car, armed with those assault weapons. The girl is shot dead getting an ice cream. The man escapes the scene and, after some near lethal encounters makes his way, raving in shock to the station. The gang can kill two birds with one stone. Oh, and a group of hard criminals is being transported by bus including a notorious murderer and a very sick prisoner. It's not the babysitting gig Lt. Bishop expected but then he did tell his boss that he wanted to be a hero.

Reading that, it's a ton of plot but watching the movie it never feels like it. John Carpenter's second feature film but first that didn't begin as a student film finds him ready to rock. All those narrative threads above are woven seamlessly through a personable first act which ends in atrocity. The seige story that follows forms the pattern for Carpenters next decade finds place here as a compelling play of tension and character development. Assault is overshadowed by both the cheeky space adventure prior to it (Dark Star) and the horror masterpiece that followed it (Halloween) but it offers great rewards for the repeat viewer.

A significant debt, aside from Carpenter's confessed Rio Bravo, is the independent source point Night of the Living Dead. This might well have guided the casting of a black actor for Lt. Bishop (Carpenter doesn't mention it in his commentary) but it definitely suggested the middle act discusison of whether to go upstairs or to the basement for best defence. While the gang members are not zombies (the sleek choreography of their movements gives them an extra spike of threat) the sense that they are as relentless drives their scenes. They are also, poignantly multi-racial. Closing in on an ethnicity would have distracted from their purpose as pure antagonists.

However, once you understand these precursors any overriding influence of the history of cinema vanishes under Carpenter's confident helming of the action and tension. If you think of Dark Star as the college film that escaped, Assault emerges as among the strongest of debut features. This is also where Carpenter began his practice of shooting in the widescreen ratio of 2.35:1 to add a sense of cinematic value. At no point, however pulpy or B-movie it gets, the film never looks less than prime.

Then there's the world building. The Los Angeles invented suburb of Anderson is all bungalows and dried untended lawns. The gangs have driven everyone indoors and the paved empty streets look post apocalyptic. The comparative cosiness of the station offers visual sanctuary until it becomes a target and the quarry of the gang and then it resembles something more like a disintegrating prison. The sense of abandonment by the rest of the city's law enforcement adds a clear saddening hopelessness as the night progresses.

On characterisation, this is a film with dual leads. We have already met Lt. Bishop but it is his nominal antithesis who takes co-ownership of centre screen. Napolean Wilson, the mass murderer accepts his judgement and potentially lethal punishment and it is strangely disarming. He is the chief wit in the film and the moment of respect that passes between him and Bishop gets us hankering to see them bounce off each other.

Austin Stoker's Bishop is a strong leader but beset by doubts on his first job as an officer. His fluent physicality deepens his openness. Darwin Joston as Wilson manages to squeeze charisma out of his every dialogue exchange and maintains a strange mix of effortlessness and intensity. Laurie Zimmer as Leigh is Carpenter's first properly drawn female character. Zimmer plays her as someone discovering the reason she has bravery and confidence when faced with lethality. Carpenter would get Jamie Lee Curtis to do to opposite in Halloween two years later. In this early go, Zimmer gives Carpenter an early win. She's magnetic on screen and the swelling connection between her and Wilson feels deliciously dangerous. 

So, if John Carpenter's first fully fledged outing as a feature film maker stepped beyond good for a rookie to announce the emergence of a stylistically easy action guy where did he have to progress. The next decade would be a career yoyo with global hits like Halloween but anti-zeitgeist flops like The Thing. Cartoony adventure with Big Trouble in Little China but ideas-heavy sleepers like Prince of Darkness or the prescient They Live filled his screens. His self-effacing blu-ray commentary leaves his description of Assault as an exploitation film but we are looking at an engaging, characterful action feast that can be gripping and eerie by turns. Oh, it's also one of his strongest music scores, fully synthesised, brooding, menacing and relentless. When weirdo trip hopper Tricky used it for his Bomb the Bastards rap, he just let the theme music play without adding anything more than his own vocals. That's a bow of tribute.

Viewing notes: I watched my excellent Umbrella Blu-Ray of this film and hope that someone puts out a 50th anniversary 4K. Meanwhile it can be rented from Apple, Prime and YouTube. Umbrella's BD (which includes a director's cut of Dark Star as an extra) is out of print. 

THE FLY @ 40

Seth Brundle picks up journalist Veronica at a science and technology convention when she tells him everyone says their invention will change the world and he says, "yeah, but they're lying." He does have a point. He's developed a matter transporter which he demonstrates back at his digs in the rusty quarter of town. She talks her skeptical boss (and romantic ex) into putting her on the story and one night when Seth gets drunk and jealous he puts himself through the machine, not noticing the stray fly that's followed him into the pod.

The Fly is often cited as the moment that David Cronenberg met the mainstream but he'd already done that with The Dead Zone (which even fans forget, however unjustly).  What The Fly more accurately signifies is Cronenberg bringing his trademark body horror to Hollywood. The one before Dead Zone was Videodrome which would not have flown in Hollywood with its paranoid themes of controlling media but The Fly was a remake of a '50s move (incidentally, one set in the Canada of Cronenberg's childhood years) and felt like a bankable update the way that Body Snatchers had in 1978 or The Thing in '82 (though that one didn't hit).

Regardless of what they thought they might have been in for what the suits and the public got was the work of an auteur glad to have a roomy budget and one careful not to waste a cent. What they also got was one of his most toughly visceral outings, an unflinching look at bodily disintegration and mutation. Cronenberg consciously chose against an allegory of AIDS which he felt would not only date the film but provide an irrelevant distraction from Brundle's story. To that end he encouraged his FX and makeup crew to concentrate on the effects of human aging, rendering Brundle's transformation all the more universal.

As it had in almost all Cronenberg's previous films, the exchange between strange technology and corporate interests gives way to the most profound aspects of the horror. The exclusivity of the Starliner housing development in Shivers serves as a perfect incubator for the sexually transmitted parasite. The pop psychologist's cultish manifestation of his patients' rage in The Brood gives literal brith to an army of homicidal monsters. In The Fly the initial entry point of greed is through fame, Brundle's in the science community and Veronica's in the publishing world, but the obvious commercial potential of the invention is there to begin with and, while not exploited in the running time, is clearly pointing to the future.

