EXPEND4BLES

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Another entry in the annoying trend of alphanumeric movie titles: what's wrong with The Expendables 4? Or Part IV if you want to look a bit more intellectual? Expend4bles is a ridiculous title: you can't say it, most people are just going to ask for Expendables (as with whatever Fast And Furious, Mission Impossible or Scream is out that week) anyway, and it looks stupid written in lower case since the 4 only looks (vaguely) like a capital A. Sadly the dumb password-style title is far from the worst thing about this plodding, uninteresting shoot-em-up that's got not one but two ridiculously obvious plot twists that a blind man on a galloping horse could spot within three frames without even trying.

We start in Libya, where Stallone, Statham, Lundgren and a couple of other Surnames have been assigned to retrieve some nuclear detonators that must not fall into the hands of a mysterious supervillain codenamed Ocelot. (Presumably Tiger, Puma and Snow Leopard were already taken and no-one wanted to be codenamed Colocolo or Margay.) Things go bad, everyone fires machine guns and missiles at each other and Stallone's plane explodes and crashes. Time for what's left of the Expendables to saddle up, retrieve the detonators, unmask Ocelot and get revenge for kabooming their friend and leader out of the sky...

And with Statham kicked out of the squad for disobeying orders, they need some new blood in there. Step forward Megan Fox, still probably best known as the nice-girl-next-door/hot chick bending over a motorcycle in slow motion in the first two Transformers movies. It's perhaps a sign of the times that Stallone is 77 and is allowed, indeed expected, to look it, while Megan Fox is a full forty years younger and is forbidden from looking it because what kind of audience would ever want to watch a 37-year-old woman in an action movie? Eww. One hesitates to sound ungallant, but she used to be perfectly pretty and what the hell happened? Was there a fire? In her defence, however, it's impossible to believe anything that she says or does as it's so clunkily written and no-one on Earth could get away with the hardass bantz they're all lumbered with this time out. Previous instalments have at least been kind of funny with this, and Statham's and Dwayne Johnson's alpha male bickering in Fast And Furious: Hobbs And Shaw was hilarious, but it absolutely falls stone dead here.

More serious, however, is the appalling CGI slathered over too much of the film, rendering a lot of the action as little more than a cartoon. How many more times: I'll be far happier with one exploding helicopter done for real than a hundred exploding helicopters rendered on an Xbox. It's a pity because when it gets down to people kicking and punching each other in the head, old-school, The Expendables 4 is perfectly acceptable popcorn knockabout and The Stath is always good value when knocking bad guys into next week. But then everything's suddenly CGId into cartoon nonsense again and it loses what little substance it had; you might as well be watching Shrek. Armies of anonymous goons get mown down with machine guns, tanks and jeeps and planes get blown up: none of it is even slightly interesting because clearly none of it is real and none of it exists, and none of it means anything. Expend4bles has four producers, three co-producers, six co-executive producers and twenty-one executive producers, and one has to wonder what the hell they did all day. Because outside of a couple of nicely crunchy fight scenes, this is 4bsolutely 4wful.

*

A HAUNTING IN VENICE

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS AND A SENSE OF RELIEF

The first thing to say about this third outing for Kenneth Branagh's incarnation of Hercule Poirot is that it's easily the best of them so far. Murder On The Orient Express and Death On The Nile were both saddled with, and suffered from, the inevitable comparisons with the earlier Brabourne-Goodwin film versions, which have since become much-loved classics along with Evil Under The Sun and, to a lesser extent, The Mirror Crack'd, thanks to the sense of fun, glamour, crafty plotting and casts heaving with Hollywood legends from Bette Davis to Sean Connery, Elizabeth Taylor to James Mason. (Let's draw a discreet veil over Michael Winner's later Appointment With Death.) I was massively relieved when, having done two of the Brabourne-Goodwins, Branagh elected not to tackle Evil Under The Sun as I have a lot of love for that film: the first VHS tape we rented and a long-standing family favourite (and the Cole Porter-adapted soundtrack is glorious).

