CONTAINS SPOILERS, SORT OF
Years ago I had hundreds of VHS tapes. Many precerts and ex-rentals, and some quite rare, but I eventually gave them away when I realised I wasn't ever going to watch them again. Only a few I kept back: Bruno Mattei's Rats: Night Of Terror because it was rather fun, the genuinely repulsive Nekromantik (which I won in a raffle at the Scala Cinema and Jorg Buttgereit autographed the sleeve), The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue, because it was my only actual video nasty. And this sort-of documentary about the psychological workings of horror movies that doesn't really work on that level as it has no depth or insight whatsoever (hey, as if I'm one to talk) but as nicely edited assemblage of great and awful horror movies from the 70s and 80s it's enormous fun. And it's also a fabulous trivia game of Name That Movie - shout out the title as you identify each clip. Which is tricky because some of them are only a couple of seconds long.
Terror In The Aisles has a genial Donald Pleasence and Nancy Allen sitting in a tatty grindhouse cinema in the middle of a pretty rowdy audience, putting forth various arguments and theories about different aspects of horror movies: wish fulfilment, the role of the villains, shock versus suspense, whether we invent fictional horrors to help us cope with the real ones. But while they're burbling merrily away I'm much more excited about the series of clips tumbling onto the screen - classic horror titles like Halloween, Alien, The Omen, Carrie, Psycho, Jaws, Rosemary's Baby and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, largely forgotten movies like Nightwing and Alone In The Dark (the Landau-Pleasence slasher, not the Uwe Boll nonsense), and films like Play Misty For Me, Vice Squad and Nighthawks which are either borderline genre movies or not genre movies at all.
Terror In The Aisles hasn't been released in this country since its 1987 video release, and indeed still isn't available. But, strangely, it's been included in its entirety as a bonus feature on the newest American BluRay of Halloween II (the Rick Rosenthal film, not the Rob Zombie atrocity) which is happily Region Free. And it looks fantastic in the proper widescreen ratio and 1080 definition rather than the 4:3 crop on a battered ex-rental VHS tape. And just as Not Quite Hollywood made me want to see some of its vintage Australian exploitation movies again, so Terror In The Aisles has made me want to see Nighthawks and Ms 45 again. And while I have spotted most of the film excerpted, I'm still not sure where Dawn Of The Dead shows up: Romero's zombie masterpiece and The Greatest Film Ever Made is included in the end credits copyright listing but despite having watched it many times over the years I've never spotted a single shot.
I love Terror In The Aisles for its editing together of wildly disparate movies (The Birds, Halloween, The Brood and Night Of The Living Dead all bolted together in one sequence) and its thundering John Beal score, which has become one of my favourite recent CD purchases although the music as heard in the film is even better. Granted it doesn't really delve into the deeper social relevance of horror cinema, and the comedy pop song tacked on the end doesn't feel appropriate even when playing against shots from horror comedies like Saturday The 14th (which is rubbish) and The Howling (which isn't). But it's great fun and I'm thrilled to finally have a more than decent copy of it.
****
Friday, 17 February 2012
Wednesday, 15 February 2012
THE WORLD IS FULL OF MARRIED MEN
PHWOOOAR, LOOK AT THE SPOILER WARNINGS ON THAT
Just a few weeks after they sent me the absolute nonsense of The Stud, another load of old toot from Jackie Collins clunks into my mailbox. Again it's an amusing time capsule of the fashions and attitudes of the late 1970s, backed mainly with pop and disco music, and again there's a raft of familiar TV and movie faces stumbling through the terrible dialogue and story. If there's much difference between this movie and The Stud (and I'm hoping The Bitch turns up in the post sometime soon as well), it's that this one focuses on a despicable man rather than a morally hollow woman - though The Stud is nominally about the Oliver Tobias' character, it's really Joan Collins' film.
The principal married man in The World Is Full Of Married Men (which is a pretty nonsensical title) is Anthony Franciosa, a monumental philandering douchebag who's at it like billyo with aspiring actress Sherrie Lee Cronn (in her only film role) but shocked when his neglected wife Carroll Baker starts a relationship with pop singer Paul Nicholas. As that marriage crumbles, Franciosa settles in with Cronn but she's too wild and about twenty years too young for him: he breaks that one off as well before moving into the Dorchester Hotel and bedding a string of young dolly birds only to find he can't get it up any more except with his mousy secretary. Meanwhile Cronn follows her dream of movie stardom via the casting couch only to find she's expected to participate in a lesbian tryst and then an orgy of strangers....