What doesn't point to the future is the effect on Brundle as he edges toward life as Brundle-Fly. Going from constant sexual arousal, climbing the walls, predigesting his food with acidic vomit, he is soon enough filling a display case of his unnecessary human features. They adorn the glass shelves of his museum of human history. The shedding of his humanity is reduced to a series of squelches and tearing dead tissue. As he narrates to a video camera how he is changing, we are increasingly aware that he is travelling on a one way ticket. This is a major departure from the '50s original in which rthe hapless Dr. Delambre continually resists his new state. Brundle not only accepts it but, thinking his new strength is a result purely of transporting, encourages Veronica to try it. When it's clear that he has fused with the insect his chief drive is curiosity and excitement. Only when this turns into deterioration does his philosophical acceptance emerge. Before the catastrophes of the final act, this is the scientist and his examination of his own passing.

The casting of the film included real life couple Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum who were about to have very good '80s and '90s. Goldblum exhibits the nervous intellect that still keeps him famous and it is perfect for Brundle's mix of rapid thought and frenetic self-effacement that gives the character his depth. He'd already delighted audiences with his similar turn in The Big Chill and this is his rarified version. Geena Davis with her sharp intelligence and warm deeper voice provides a presence that can complete the picture, beat for beat. This film always feels like a two hander rather than Goldblum's showcase and that is down to Davis' presence.

Also starring is the work of Cronenberg's workshop of effects and make up masters who served up a wealth of grotestquery that outdid all of Cronenberg's previous body horrors put together. From the mangled baboon to the various stages of Brundle's disintegration, to the maggot baby (with Cronenberg himself as the obsretician) to the final mess of a thing that yet invokes our pity and sorrow. All of it looks both physical and a little dated but dramatically so strong that we effortlessly watch along. 

The Fly saw David Cronenberg, the maestro of the weird idea in contemporary city life, reach the point where it felt he was finally comfortable with his actors. He's already worked with many highly accomplished casts but their performances can feel, in those earlier films, on the stilted side. With the young power couple at the centre of The Fly for the first time we know warmth in his stories. That final ingredient that makes The Fly more easily rewatchable than anything he'd already done (though my favourite will always be Videodrome) and it was an experience he took to almost everything he did thereafter that didn't require a cold touch (like Spider or Cosmopolis) completing the pieces to allow him to move between the mainstream and the personal without stylistic compromise. It depicted a terrifying transformation but it resulted in his own creative one. 

Viewing notes: I don't know if there will be a 40th Anniversary 4k of this in 2026 so I went ahead and watched my old Blu-Ray which is a superb transfer with clear impactful sound (frequent collaborator Howard Shore really got to play around with a big orchestra this time). On Disney+ with subscription, rent from Apple, Prime and Youtube, and out of print in Australia but always affordable through a market for around the $20 mark. 

Review: IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT

Vahid, the boss of a garage, freezes when he hears a sound coming from one of his customers. It's a little squeak from a prosthetic leg. It takes him back to days in political prison when the torturer Pegleg was committing atrocities on a daily basis. He follows the man (with young family) home and then kidnaps him and prepares him for summary live burial in the desert. The man's pleas include a challenge to test his claim of mistaken identity and Vahid is struck with reasonable doubt that dances around with his righteous anger. So he phones some friends, or at least others who were imprisoned by the regime at the same time. They need a positive ID.

But they can't quite do it. The closest any of them get is something remembered from the darkness of a solitary confinement cell. Between them they still don't quite have enough to stop them killing an innocent and very unlucky man. By this time Vahid's van is crammed with a wedding photographer, her subjects including a bride to be in tiara and gown, a firebrand, and the war criminal/innocent man  packed into a coffin sized tool box.

Jafar Panahi's thriller has a story that has been told before. It's one that highlights the costs of totalitarian regimes and the crimes against humanity that nurture them. In this case the story has some more urgency, being from the current Iranian situation. Panahi has been a prisoner several times over in the regime's jails as well as house arrest. He has been generally forbidden to make films and famously made one by stealth while under house arrest title This is Not a Film.

Here, he is operating with loosened restrictions and presents this alarming tale in his usual neo-realist style, mixing muscular characterisation with enough comedy to smooth things while the ethics stay centre stage. There is one massive humanity-testing circumstance in the middle act that manages to be both funny and demoralising, another moment where officials expect kickbacks and things that should run smoothly are subject to wrinkles in the tape. 

Panahi does give us a conclusion (no spoilers) which is followed by a tense and almost eerie finale moment, shot with impeccible judgement. At a time when the world's news is loud with the actions of blustering tyrants and forced loyalties to atrocity organisations, we need this film. We need to remind ourselves of the terrifying decisions that await us when the curtain lifts to reveal danger from our own neighbourhoods. Think about it, it seems to call, just think.

Viewing notes: I went to a morning screening which was sparsely attended but did feature a couple of senior women at the back row who talked all through the trailers and commercials and then through the opening coprorate badges that inform that the movie is about to begin. They weren't loud but I hadn't paid to listen to them. I did as I no longer fret to do and turned until I located them and loudly intoned: "Excuse me. Please stop talking." They did, for the entire film. We need to do this more.

Review: SEND HELP

Linda, corporate nerd engine has been passed over a promotion she was promised. The new boss Brad gives it to his friend. Linda plucks it up and confronts him and he gives her a chance to impress on an upcoming business sortie. As the bros laugh openly at her Survivor audition reel, the plane hits turbulence and blows up, crashing into the sea, leaving only Linda and Brad to wash up on the nearby island. Gonna be a long wait for rescue.