A Haunting In Venice, nominally based on Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party, is more able to stand on its own terms, partly because the only other adaptation is the ITV version with David Suchet, and partly because it has very little to do with the book anyway. In a sense they've Moonrakered it: kept some of the character names, thrown the rest of the source novel away and fashioned an entirely new story (Hallowe'en Party is another English village mystery). Poirot is now a retired recluse living in Venice, weary of death and murder and refusing to take any more cases. Until his old friend, mystery writer Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), turns up and convinces him to attend a Hallowe'en seance at an enormous palazzo rumoured to be haunted... Murder, obviously, ensues.

With its ominous, dimly-lit, creepy old house, its array of shifty and secretive characters, its jump moments, and occasional hints towards the supernatural, plus a vivid thunderstorm, much of A Haunting In Venice plays less as elegant whodunnit and more as full-blooded gothic horror (a genre in which Branagh has form, with his Frankenstein, and the much underappreciated Dead Again), possibly even bordering on giallo. Ultimately, though, it is a whodunnit and it requires the traditional unmasking which, as usual, fooled me completely: I had no idea who the killer was though to be honest I was having too much macabre fun to sift through the clues and work it out for myself.

Perversely perhaps, the relative absence of an Oscar-laden megastar cast of familiar faces worked to its advantage. But it wouldn't be a Poirot without an unmasking and the villain here is Hildur Gundadottir, who has given the film an inexplicably miserable sawing-a-cello-in-half score that absolutely fails to enhance the film (and is a frankly dreary listen on its own). Branagh's regular composer Patrick Doyle would have given it some full-blooded energy, but he had to pass as he was working on a Coronation March at the time. But given that they were in Venice anyway, why didn't they just go round to Pino Donaggio's place? At least that would have made up for his Ordeal By Innocence score being rejected back in 1984 in favour of Dave Brubeck honkings! Gudnadottir's joyless dirges do nothing to assist in the drama, the mystery or the horror and form the one major flaw in an otherwise mostly successful movie. While it's never going to supplant the colourful romp of Evil Under The Sun as a favourite Christie adaptation, it's the best of Branagh's - even the moustache isn't a distraction this time out - and a fourth or even fifth trip to the Poirot well would be most welcome.

****

THE EXORCIST

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS, IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY SEEN IT BY NOW

Is this, as Dr Mark Kermode would have you believe, The Greatest Film Ever Made? Certainly it's a film that's earned its legendary, even iconic status, certainly it's a film that has the power to shock, upset and disturb in a way that few others have achieved, certainly it's a film that pushed the limits then and still pushes them now. Books and documentaries have been written and made about it (not least by Dr K himself), we've had sequels of varying quality, a stage adaptation, a TV series and an upcoming addition to the series later this year. Its impact and reputation are undenied. But is it The Greatest Film Ever Made? No, I really don't think it is.

I first saw The Exorcist sometime in the mid 1980s on its pre-cert VHS release (though after the film had been officially withdrawn, and thus unofficially banned, under the Video Recordings Act) and I do recall that I was shocked, upset and disturbed as intended. Oddly, I was far more disturbed by the book, which I couldn't finish and eventually had to throw away, possibly putting on rubber gloves to pick it up and carry it out, at arm's length, to the wheelie bin. Years later I finally worked up the courage to see it again, this time at the Cannon Cinema in Portsmouth on  November 10, 1990, on a late double-bill with Exorcist II: The Heretic. The experience was marred by a very battered and scratched print, and by a large number of hooting idiots just out of the pubs, but the scares and primal unsettling power still shone through. (At least until they were substantially dissipated by the Still A Bit Rubbish But Really Not As Bad As You've Heard Exorcist II.) And since then I've managed to avoid it... until FrightFest commemorated the fiftieth (!) anniversary by showing The Version You've Never Seen on the IMAX screen, prior to a theatrical re-issue and a 4K home release.

It's still good, sure. But it didn't leave me as shaken this time: that which upset and unsettled me back in the 80s and 90s just didn't upset and unsettle me to that extent in 2023. I didn't need a light left on all night, and I didn't have any trouble sleeping. Maybe that's because in the myriad possession and exorcism movies since then we've become much more used to the levitating and the shaking beds, the grisly make-up effects and growled obscenities, that what was once the ultimate in unimaginable and unspeakable horror simply doesn't feel that raw and shocking any more. Just as a rewatch of the original Star Wars, after forty years of sequels, spinoffs and countless other space adventures, doesn't have the gosh-wow sense of wonder it did back then, so it's perhaps hard to see The Exorcist with fresh eyes in the wake of however many demons, succubi and vomiting innocents we've waded through, from the video shop shelves to the lower tiers of Amazon Prime.