If The Stud was rubbish (and let's not pretend it wasn't), this is no better: it plays like a double episode of an old TV soap opera with more sex and is even more ridiculous: there's even that horrible old cliche of the frumpy secretary taking her glasses off, letting her hair down and becoming a hot little number, which only lacks the astonished line "Why, Miss Field, you're beautiful!" The movie also plays as a "men are bastards" screed (Franciosa's character is indisputably a bastard), and there's no shortage of the double standard where married men can sleep around but married women can't. Georgina Hale and Gareth Hunt are enjoyable supports, the tacky clothes and home furnishings are fun, and Sherrie Lee Cronn spends half her time in various states of nudity. But it's still not very much of a movie. Bonnie Tyler performs the theme song at the start.
**
Ludicrous:
Just a few weeks after they sent me the absolute nonsense of The Stud, another load of old toot from Jackie Collins clunks into my mailbox. Again it's an amusing time capsule of the fashions and attitudes of the late 1970s, backed mainly with pop and disco music, and again there's a raft of familiar TV and movie faces stumbling through the terrible dialogue and story. If there's much difference between this movie and The Stud (and I'm hoping The Bitch turns up in the post sometime soon as well), it's that this one focuses on a despicable man rather than a morally hollow woman - though The Stud is nominally about the Oliver Tobias' character, it's really Joan Collins' film.
The principal married man in The World Is Full Of Married Men (which is a pretty nonsensical title) is Anthony Franciosa, a monumental philandering douchebag who's at it like billyo with aspiring actress Sherrie Lee Cronn (in her only film role) but shocked when his neglected wife Carroll Baker starts a relationship with pop singer Paul Nicholas. As that marriage crumbles, Franciosa settles in with Cronn but she's too wild and about twenty years too young for him: he breaks that one off as well before moving into the Dorchester Hotel and bedding a string of young dolly birds only to find he can't get it up any more except with his mousy secretary. Meanwhile Cronn follows her dream of movie stardom via the casting couch only to find she's expected to participate in a lesbian tryst and then an orgy of strangers....
If The Stud was rubbish (and let's not pretend it wasn't), this is no better: it plays like a double episode of an old TV soap opera with more sex and is even more ridiculous: there's even that horrible old cliche of the frumpy secretary taking her glasses off, letting her hair down and becoming a hot little number, which only lacks the astonished line "Why, Miss Field, you're beautiful!" The movie also plays as a "men are bastards" screed (Franciosa's character is indisputably a bastard), and there's no shortage of the double standard where married men can sleep around but married women can't. Georgina Hale and Gareth Hunt are enjoyable supports, the tacky clothes and home furnishings are fun, and Sherrie Lee Cronn spends half her time in various states of nudity. But it's still not very much of a movie. Bonnie Tyler performs the theme song at the start.
**
Ludicrous:
Tuesday, 14 February 2012
THE POSSESSION OF JOEL DELANEY
CONTAINS SPOILERS AND WHUUU????!?!??!
There are several things to like about this film. It's got an interesting subtext about the widely differing lifestyles between rich and poor in the same city, it's a horror movie about possession, it's got severed heads, dismembered corpses, Michael Hordern as a therapist, the restless ghost of a serial killer, Puerto Rican exorcism rituals (the religion is apparently Santaria) and suggestions of incest; it stars Shirley MacLaine, incredibly, and it climaxes with a genuinely disturbing and distressing sequence of grotesque humiliations including and involving children, to such unsettling extent that you wonder how the hell the BBFC passed it - and at a lower rating than before! What was given a fat red X in 1971 (and the DVD nostalgically includes the BBFC's X card at the start) has now been downgraded to a mere 15 with "previous film cuts waived", yet I was honestly left wondering whether it should have been passed at all....