Sam Raimi's fable of peeling the veils of civilisation is not the brittle satire I imagined, though it deals with the same elements. Silver spoon Brad is dependent on Linda for his survival, first through his incapacitating injury and then through his incompetence. If they clear that difference there's still her resentment and his contempt. There's a ton to work through. If that sounds a little too much like a corporate training video then rest assured that Raimi is only too happy to supply eye popping gore with black humour and a constant undercurrent of unease. The master cineaste of The Evil Dead is still among us.

A screenplay that keeps things on the boil with wit and eviscerating obervations, nurturing toxic developments in characters as well as the ingredients for collaboration is brought to life by the casting. Dylan O'Brien as Brad is believably dickish but given enough clear intelligence to prevent him from eliciting a measure of empathy. It's his edginess that carries a lot of the tension. But this is still Rachel McAdams' film. She took on a type-reversing frumpy nerd and turned her into a jungle queen with constant conflicts through the survival scenario. It might lead to a splattery end but her growing hardness in the circumstances involves a near visible shedding of the social compliance held contemptible by the business world.

The result is one of the most gripping thiller comedies on offer. Raimi's effortless mix of violence and humour comes to the rescue of some of the most white knuckle scenes. But there's also a softer satire to provide relief from the intensity. Linda's discovery of a waterfall plays like a moisturiser commercial. Brad's breakout escape plan is shown with pathos as well as ridicule. 

The third act suffers from some needless expository dialogue during a scene that would have benefitted from wordless tension as the pair prepare for the big showdown. Then, that showdown is a fine toughened setpiece of conflict between the antagonists who now are both wiser and barer than their starting states, amid the trappings of luxury. The coda, if on the sour side, provides an apt cap.

I like this film more than some of Raimi's other genre outings like The Gift or Drag Me to Hell. Send Help is closer to the more complex A Simple Plan for the depth work done with the characters. The sustain of underlying tension and shifting ethics give even the most benevolent acts a queasy edge. Even when Linda's worst instincts lead her to darkness, we see she's also the victimised office drone and our judgement needs reservation. The choice of Blondie deep cuts Rip Her to Shreds and for the closing sequence One Way or Another is inspired. If you know the songs you'll welcome them here. They are the perfect aperitif and dessert cocktail to a fable that illustrates why civilisation should be earned, not assumed.

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 @ 45 (Spoilers)

After a prologue that blends a recap of the legend and ending of the first film with a stalking and killing of its final girl, we gather at a new summer camp with new counsellors. It's also on Crystal Lake because why not? Pranks and gossip buzz and the chief Paul and his current flame among the staff, Ginny, smooth out their bickering. Meanwhile, handheld camera at ankle level, Jason is shown active as a full grown man roaming the woods as the young adults cavort in them. The crew get one last night on the town before they get down to prep for the summer camp and then the killing begins and the formula clicks into place.

That might sound cynical but this film, made at the dawn of teen slashers while the rules were still getting their first draft, happily reinforces everything that works and presages some features that the franchise itself would use. The first Friday the 13th was an attempt at distilling what worked about Halloween and dispensing with all that pesky character development. It worked and its first sequel added even more filtration. Get young adults together in a remote location. Kill them.

While I am not about to exaggerate the nuances of the relationships and characterisations here, there is some basic work done on what's between Paul and Ginny, Vickie shows paraplegic Mark that her attraction to him is not drawn from pity, whacky Ted is not just a pranky git. Ginny's bar-side musings on the legend of Jason and that he might have grown to age with no means to distinguish violence from morality. Surrounded by people washing their own ethics away with gushes of beer, it's a poignant moment.

So then you get the kills and they're good. Although gore effects emperor Tom Savini did cross paths with Jason and his victims, this time the setups are handled by Steven Kirshoff. Hammer claws to the skull, machetes to the neck, an encore of a javelin through sexually engaged bodies. All who paid for more of the first one were getting just that. As to the score, Henry Manfredini is back with his Psycho-inspired shrieks in the high stirngs. There is more electronica on the same stage though and the viewing I did for this featured a scene backed by the violin intensity and some strange synthesised chirping which added an uncomfortable weirdness to the scene. 

The most famous setpiece in the film comes at the end when Ginny musters everything she knows about psychology to hypnotically convince Jason that she is his murdered mother. She dons the deceased's jumper and talks to the killer, stopping him as he crashes through the door. It works. With her life at stake, and those of countless future others, she does a turn for the ages as Jason's vision blurs through confusion to acceptance, right up to the moment where he sees his mother's dessicated head still on the altar where he left it. Ginny is making good with her theorising and adding a comprehension to it  that feels like compassion. Where the inspirational figure of Michael Myers in Halloween's sequel (same year) might benefit from a few sprinkles of rounding back detail, he remains a mechanical predator. Jason gets a personality and history of abuse, the childlike killer left is made all the more terrifying.

The Jason of this outing has yet to put his iconic hockey mask on his face. He does wear an Elephant Man hessian sack with a single eyehole over his head, though. In the first we only see him as a mangled child projecting from the water in Alice's memory.  The dialogue states that it was five years between then and this one. Now, Jason is a grown man who has learned to dress himself and survive in the woods without discovery. Ok, but if you're going to hold what will increasingly be a disturbing thread of a figure liminally between worlds who becomes a slashing monster in this one, you won't be getting much out of this franchise. 

So, this one does what it says on the tin without pretending it's doing anything else, while adding some intriguing innovations. As to the tired criticism of slashers being puritanically anti-sex, recall the cry of the hosts of the great Faculty of Horror podcast: the film is rad, the killer is the prude. On the other hand, if I've managed to interest you in this one, move to the underrated Part 3. He gets the hockey mask in that one ;)

Viewing notes: I watched my blu-ray from a set of all the Paramount chapters. The presentation is stellar HD with good muscular audio mix. This set is no longer currently available but the whole franchise is rentable through a few streamers. 

WAKE IN FRIGHT @ 55

John Grant is in a bind. Young, intelligent and middle class, he signed on for a teaching career as a way of getting to an interesting and fulfilling life through a transformation into journalism. But the Department sent him to Woop Woop to teach the entire schoolage population in a single room as flies buzzed around them and the great arid outback wasteland spread to all horizons. He's in a bind because the only two ways of escaping are through seeing his contract through or buying his way out at a hefty 1971 thousand dollars. Not even the lump he gets for his upcoming holidays would come close to that.