That's not to suggest the visceral horror of Dick Smith's alarming effects doesn't still punch you in the gut, or the sight and sound of a pre-teen girl contorting and blaspheming isn't still deeply uncomfortable. As a horror movie it is still of the top confrontational rank, though it probably plays better and more frighteningly in The Version You've Seen Loads Of Times, substantially shorter and missing several scenes more concerned with character-based drama. In this extended cut, the horror feels less relentless, with those additional scenes spacing out the shock moments and giving the audience time to calm down before the next onslaught. Maybe I need to rewatch the shorter version to compare for sure, but frankly I'm too scared to try it as I live on my own. It's still good, but it's not as scary as it was and it's absolutely not, not, not the Greatest Film Ever Made.

***

THAT'S A WRAP

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS

There's little to say, and even less that's positive, about this cheap, ugly slasher movie about cheap, ugly slasher movies. Who is hacking their way through the cast of a Z-grade horror movie at the miserable wrap party, dressed up as their own film's masked and bewigged killer? You won't care even before the entirely gratuitous nude shower scene that's only there out of sheer desperation, nostalgia for the days when you could do that kind of thing unironically, and the brainwave that it's somehow still a great idea to "hommage" Psycho yet again (and believe me, the quotation marks around the word "hommage" are doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting). You won't care even when they wheel on an equally gratuitous gay sex scene that really is only there because someone thought they're really pushing the boundaries and being incredibly progressive. (Hint: they're not.) And you certainly won't care at the big reveal and villainous monologue which, even by rubbish slasher movie standards, wouldn't be remotely plausible even if it made any sense at all. Minor trivialities like halfway decent acting and a halfway decent script aren't so much absent without leave as heading for the border in a stolen car as fast as they can, and it's impossible to tell whether it's a genuinely rubbish slasher or a failed spoof of same. Not even acceptable as a six-pack Friday night quickie.

*

THE BLACK MASS

CONTAINS NO REAL SPOILERS

Maybe I'm just weird, but I genuinely don't understand the fascination with true crime. There seems to be something ghoulish about forensically poring over the tiniest details of brutal, pointless murders carried out by brutal, pointless men, as if there's still something to be gleaned from exhuming these horrors yet again. If you were law enforcement, if you were personally connected to the case, if you were a specialist in that kind of psychopathic or sociopathic behaviour, then possibly there's some legitimate justification for diving deep into the ghastly stories of these ghastly people. But for a film?

The Black Mass is yet another Ted Bundy movie, focussing on one single period in 1978 in Florida as he stakes out a sorority house, eventually succeeding in getting in and savagely attacking the young women living there. Though the names (except for his) have been changed, it's still hewing uncomfortably close to known fact - at least according to his extensive Wikipedia page - with date and time captions coming up at every scene change in an authoritative typewriter font. 

On a technical level it's perfectly well done: a misty late 70s ambience, with all the right hairstyles and costumes and no massive anachronisms, and a few familiar genre names in the cast (Lisa Wilcox from a couple of Elm Street sequels, Kathleen Kinmont from Bride Of ReAnimator, Eileen Dietz from The Exorcist). Bundy himself is almost never offscreen, with the camera giving us a scumbag's-eye-view, hovering over his shoulder pretty much the entire time (very rarely is he actually seen in full focus) as he plans and schemes and tries to pick up women in what must, even then, have been an appallingly red-flag creepy manner.

But the problem isn't that The Black Mass is yet another Ted Bundy movie, it's that it's just another Ted Bundy movie. It's not that it's raking over the real deaths and real suffering of real people, it's that that's all the film is doing. No new information is available, no new insight is forthcoming. This is just restaging the cold-blooded assaults on young women: pass the popcorn. The Black Mass could have bypassed all that by simply making everything up and inventing their own fictional serial killer: it's not as if audiences won't enjoy a Hannibal Lecter or a Michael Myers, and personally I'm rarely happier than during a Saw marathon because They're Not Real. But, as with Mansonsploitation movies like Wolves At The Door, if you're telling a true story you have a responsibility to the victims and on that level, this film doesn't make it. And I hated it for that.

*