The Possession Of Joel Delaney has Perry King as Joel, a "freelance writer" who has chosen to live in poverty in a squalid little apartment in the Puerto Rican neighbourhood of New York. Yet his divorcee sister Norah (Shirley MacLaine) and her two young kids live in a swish and well-appointed house in the best area of the city. But Joel goes unaccountably mad and attacks his landlord one night - why? As Norah looks into it, she finds a connection between Joel and Tonio Perez, wanted by the police for three grisly ritual decapitations. Who can help her sort out Joel's mood swings and his increasingly erratic and upsetting behaviour?
There's certainly an enjoyably odd juxtaposition with the rich and fur-coated MacLaine stumbling around the poorest ghettos of the city: a world away yet just a taxi ride away. Hers is a well-heeled world: her friends are surgeons and therapists who go to the opera and throw elegant parties, while her own brother has elected to live in a tiny, cramped apartment because he finds the people fascinating. To her, the cultures and practices are entirely alien; when she attends an exorcism ritual we don't understand exactly what's going on any more than she does.
There are definite hints at some kind of creepy brother-sister attraction between Joel and Norah throughout. But the film is at its most problematic in the final reels, where Norah and the children have escaped the increasingly unhinged Joel to a beach house, but Joel has followed and terrorises all three of them with a switchblade. It's a genuinely distressing sequence in which Joel is no longer Joel, but the maniacal Tonio, and he is as loathsome and despicable as any of the home invasion scum of the Last House On The Left / Death Weekend genre, not just for his new-found (and debatably still incestuous) attitude to Norah as his savagery towards the children. It's a sequence that you just couldn't get away with today, no matter how artfully staged and edited.
Because the strongest and most upsetting moment here isn't when he forces Norah's daughter to eat dog food out of the bowl on the floor, nor even when her throat is very slightly cut with the knife - it comes when Joel forces Norah's young son - aged around ten - to strip naked and dance on a table; a sequence which includes frontal child nudity. How does this sequence not constitute "indecent images of a child"? That it's fleeting, and in a non-sexual context, or that it would have been difficult to edit around, shouldn't matter. It's easily the sourest note in the film, which is otherwise a pretty enjoyable and intriguing, if unsettling, curiosity with a nice ambiguity in the ending. A very cautious recommendation.
***
Perverts!:
There are several things to like about this film. It's got an interesting subtext about the widely differing lifestyles between rich and poor in the same city, it's a horror movie about possession, it's got severed heads, dismembered corpses, Michael Hordern as a therapist, the restless ghost of a serial killer, Puerto Rican exorcism rituals (the religion is apparently Santaria) and suggestions of incest; it stars Shirley MacLaine, incredibly, and it climaxes with a genuinely disturbing and distressing sequence of grotesque humiliations including and involving children, to such unsettling extent that you wonder how the hell the BBFC passed it - and at a lower rating than before! What was given a fat red X in 1971 (and the DVD nostalgically includes the BBFC's X card at the start) has now been downgraded to a mere 15 with "previous film cuts waived", yet I was honestly left wondering whether it should have been passed at all....
The Possession Of Joel Delaney has Perry King as Joel, a "freelance writer" who has chosen to live in poverty in a squalid little apartment in the Puerto Rican neighbourhood of New York. Yet his divorcee sister Norah (Shirley MacLaine) and her two young kids live in a swish and well-appointed house in the best area of the city. But Joel goes unaccountably mad and attacks his landlord one night - why? As Norah looks into it, she finds a connection between Joel and Tonio Perez, wanted by the police for three grisly ritual decapitations. Who can help her sort out Joel's mood swings and his increasingly erratic and upsetting behaviour?
There's certainly an enjoyably odd juxtaposition with the rich and fur-coated MacLaine stumbling around the poorest ghettos of the city: a world away yet just a taxi ride away. Hers is a well-heeled world: her friends are surgeons and therapists who go to the opera and throw elegant parties, while her own brother has elected to live in a tiny, cramped apartment because he finds the people fascinating. To her, the cultures and practices are entirely alien; when she attends an exorcism ritual we don't understand exactly what's going on any more than she does.