But he is about to flee the scene for the Christmas holidays. His frequent daydreams of his girlfriend in Sydney emerging from crystal waters, gliding over the sand to plant a soft and loving kiss on his mouth keep him going through the rowdy train journey with its deafening drunks and racial exclusion. He has to stop at Bundanyabba overnight to hook up with a Sydney flight the next day. 

The Yabba clings around a mine and its pub is filled with loud, sweating men. John, bumping his way through to the bar gets a beer and retires to the closest thing to a private corner he can find. The cigarette he takes out is lit by Jock the local cop whose avuncular method of interrogation has John blurting out his predicament and sense of superiority over everyone that surrounds them. Jock then proceeds to lock John into the kind of shouting match that, in the Aussie lingo, only ends up with everyone plastered and vomiting beer. 

At the end of the night, at John's pleas, Jock takes to an afterhours diner where he finally gets something to soak up all that beer and hosts a constant two-up game. John looks at the Boschian nightmare of barking men in a room whose odour makes it through to the celluloid it was shot on, and he thinks: one thousand dollars. Soon enough he's shirtless. Bye bye, plane to Sydney and even train back to Tiboonda. He's stuck. If his teaching job was in Purgatory where he might just wait it out before redemption, he's now in Hell, possibly forever like the old Doc Tydon a man whose peace with the Yabba has made him poetically cynical and irretrievably depraved. 

What follows is a journey through that blistering wasteland. There's more ribbing and torment, violence and spooring toxic masculinity and rivers of beer. Kenneth Cook's source novel (same title) is a reference to an old saw: dream of the Devil and wake in fright. Well, that happened

Ted Kotchieff's film of the book from Evan Jones's screenplay is a carefully measured depiction of a steel trap closing on a victim. From the oppressively overheated plains of the opening shots to the inferni both meteorological and human, the crowd choreography that never feels staged, to the insertion of the brutal roo hunt, Kotchieff builds a world of minimally clothed savagery that, substantially exists to this day. The inclusion of period slang customs, aside, Wake in Fright feels as timeless as Hell itself.

The movie was considered lost. I saw it on late night TV in Brisbane in the early '80s but that was from the same kind of crud source that made it onto home video. It wasn't until the 2000s that the original elements were excavated and restored that anyone saw it in anything like its original form. I say this because the lost years created an impression that John Grant plummeted into a world of torture and depravity because of the bad boys in town but a good solid viewing of the film shows an ostensibly civilised man tearing away at the cuts from a few stoushes to find himself as feral as all the others. The early signals of his conversational hubris are punished until his increasing compliance is brought to screaming life as he strives to outdo the worst acts he sees, to make that same claim of superiority. He is not a babe in the woods, he is the sneering, me-first overgrown baby that anyone can be if given a little licence.

When he has a moment of lucidity towards the very end and rails at a local about the nightmare ethics of the culture, it's only partly from moral outrage; the other part is his failure to excel at it. The conclusion, emerging minus his pretensions to accept a fate mundane, humbling and ugly, shows us one changed from baseless arrogance to a life of accepted mediocrity. It's my view that it's this, rather than the obnoxiousness of the Yabbans that audiences in this country really objected to. If we really were that worried about bush machismo we wouldn't have had Crocodile Dundee.

But it's not all extreme fist fights and pub lore and an unforgiving pallet of barren earth that makes Wake in Fright the deserving classic that it is. We also get performances the like of which Australian cinema had never sported and it was a rich mix of bravura playing and sullen natrualism. 

Gary Bond, a British stage actor, gives John Grant a put upon pain that his looks (near identical to Peter O'Toole) and initial confidence render reasonable. His transformation through brutality are all the more striking and even shocking because of this. Australian veteran actor Chips Rafferty was never before not after as sinister as he is here. Typically, the Everystralian, good bloke in every crowd, character, he presents that but with a manipulative edge and a sneering superiority that has seen too many John Grants to care about their formal education and airs. In context, his performance is the most frightening.

Donald Pleasance, another import, is Australian enough to make it through his lines smoothly gives us a brutalised man whose pragmatism suggests far darker bargains and interactions than we see here. Sylvia Kay whose longing eyes show a detachment to her surroundings that has led her to a confusion between escape and oblivion whereby her joyless sexual excursions have become her sole exit. The attempted seduction of John and his response (is it revulsion or just too much beer?) ends with a rebuttoning and a lack of comment. For her the myth of Sisyphus might as well be a kind of lifestyle porn. The young Jack Thompson who was about to have an enviable '70s, bursts in with all the dangerous energy of that bloke at the barbie that you hear before you see, loud, intimidating, unstoppable. Hell of a debut.

Is this film unfair? On release, it was championed by all the John Grants in the community and condemned by all the Jock Crawfords. Did it really take a foreigner to show us ourselves? Ted Kotcheff went on to the satire Fun With Dick and Jane and the tougher First Blood. He knew the importance of details in world building so that the globe is bigger when seen in closeup. The documentary feel to the crowd scenes would have been familiar to local viewers from the likes of 4 Corners on the ABC. That he set a compelling drama within that points forward to the decade of Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman. He wasn't attacking Australia or its stereotypical blokes, they just got in the way via the setting of a novel. Masculinity? Yes, that's most of the bullseye on the target as it is the root cause of almost everything in the general malaise. It's not Australian culture but that of a people who will not break it where it needs breaking. We might have moved on, here, but incidents like the Nazis at populist rallies and deflating referendums (the Voice as well as the republic) and other horrors lead us right back to the room for improvement. Wake in Fright is not a time caspule. It's a clear and present caution.

Viewing notes: For this blog I watched Umbrella's outstanding 4K presentation of the 2000s restoration. Goodbye gluey video, this looks like film. It's available on 4K with a Blu-ray on disc, and streaming for hire on several platforms. A the moment you can see it for free with ads on Brollie and without ads on ABC iView. Go ye!