There are definite hints at some kind of creepy brother-sister attraction between Joel and Norah throughout. But the film is at its most problematic in the final reels, where Norah and the children have escaped the increasingly unhinged Joel to a beach house, but Joel has followed and terrorises all three of them with a switchblade. It's a genuinely distressing sequence in which Joel is no longer Joel, but the maniacal Tonio, and he is as loathsome and despicable as any of the home invasion scum of the Last House On The Left / Death Weekend genre, not just for his new-found (and debatably still incestuous) attitude to Norah as his savagery towards the children. It's a sequence that you just couldn't get away with today, no matter how artfully staged and edited.
Because the strongest and most upsetting moment here isn't when he forces Norah's daughter to eat dog food out of the bowl on the floor, nor even when her throat is very slightly cut with the knife - it comes when Joel forces Norah's young son - aged around ten - to strip naked and dance on a table; a sequence which includes frontal child nudity. How does this sequence not constitute "indecent images of a child"? That it's fleeting, and in a non-sexual context, or that it would have been difficult to edit around, shouldn't matter. It's easily the sourest note in the film, which is otherwise a pretty enjoyable and intriguing, if unsettling, curiosity with a nice ambiguity in the ending. A very cautious recommendation.
***
Perverts!:
DEADLIER THAN THE MALE / SOME GIRLS DO
CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS FOR BOTH
By 1966 the James Bond films had reached their fourth instalment, Thunderball, with the fifth on the way, and the genre was already rife with spoofery, ripoff, pastiche and parody. From Hollywood there were the Matt Helms, the Man from UNCLEs and the two Flint movies; the French and Italians and apparently even the Danes had riffed on the formula (though sadly many of the European variants aren't easily available on UK DVDs). And we Brits were spoofing them ourselves: someone disinterred the Bulldog Drummond for this double-bill of outlandish pseudo-Bond nonsense. That Drummond originally dated from the 1920s in both novel and silent film didn't really matter.
Neither film is particularly great, but they are both colourful and ridiculous pantomimes in which the urbane and unflappable Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond (Richard Johnson) takes on fiendish but elegant criminal mastermind Carl Peterson (Nigel Green in the first, then James Villiers). Deadlier Than The Male is probably the better of the two films, in which Peterson schemes to assassinate an Arabian prince to gain hugely lucrative oil revenues, while Some Girls Do is easily the sillier. Peterson now has his eye on a supersonic weapon with which he can take over the world (or something). To be honest, neither film makes a huge amount of sense on a plot level.
Both movies feature, as spy movies in the 1960s were wont to do, an array of glamorous dolly birds either as killers, agents, or (in the second film) robots. It might have been acceptable then but it dates the movies quite severely; it would now be seen as hideously sexist now and you just couldn't get away with it. More exciting is the strong supporting casts of character actors: Leonard Rossiter, Laurence Naismith, Elke Sommer in the first, Robert Morley, Maurice Denham, Yutte Stensgaard and an uncredited Joanna Lumley in the second.
And on the level of daft spy comedies they're decent enough; although neither are particularly funny they're still fun: they rattle along quite decently along the lines of a Golden Age Avengers episode. Richard Johnson was supposedly offered the role of James Bond and turned it down, but he's very Bondian here (obviously, as a gorehound, I know him best from Zombie Flesh Eaters) and although I can't imagine anyone but Connery in those first five 007 movies it might have been interesting to have seen what he'd have made of them (he would probably have made a better Bond than Lazenby did). Both of these Drummond movies are worth a look for an evening's old-fashioned amusement and bemusement; neither are any kind of lost masterpiece or neglected classic but there's some slightly off-kilter entertainment to be had.
***
***
Get them here:
By 1966 the James Bond films had reached their fourth instalment, Thunderball, with the fifth on the way, and the genre was already rife with spoofery, ripoff, pastiche and parody. From Hollywood there were the Matt Helms, the Man from UNCLEs and the two Flint movies; the French and Italians and apparently even the Danes had riffed on the formula (though sadly many of the European variants aren't easily available on UK DVDs). And we Brits were spoofing them ourselves: someone disinterred the Bulldog Drummond for this double-bill of outlandish pseudo-Bond nonsense. That Drummond originally dated from the 1920s in both novel and silent film didn't really matter.
Neither film is particularly great, but they are both colourful and ridiculous pantomimes in which the urbane and unflappable Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond (Richard Johnson) takes on fiendish but elegant criminal mastermind Carl Peterson (Nigel Green in the first, then James Villiers). Deadlier Than The Male is probably the better of the two films, in which Peterson schemes to assassinate an Arabian prince to gain hugely lucrative oil revenues, while Some Girls Do is easily the sillier. Peterson now has his eye on a supersonic weapon with which he can take over the world (or something). To be honest, neither film makes a huge amount of sense on a plot level.
Both movies feature, as spy movies in the 1960s were wont to do, an array of glamorous dolly birds either as killers, agents, or (in the second film) robots. It might have been acceptable then but it dates the movies quite severely; it would now be seen as hideously sexist now and you just couldn't get away with it. More exciting is the strong supporting casts of character actors: Leonard Rossiter, Laurence Naismith, Elke Sommer in the first, Robert Morley, Maurice Denham, Yutte Stensgaard and an uncredited Joanna Lumley in the second.
And on the level of daft spy comedies they're decent enough; although neither are particularly funny they're still fun: they rattle along quite decently along the lines of a Golden Age Avengers episode. Richard Johnson was supposedly offered the role of James Bond and turned it down, but he's very Bondian here (obviously, as a gorehound, I know him best from Zombie Flesh Eaters) and although I can't imagine anyone but Connery in those first five 007 movies it might have been interesting to have seen what he'd have made of them (he would probably have made a better Bond than Lazenby did). Both of these Drummond movies are worth a look for an evening's old-fashioned amusement and bemusement; neither are any kind of lost masterpiece or neglected classic but there's some slightly off-kilter entertainment to be had.
***
***
Get them here:
Monday, 13 February 2012
THE WOMAN IN BLACK
CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS
Well, it's about time. The relaunched Hammer has finally pulled it together and done what they're supposed to do - classy Gothic horror movies. After the tiresome MySpace serial Beyond The Rave, the pointless slasher The Resident, the unwarranted but handsome remake Let Me In (which I liked, but it's a Hammer Film in exactly the way the Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach is a Warner Brothers Film; the branding is meaningless) and the unsuccessful Wake Wood (which doesn't even have the Hammer name anywhere on the film), they've gone back to well-known literary roots, a period setting, splendid production design and actual scares.
Aspiring lawyer Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) has been dispatched to the remote coastal village of Crythin Gifford to sort out the paperwork for a recently deceased client's estate: specifically the gloomy and crumbling mansion Eel Marsh House built so far across the sands that it is cut off at high tide. Why are the locals so unfriendly and unwelcoming? Why does the village solicitor refuse point blank to assist? Why will no-one venture out to the house? The local lore of The Woman In Black, that's why: a vengeful spectre whose every appearance is said to presage a death in the village...and Kipps' presence is disturbing her.
In Hammer terms, Eel Marsh House is basically Castle Dracula and Crythin Gifford is full of the scared peasants who won't take Van Helsing up the mountain at night (you do almost expect Michael Ripper to turn up as the innkeeper). The House itself, a dark, fog-shrouded monstrosity that no sane person would ever set foot in, is a magnificent piece of set design that quite honestly could not be more naturally terrifying - gravestones in the grounds, creaking doors, an array of clockwork toys that are disturbing enough before they switch on by themselves, a rocking chair that rocks while empty. And that's before the Woman In Black herself: genuinely scary whether seen blurred in the background or barrelling straight towards the camera.
There are some comfortably familiar faces including Ciaran Hinds, Janet McTeer and Roger Allam, to add some colour around a fairly bland central character (which is often the way - the leads tend to be less interesting than the supports). In this regard Daniel Radcliffe is probably the weak link as he has yet to break clean away from being Harry Potter. Certainly he's good enough that you don't ever expect him to whip out a wand, but he needs to do several other significantly different roles to get away from that most famous millstone role (and probably the same thing will hold for the other Potterites, as well as Twilighters Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner). Most likely he will, but it'll take time.