Review: 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE

Almost no time has passed between the end of the last one and the opening of this one. Young Spike is facing an initiative fight to the death with one of the other Jimmys in the gang. He wins but not how you'd reckon it and is then part of the gang of marauders in Jimmy Saville costumes. We also see Dr Ian from the last film, wandering around his bone temple and finding something unusual in the behaviour of the local alpha infected zombie. Then we meet some of the folk from an uninfected settlement who escape an infected encounter and run home only to find that the Jimmys have invaded their house. Times could be better.

Through a series of ultraviolent encounters we learn that the Jimmy's, under the hand of the self appointed Lord Sir Jimmy Crystal, roam the land, dispatching the infected in cartoon but very effective fashion as well as spreading the message of a twisted morality based on his experiences as a child. If you have seen the previous installment, this Jimmy is the boy who tries to take refuge in the church where his father is vicar to permanently scarifying effect. Keeping the kids of the gang, his fingers, in check with the constant threat of violence, his leadership is drawn entirely from fear and the spectre of Satan. Jimmy's conferences with Satan are imaginary but effective in building a culture of dread.

Ian the doctor, tends his memento mori, the columns of bones he has built from the decades since the outbreak. His response to the infected is measured, death in self defence but professional curiosity when observing a pause in the behaviour of some of them. One such, a mountain of an infected man, seems to understand the danger of Ian's blowpipe with its sedating dart. Ian has a project.

I won't reveal more plot. This film measures that out in digestible doses. I will say, however, that this is the most engaged I have felt throughout the whole running time of any of this series, including the original (which I loved up until the final act where it got weirdly cute). The injection of Nia DaCosta into the blend has helped. She has dispensed with the indugence of Danny Boyle's diluting influence, allowed the violence to speak for itself, and let the darkness of the tale take its own energy. It works. It's very violent, and it's scary which is more than I can say of the rest.

Jack O'Connell as Sir Lord Jimmy (the order wanders) is fearsome with his pauses, near reasonable ponderances, and sudden lethal judgements. The suggestion that he doesn't believe his own preaching gives him a danger beyond the average villain, toward a barely contained explosive malevolance. Ralph Fiennes does what he does, making himself wlecome while mumbling through old New Romantic song lyrics or putting on a magnificent cabaret to an old Iron Maiden classic. Alfie Williams as boy Spike holds his own, torn between the conscience he brings from his former life to playing the motions as a Jimmy. Erin Kellyman as the dynamic Jimmy Ink makes us doubt at every turn. 

The cinematography, a pleasing, clean and rich digital video, emphasises the indifference of green, wind blown nature which seems impatient to be done with these violent things running through it. Music, by Hildur Guonadottir is stealthy, squeaking here, roaring there, in step with the look and feel.

I was more captivated by this late entry to this long standing franchise than any other of the entries that I've seen (never bothered with 28 Weeks Later). This is because the guest director seems as though she has worked to make something that is effective whether it is standalone or seen as part of a series. Danny Boyle's 2002 original was a mostly good film, ruined by a hasty conclusion and apparent need to appear cool. I found 28 Years Later self-subverting with its overly comfy presentation of the survivor colony and its laddishness. Did writer Alex Garland feel the same? The absence of those over-warmed tones in Boyle's films is welcome. Perhaps, the mooted final sequel which purports to be about redemption will fulfil the promise of this stylistic detour. I doubt it but doubts are part of wishes.

SOMETHING WILD @ 40

Charlie, white collar on the rise, gets caught out in one of the microrebellions he stages to assure himself he's still vital (skipping out on a lunch bill). His pursuer is a young woman named Lulu with a flamboyant dress sense who recognises his motives and invites him on an adventure. Action by action, his resistance is broken and soon he's cheating on his marriage with her in a motel paid for by the work Christmas Club cash he was bearing. All the corporate heights he was heading for, with their rewards of status and riches in the conventional world are about to be stripped away, leaving him at rock bottom. Is he about to find out that that's exactly where he needs to be?

Jonathan Demme had over a decade's worth of exploitation flicks and thrillers, graduating from Roger Corman University in the '70s to the heights of Oscar nominations by the mid-'80s. By the time Something Wild hit his desk he had the luxury of taking his pick. It read like an old screwball comedy but with a harder more contemporary edge. The director who would launch the formalised serial killer genre in a few years with Silence of the Lambs would have seen that right off.

This is why the whacky looking poster art sent out for this movie is such a bait and switch. Melanie Griffith looks wickedly alluring and Jeff Daniels, upsidedown, is worried. But despite the meet cute outside the restaurant and the initial joyride she takes him on, the comedy steadily cranks down and gets replaced by darker matter. That's before the disruption in the middle act.

The '80s saw the emergence of a new kind of American upwardly moving salary jerk or perhaps just a new name for them. The Yuppie was a figure of fun or malevolance, the notion that the future of western culture would be in the hands of greed driven psychos was a terrifying one and, whether it was comedy like Desperately Seeking Susan or thriller like Fatal Attraction, the Yuppie Nightmare movie appeared to assuage our fear with their disintegration or satisfy our powerless envy through ridicule. This bled into the following decade even more extremely and had already been taken far enough by Martin Scorsese with After Hours that the jokes landed so hard they stopped being funny.

If I say that E. Max Frye's screenplay takes a softer approach, it's not to suggest that Something Wild is a lightweight piece but concerned less with attacking the Yuppie than understanding them. Demme ran with that, adding enough to let the gravity takeover feel natural. Demme keeps his eye on character and nurturing performances that give the extraordinary situation credibility.

Melanie Griffith, if she had started today, would have been called a nepo baby because she was Hitchcock blonde Tippi Hedren's daughter. But that would still be unfair considering she was a child actor and as a teenager played opposite Gene Hackman Night Moves, and then in Roar with the lions she grew up with. This role feels like a vindication of her life experience to date. After the whacky update of a Rosalind Russell or Katherine Hepburn screwball agent of chaos has worn out and the wig comes off in her mother's house, she's Audrey with a real life story that involves pain. Griffith assumes the dignity smoothly, risking the audience's resentment at the loss of the sexy flake, and gets away with it. This is her film.