It's scary, it's creepy, it's doom-laden and morbid, and it's precisely the kind of film Hammer should be making: period British Gothic horror. And I jumped at all the right moments and covered my eyes throughout to the extent that I query the BBFC's 12A rating. Six seconds were cut and some shots were visually or aurally toned down, which means the finished film is a very strong 12A rather than a borderline 15, but the released version still pretty intense and as a grown adult I honestly felt it was still too strong, and 15 is still the appropriate certificate. 12A allows idiot parents to bring seven-year-olds in because it's got Harry Potter in it and it really isn't suitable for them. But for horror fans, it's a creepy, unsettling treat, firmly in the tradition of British ghost stories (coming a few months after The Awakening, is it too much to hope for a full-blown renaissance of the genre?) and thrilling to see in an era of remakes, sequels and reboots. Go and see it.
****
Well, it's about time. The relaunched Hammer has finally pulled it together and done what they're supposed to do - classy Gothic horror movies. After the tiresome MySpace serial Beyond The Rave, the pointless slasher The Resident, the unwarranted but handsome remake Let Me In (which I liked, but it's a Hammer Film in exactly the way the Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach is a Warner Brothers Film; the branding is meaningless) and the unsuccessful Wake Wood (which doesn't even have the Hammer name anywhere on the film), they've gone back to well-known literary roots, a period setting, splendid production design and actual scares.
Aspiring lawyer Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) has been dispatched to the remote coastal village of Crythin Gifford to sort out the paperwork for a recently deceased client's estate: specifically the gloomy and crumbling mansion Eel Marsh House built so far across the sands that it is cut off at high tide. Why are the locals so unfriendly and unwelcoming? Why does the village solicitor refuse point blank to assist? Why will no-one venture out to the house? The local lore of The Woman In Black, that's why: a vengeful spectre whose every appearance is said to presage a death in the village...and Kipps' presence is disturbing her.
In Hammer terms, Eel Marsh House is basically Castle Dracula and Crythin Gifford is full of the scared peasants who won't take Van Helsing up the mountain at night (you do almost expect Michael Ripper to turn up as the innkeeper). The House itself, a dark, fog-shrouded monstrosity that no sane person would ever set foot in, is a magnificent piece of set design that quite honestly could not be more naturally terrifying - gravestones in the grounds, creaking doors, an array of clockwork toys that are disturbing enough before they switch on by themselves, a rocking chair that rocks while empty. And that's before the Woman In Black herself: genuinely scary whether seen blurred in the background or barrelling straight towards the camera.
There are some comfortably familiar faces including Ciaran Hinds, Janet McTeer and Roger Allam, to add some colour around a fairly bland central character (which is often the way - the leads tend to be less interesting than the supports). In this regard Daniel Radcliffe is probably the weak link as he has yet to break clean away from being Harry Potter. Certainly he's good enough that you don't ever expect him to whip out a wand, but he needs to do several other significantly different roles to get away from that most famous millstone role (and probably the same thing will hold for the other Potterites, as well as Twilighters Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner). Most likely he will, but it'll take time.
It's scary, it's creepy, it's doom-laden and morbid, and it's precisely the kind of film Hammer should be making: period British Gothic horror. And I jumped at all the right moments and covered my eyes throughout to the extent that I query the BBFC's 12A rating. Six seconds were cut and some shots were visually or aurally toned down, which means the finished film is a very strong 12A rather than a borderline 15, but the released version still pretty intense and as a grown adult I honestly felt it was still too strong, and 15 is still the appropriate certificate. 12A allows idiot parents to bring seven-year-olds in because it's got Harry Potter in it and it really isn't suitable for them. But for horror fans, it's a creepy, unsettling treat, firmly in the tradition of British ghost stories (coming a few months after The Awakening, is it too much to hope for a full-blown renaissance of the genre?) and thrilling to see in an era of remakes, sequels and reboots. Go and see it.
****
Thursday, 9 February 2012
MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE
SPOILERS SPORTSWEAR SPAGHETTI SPOON
Oh dear. I wanted to like it so much. It's another potentially fascinating film that ends up as an unfulfilled and unfulfilling piece of work: an interesting subject, a really nice atmosphere, the grains of an intriguing and involving story, but it consistently annoys in the manner of its telling, and the absurd refusal to resolve it. The film has been getting pretty good reviews, and yet again I just don't get it. I'm thrilled that niche audience movies are getting released to multiplexes, albeit only the biggest with enough screens, but for all the nicely ragged indie feel, it's on story that the film falls down: more than once I momentarily lost track of whether I was in present or flashback, and there's no proper ending as the narrative just stops. Some might argue that the main character's mental state is what it's about, rather than whether the bad guys will catch up with her or not, but it merely feels there's a couple of scenes missing before the end credits.
Martha Marcy May Marlene tells of Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), who flees a rural, apparently idyllic but somewhat Mansonian commune and ends up with her older sister (Sarah Paulson) and her husband at their lakeside Connecticut holiday home. Through a string of flashbacks we learn something of what went on back at the commune, how it wasn't the simple and uncomplicated alternative to capitalism and greed as it first appeared, and something (though infuriatingly not all) of why she ran away. But can she ever reconnect with the "normal" world, and confront what actually happened to her back under the less than benevolent eye of Patrick (John Hawkes)?
The truth of what went on at the commune is pretty horrible, moreso given the level of Martha's complicity. Renamed Marcy May (everyone in the commune is renamed for some reason - it's never explained but I suppose there was a rationale behind it), she goes along with the criminal activities as well as the more unpleasant sexual practices, principally Patrick's so-called ritual of cleansing. And ultimately two years of living with this twisted set of values has left her unable to properly engage with people outside. Do they want her back? Are they planning to abduct her back to her new "family"?
The film certainly seems to suggest so: in its latter stages Martha believes she recognises someone - but does she? - and in its final moments there's some business with a car following her, but the film frustratingly cuts off at the second we find out, leaving the story unfinished. Which means all the good work up to that point is largely thrown away. And it is good work: the film looks terrific, with a lovely low-budget indie feel about it, there's no issue with the performances; it's simply down to the fact that writer-director Sean Durkin either didn't know how to conclude the film, or deliberately chose not to. By all means make films which raise questions with the audience, but one of the questions shouldn't be "And then what happened?"
***
Oh dear. I wanted to like it so much. It's another potentially fascinating film that ends up as an unfulfilled and unfulfilling piece of work: an interesting subject, a really nice atmosphere, the grains of an intriguing and involving story, but it consistently annoys in the manner of its telling, and the absurd refusal to resolve it. The film has been getting pretty good reviews, and yet again I just don't get it. I'm thrilled that niche audience movies are getting released to multiplexes, albeit only the biggest with enough screens, but for all the nicely ragged indie feel, it's on story that the film falls down: more than once I momentarily lost track of whether I was in present or flashback, and there's no proper ending as the narrative just stops. Some might argue that the main character's mental state is what it's about, rather than whether the bad guys will catch up with her or not, but it merely feels there's a couple of scenes missing before the end credits.
Martha Marcy May Marlene tells of Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), who flees a rural, apparently idyllic but somewhat Mansonian commune and ends up with her older sister (Sarah Paulson) and her husband at their lakeside Connecticut holiday home. Through a string of flashbacks we learn something of what went on back at the commune, how it wasn't the simple and uncomplicated alternative to capitalism and greed as it first appeared, and something (though infuriatingly not all) of why she ran away. But can she ever reconnect with the "normal" world, and confront what actually happened to her back under the less than benevolent eye of Patrick (John Hawkes)?
The truth of what went on at the commune is pretty horrible, moreso given the level of Martha's complicity. Renamed Marcy May (everyone in the commune is renamed for some reason - it's never explained but I suppose there was a rationale behind it), she goes along with the criminal activities as well as the more unpleasant sexual practices, principally Patrick's so-called ritual of cleansing. And ultimately two years of living with this twisted set of values has left her unable to properly engage with people outside. Do they want her back? Are they planning to abduct her back to her new "family"?
The film certainly seems to suggest so: in its latter stages Martha believes she recognises someone - but does she? - and in its final moments there's some business with a car following her, but the film frustratingly cuts off at the second we find out, leaving the story unfinished. Which means all the good work up to that point is largely thrown away. And it is good work: the film looks terrific, with a lovely low-budget indie feel about it, there's no issue with the performances; it's simply down to the fact that writer-director Sean Durkin either didn't know how to conclude the film, or deliberately chose not to. By all means make films which raise questions with the audience, but one of the questions shouldn't be "And then what happened?"