Jeff Daniels as Charlie has a tougher job winning us over from his ginger token rebellion. He's exactly the starched effigy the audience has been warned against, using everyone else's money to make his fortune regardless of everyone else. He is given his own pain and it's fed to us piecemeal but his playing of the turning point is exceptional, winding up the spring that shoots him into his new life he ums and ers and appeals to everything his antagonists should superficially assume about him. All of that suit-deep convention is jettisoned as he physcially leaps toward Audrey. He is careful, after that, to retain Charlie's timidity, tiny tics and casting of his gaze that speak of a life of passive aggression. Daniels was a realitive newcomer to the screen and while he might have been initially chosen for his clean-lined all American look he gave depth to prevent the kind of caricature that would have plunged this film into obscurity.

Ray Liotta, lean and hungry, who would soon hold his own beside De Niro and Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, provides a prototype performance, adding a growling narcissism to his bad boy role. He is unpredictably dangerous. When Charlie stops a train of conversation about Audrey's sexual performance, retaining the better part of his old conventionality, Ray surprisingly relents but then moves on to further violence, a walking hair trigger.

Something Wild does look like the '80s cinema around it with big bright colour and soft light in the dark and a mix of needledrop and scored music. The credits open with a solo David Byrne track that sounds like Talking Heads, the score credits for John Cale and Laurie Anderson cover both arthouse and mid-'80s cache. Those are ticked boxes but there is one moment I noticed in the most recent watch that struck me. In a brief establishing shot of a street, a convertible glides past with a brace of yuppies in it, the song on the car speakers is New Order's Temptation, a song four years old at the time. While the chaos is transforming Charlie inside, the rest of America is still in the Yuppie dream, driving a vintage convertible, consuming the Noo Wave now that it is safe to do so. Such a pleasant alternative to something like About Last Night's constant screaming mainstream pop.

Jonathan Demme chose to quietly subvert the film he was expected to make by finding the sobering core in the screenplay. He might easily have got away with making the movie of the poster, raked in a good opening weekend and moved on but the question of what lay beneath the designer shirts and investment portfolios of his culture proved too compelling. It was an example that the film culture didn't heed, with the likes of Basic Instinct or The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. Then again, it was Demme's Silence of the Lambs, showing he was happy to dress up base exploitation in glossy-budgeted finery and start one of the most detestable, convention-guarding genres in recent cinema history, so he wasn't really above anything. Except there was this moment where he went with his gut, plied his craft and made something durable.

Viewing notes: I watched this free with my Prime subscription in an HD presentation. Also available to rent through YouTube and Apple.

DEAD AND BURIED @ 45

A photographer on a road trip stops at a picturesque beach. After a few decent scenes he focuses on a pair of shapely legs. Tilting up, he sees a beautiful young woman. She's fine with having her picture taken, even loosening her top and exposing her breasts. She invites him to take her and he, finding it difficult to believe, goes along until he's knocked on the head, tied to a post with a fishing net as a group of locals advance on him with cameras, a can of petrol and a lighter. He screams as one of them says, "welcome to Potter's Bluff." If you think that's a spoiler, you haven't seen this movie.

Dead and Buried is a strange horror film in that it refuses to declare its hand until it's got you scratching your head. Further victims appear posthumously, taking their places in the population with new identities. The local sheriff emerges as the protagonist as he tries to piece the bizarre events around him. He's aided by the local coroner who loves his classic big band records and waxes lyrical abou the art of the embalmer. Sheriff Dan's wife Janet is a schoolteacher with a performative style and a barely veiled interest in the occult. The deeper Dan gets into the mystery the worse the possibilities get unto a finale with an unexpectedly heartrending conclusion.

When I've shown this movie to friends, even those of my own vintage, they wonder why they had never heard of it. I saw it because I was getting back into horror movies after a decade or two of snobbery from film student days. Also, the VHS cover art intrigued me. A woman's face is partially buried, surrounded by broken earth with a beach and gentle sea stretchingstretching to the horizon. A full moon shines behind chunky clouds. It could have been a lesser surrealist masterpiece for its impossible geography and  eerie moodiness. The loneliness of the image gives out a weird quiet despair. I had to see it.

James Farentino, rocky faced star of detective and action shows on TV, has an appealing bewilderment at the strange events around him. He manages to blend this with the more assertive heroic figure he needs for the sheriff. Melody Anderson as Janet uses her doll-like face to cover sinister motivations in a kind of reverse gaslighting turn. Her's is the most heavily affecting death scene. Lisa Blount's Lisa, the siren of the opening murder scene, doesn't have to be anything more than amoral malevolance which she provides generously. It is Jack Albertson, veteran character actor of westerns, noir and drama, Grandpa in Willy Wonka, who steals the show here as the coroner Dobbs with a gruff poetry and worldly (perhaps otherworldly) pragmatism. It was his final performance. He died weeks after wrapping.

I'd recommend following up information about the FX master Stan Winston's work on this film, it remains extraordinary. Stephen Poster's cinematography made such heavy use of gauze and lace for the daylight scenes that the patterns can be discernable and feel like we are peeping through curtains at a mystery. My copy includes a CD of Joe Renzetti's score which I can listen to by itself, a piano-led melancholic suite.

Dead and Buried covers its plotholes by pushing the unreality of its events enough to impose on our objections but not so much that it's just formless fantasy. Concentrate on motivations as they slowly emerge and you'll get the movie. If you do, you might just want your own copy, especially if you like an uncanny tale on a rainy afternoon and one that pits humans against their own vanity and resonance. Seek!

Viewing Notes: I watched my Blue Underground special edition with 4K, Blu-Ray and CD soundtrack discs. One thing I'll note about this which is worth bearing in mind. My copy appeared in one fo the 2021 lockdowns. It was misdelivered and lay for days beside my neighbour's letterbox until he found it and left it at my doorstep. It was so thoroughly soaked from heavy rainfall that even the plastic covering had been penetrated. I had to throw away the slipcover (kept the lenticular panel, though) and found that the main 4K disc would not play properly. I complained with the courier company who, after some earnest exhanges, dropped the case. Figuring on water damage I left the disc upright in a place where it would get some breeze. Little by little, over a month, it did dry out and eventually played without seizing up. Handy to know.

DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS @ 40

The Whitemans are rich but dysfunctional. Dad's boffing the housemaid while Mum's a shopping zombie. The daughter is anorexic and choosing bad boyfriends. The son is gender curious and irritates the rest of them with his invasive videography. Even the dog is depressed. One day, having lost his own dog to yet another Los Angelene bourgeois, the homeless and also depressed Jerry attempts to drown in the Whitemans' pool. Summoning the liberalism we've already seen in him, Dave rescues him and, feeling guilty, offers him the spare place until he can get on his feet again. One by one the Whiteman's essential issues are variously challenged and alleviated by the oafish but charismatic Jerry.

Jean Renoir's Bodu Saved From Drowning wasn't such a far fetched choice for Paul Mazursky in 1986. At the time, high concept comedies were machine gunning and hitting big. The master of the arch and strong Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice had plenty to broach with the conspicuously wealthy of Los Angeles with their gurus, pet psychiatrists, faux consciences, piling up the bank accounts and buying to be seen to buy at the expense of their humanity. 

All the targets are here and one perfect segue between a meditating Barbara humming and the buzzing of flies around Jerry, sleeping under a tree by the footpath says a lot about the approach. Mazursky is going to take pot shots but they will be coated in warmth and magnanimity. So, for a movie that has a lot of shadowy capitalism, sexual infidelity, risque sexuality and hot topics like dietary disorders, Down and Out is a comfortable satire.

Richard Dreyfus had a scandal to redeem himself from and does so with a complex blend of anxiety and base reason. Bette Midler gives Barbara a visible longing under the purchase-makes-perfect tornado. Nick Nolte plays his lumpen phsyicality and claimed worldliness as a smooth continuum. Evan Richards never allows Max's sexual curiosity to spill into camp. Jerry's cosmetic advice to Max is a touching moment, an encouragement rather than a sneer. Come to that, the Chinese business partners are just business people, nothing like the honking-accented alien in something like the then recent Sixteen Candles. Even the money grubbing pet psychiatrist can offer a word or two of genuine advice.

Mazursky's comedy is a natural inheritor of Renoir's, being worldly and intent on finding the foible and flaw that gives the characters strength. Could Little Richard's neighbour with his call-out of systemic racism have been given more gravitas? Yes, it's the one area that doesn't quite resolve. When he is banging out one of his classics, the party around him is distracted and flees toward a spectacle. Little Richard is playing in your living room; if you're running to look at something, it had better be walking on water. It reminded me of the heavily glossed depiction of the proto-rock star in the Girl Can't Help It when he and all the other early rockers perform in opulent venues they would never have been admitted to. Perhaps it's a subtler caspule of his vocal comments.

But Down and Out in Beverly Hills works because of its heart and the incsision that prevents it from blanding out into feelgood or getting overly caustic. It's a very happy coincidence of a well chosen tale to cover, and a cast at full strength. If you see that it's a mid'80s satirical comedy and you're thinking Splash or Bachelor Party be prepared to be warmed rather than slapped. So, it still works.

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK @ 45

In the distant future of 1997 Manhattan Island has become America's prison. It's a massive Alcatraz surrounded by skyhigh walls all around it and lethal chopper patrols around the clock. That is where the hijacked Airforce One crashes as the president is on his way to avert a nuclear holocaust. Oops! Not to worry, war hero turned career criminal Snake Plissken is on hand to glide in, retreive the pres and his McGuffin cassette tape that will put an end to the simmering conflict. Oh, and just in case he thinks about his own escape, he's injected with a couple of lethal pellets that can only be neutralised by the folks in charge. He has less than twenty-four hours to do this before the pellets dissolve and the summit meeting ends in war. No pressure.

The deal is extortinate. The times are tough and urgent but this deal has the ring of privilege. We see nothing of the world beyond the penal system and the sense that legal presumption has morphed from innocence to guilt. If you're caught, it's the island. What kind of society is being suggested, here?

John Carpenter had already suggested a twisted public responsibility in his previous film The Fog. The possibility that the ancestry could rise in pain against injustice is an enjoyable fable. What Carpenter saw in the America of 1981 was a wave of authoritarianism in the guise of economic rationalism. It was the start of two terms of Reagan and another of Bush. Over a decade of sweeping problems under the carpet and calling it justice. The society outside the prison of Manhattan is only different from the gangster-led rule of force within it by the price of the suits of those calling the shots. I've always imagined it as a kind of rigid '50s utopianism masking runaway capitalism.

Carpenter's first attempts at the screenplay were not in response to Reagan but Nixon and the swelling cynicism that rose in self protection in the community. Who would bother trusting politicians? Donald Pleasance's President John Harker is played with all the tight lipped narcissism that a post-Nixon chief might express. He is a weasel who knows how to be nice and for how long.

Kurt Russell is given Snake Plissken which allowed him a launch pad away from his child star status. His matchstick chewing, eye patched leathery hide feels effortlessly donned. His serpentine hissing intimidating. Remember how Heath Ledger went from nice guy with muscle to the most memorable Joker to date? Same thing. Russell turned up toned to the last millimetre with a lion's mane and way with heavy personal artillery. 

Against him, the grinning villain of countless spaghetti westerns, Lee Van Cleef presides over the operation without a beat's difference from those roles. Nor needs he to, Carpenter is happy to continue his exploration of the western through whatever other genre he chooses. The meeting between his Hauk and Plissken is one of those scenes you can replay like a favourite song.

On the island, The Duke of New York oversees. A granite Isaac Hayes, surrounded by Kinskyish punks and leering rags of humans, his chandelier-toting Cadillac proceeds through the streets like the entourage of a Byzantine monarch. Down at the trash fire street level, the information rich Cabbie and the slippery Brain deal with the day to day, offering essential services or knowledge in exchange for preservation. The world building with bizarre vaudeville shows and iron-age lethal sparring as well as gangs of the darkly insane in streets bright with car fires, is still impressive.

Carpenter, as usual, provides an action packed middle act that will lead to a white knuckle finale, this time careful to further expose the president and deliver a joke that works every time you see it again.

While it might get set up as a schlock bam bam movie, Escape From New York with its committed performances, commentary on the desperate unfairness of a brutal capitalism, ends up a wrenching and sincere gut punch at the worst Carpenter feared. It plays as a grim warning with its brooding score (one of Carpenter's very best) and desolate setting. The great city is a prison, the empire somewhere over there where you aren't allowed. We didn't get any of this by 1997 but we never have to. All we need to do is know that this is something we don't want now or ever. But we have to remember that.

Review: NOUVELLE VAGUE

Paris 1959 and a group of young filmmakers is getting its moves in front of crowds who are lapping it up. All but Jean Luc Godard who has yet to make a feature. The group is called Nouvelle Vague or New Wave (literal translation) and they are already known for stretching the tenets of mainstream cinema. All but Jean Luc who, as a prominent film critic, is now ready to make his own movies. Banging together cast crew, funding and a notebook full of ideas, he makes A bout de souffle or Breathless which becomes one of the most influential films of its time and beyond.

So we get hustling, manipulating, scheming and a lot of philosophising as the project takes shape with rising stars and one bona fide Hollywood actress, a script by established Nouvelle Vaguer Francois Truffaut, and funding enough for a tight  ninety minute thriller. But from Jour Un, Jean Luc has other plans which are a mix of get the basic thing done and do what he feels like at the time. But is the auteurism he's been promoting in his journalism a real thing or just ego? Is his dismissive treatment of the creative input of Jean Seberg just more old guard or genuinely sup par to the genius of Godard?

There are many more talking points and your answers will vary depending on your knowledge of this cine-history and how you consider the portrayal of the characters (particularly Godard and Seberg). This loving and brassy tribute to the film and what it did to the spirit of the Nouvelle Vague will either engage you consistently or leave you wondering why anyone cared, now or then. 

Indy Royalty Richard Linklater, himself the author of audacious films among the more conventional, clearly elevates Godard as a figure. If anything, it's the figure rather than the person flailing at that eminence. So much of Godard's dialogue feels drawn from his writing or interviews. The former is the more fiery and the latter more caged and difficult. Jean Luc Godard really did make a banged-out noir in Breathless and he realy did subvert it with jump cuts and subversions of convention and when you see it for the first time you well might marvel at seeing tropes for the first time they happened on screen. The movie is the work of a concentrated mind who carried his practice with discipline. The whimsical contrarian we see here is more a wich fulfilment than a figure from history.

But that's not a problem when you pit Linklater's own practice against Godard's and understand the strength of the umbillical at play. Linklater's movies don't really resemble Godard's but there is a clear likeness in the certainty behind them. For all the seeming formlessness of films like Slacker or Dazed and Confused, the sprightly invention of the Before series or Waking Life, he is more contemporary and more American. His tribute is not a thanks for technique but pluck and resolve.

I did appreciate the avoidance of a historical story that refused to shoehorn the names of famous people into the dialogue. When depictions appear, the actors characters are subtitled clearly for us to recall or forget according to what we will. I will admit that I thought Suzanne Schiffman was meant to be Anges Varda (the real instigator of the Nouvelle Vague, btw) but it's clear who is meant to be who. Some of the face casting for this is marvelous: the lookalikes for Truffaut, Bresson, and Cocteau are pretty fine. There is a coda about what they did next but this is more subdued than the usual where you might get images of the real people filling the screen, as though you can't Google them yourself. Better than that, I guess.

So, what do we have here? Linklater's celebration of cinema as blank screen for exploration could have chosen few equal or better examples of resroucefulness and innovation than this one. If he lets the notoriously difficult Godard off the hook by making him an agent of chaos as a kind of goofy ancestor he also suggests that the difficulty of making cinema has always been there and the few breaks for freedom are to be treasured then' "Bravo!"  But I wonder.

I wonder, for example, if this conscientiously 35mm film production might not have felt more suversive itself if it had been shot on UHD digital video. Godard sang the praises of the accessibility of the analogue video of the '70s and '80s. Losing the dress-up of film grain (and even black and white) might have made the tribute of it all the more sincere by that observation. 

Do we need more cinephiles praising Breathless? It's like the Unknown Pleasures T-shirt of the cinema world, the universal brand qualifier that those who touch it never need to experience for themselves. You want to really celebrate indy filmmaking and its impact on mainstream cinema? Tell the story of making Night of the Living Dead. A bunch of antsy advertisers cobbling a no budget game changer in defiance of their own lifestyle. It's less comfortable but it could hit home harder.

As an undergrad in the early '80s, I was as wowed as anyone by Godard. I smoked then, and more than I'd like to admit, smoked Gitanes or Gauloises if a shop offered them. I tired my coffee black (too young, didn't work) and foraged around for as much French as I'd forgotten from school. In perparing for seminar papers and essays on Godard, I would test my ideas with flow charts and once, delivering a seminar half joked by leaving out the second syllable of his surname. But Breathless, to me, once seen, felt like a fun first album in a career that, in its first decade, went rapidly from cute art house to violent, radical and anti-conventional. Those are the titles I think of first when thinking of Godard: Weekend, Tou va bien and, at the very top, the extended essay of life in consumerworld Two or Three Things I Know About Her. Breathless feels like a square in an old Valhalla calendar after them. And Godard (as admitted in the coda of this film) did not stop developing and confronting in the decades afterward.

But this is really beside the point. If you want to bring the kids to Shakespeare, find the easiest one and let them have at it. It took a little while after the advent of high quality home video on DVD for the Godard back catalogue to appear but it eventually recieved deluxe treatment and when I bought into that and watched them again I was again exilharated by what I saw and felt. So, ok then, 's a good film.