***
Monday, 6 February 2012
MAN ON A LEDGE
CONTAINS MAJOR PLOT SPOILERS.......SPLAT
If you're not a fan of lengthy shots pointing straight down at the tarmac from a great height then this breathtakingly silly thriller probably isn't for you. If you get dizzy and have to grip the armrests every time it looks like someone's going to fall a long way into the cold hard concrete, then you really should go and see something else. For my part I was laughing too much as it's such an absurd and overly convoluted plot that the best thing to do while watching it is not to sit and analyse it, but just to go along with it. Because while it may smash the implausibility light barrier into a thousand pieces, it's a hell of a lot of fun (unless you are actually a confirmed vertigo sufferer).
The key to Man On A Ledge is in the title: a man (Sam Worthington) checks into the 21st floor of a plush New York hotel, and promptly climbs out of the window onto the foot-wide ledge. Turns out he's an ex-cop AND an escaped convict, inside for a $40 million jewel heist, but having fled a month ago while on temporary release for his father's funeral. Somewhat inevitably, crowds gather outside the hotel, traffic is blocked off, the police are called in: and crucially attention is diverted away from what's going on inside the Englander Corporation just across the road, where evil Ed Harris is masterminding a huge property deal....
Maybe that's too much of a spoiler: the tagline on the UK poster is "The Ultimate Deception Needs The Ultimate Distraction" but it would probably be better if we didn't know going in that it was a distraction. Nevertheless the movie still springs a few decent surprises, although some of the details of the plan (particularly one involving a skateboard) would be thought too silly in the realm of a Mission Impossible film. But the film's highlights are the high-up hijinks on ledges and rooftops, culminating in the ridiculous final stunt, at which point I think I did grab the armrest (something I don't believe I can remember doing since the opening reel of Cliffhanger).
Man On A Ledge is probably too silly and unbelievable to be taken seriously, but as a dumb popcorn action thriller it's a lot of fun and well worth a look. It's got a decent cast: Elizabeth Banks, Ed Burns, Jamie Bell, William Sadler (who I'm shocked and ashamed to say I didn't even recognise!), it's efficiently done and the don't-look-down ledge sequences, particularly a moment with a helicopter, are enormously effective. Little to think about, but very enjoyable.
***
If you're not a fan of lengthy shots pointing straight down at the tarmac from a great height then this breathtakingly silly thriller probably isn't for you. If you get dizzy and have to grip the armrests every time it looks like someone's going to fall a long way into the cold hard concrete, then you really should go and see something else. For my part I was laughing too much as it's such an absurd and overly convoluted plot that the best thing to do while watching it is not to sit and analyse it, but just to go along with it. Because while it may smash the implausibility light barrier into a thousand pieces, it's a hell of a lot of fun (unless you are actually a confirmed vertigo sufferer).
The key to Man On A Ledge is in the title: a man (Sam Worthington) checks into the 21st floor of a plush New York hotel, and promptly climbs out of the window onto the foot-wide ledge. Turns out he's an ex-cop AND an escaped convict, inside for a $40 million jewel heist, but having fled a month ago while on temporary release for his father's funeral. Somewhat inevitably, crowds gather outside the hotel, traffic is blocked off, the police are called in: and crucially attention is diverted away from what's going on inside the Englander Corporation just across the road, where evil Ed Harris is masterminding a huge property deal....
Maybe that's too much of a spoiler: the tagline on the UK poster is "The Ultimate Deception Needs The Ultimate Distraction" but it would probably be better if we didn't know going in that it was a distraction. Nevertheless the movie still springs a few decent surprises, although some of the details of the plan (particularly one involving a skateboard) would be thought too silly in the realm of a Mission Impossible film. But the film's highlights are the high-up hijinks on ledges and rooftops, culminating in the ridiculous final stunt, at which point I think I did grab the armrest (something I don't believe I can remember doing since the opening reel of Cliffhanger).
Man On A Ledge is probably too silly and unbelievable to be taken seriously, but as a dumb popcorn action thriller it's a lot of fun and well worth a look. It's got a decent cast: Elizabeth Banks, Ed Burns, Jamie Bell, William Sadler (who I'm shocked and ashamed to say I didn't even recognise!), it's efficiently done and the don't-look-down ledge sequences, particularly a moment with a helicopter, are enormously effective. Little to think about, but very enjoyable.
***
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