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Reviews
Hero and the Terror (1988)
Missing the Action
A seemingly deliberate change of pace for Chuck, following the cartoonish heroics of his mid and late 80´s vehicles like Lone Wolf McQuade (1983) or Invasion USA (1985), this mostly by-the-numbers cop thriller is mostly notable for the apparent determination of its main star to play firmly against his own macho image, and deliver a lead performance more marked by vulnerability and sentiment than acrobatic spin-kicks (although those still make an appearance), along with the visible conflict with the film´s generic formula this wish creates.
Perhaps aiming to follow his 80´s action counterparts Stallone and Schwarzenegger into lighter, more thoughtful roles as his career and body aged, Chuck here offers a portrayal of a stoically humble (whilst still Corvette-driving), soft-spoken and self-effacing LA detective, made famous for his apprehension of animalistic serial killer Simon Moon (the eponymous "Terror" of the film´s gaudy title) and dubbed "Hero" for his actions by an euphoric media, a handle he chafes at given his own near-death at the sizable mitts of Moon (a voiceless Jack O´Halloran). When Moon escapes captivity and new victims bearing his trademarks (snapped neck, partial undressing) begin cropping up in LA, this Hero must face his large lumbering demons and track down the seemingly motiveless juggernaut that is his nemesis the Terror.
Methodically paced, shot with a flat televisual look and peopled with regular 80´s TV character actors, the film has a noticeable Movie of the Week flavor, right down to the underplayed action sequences, low level of gore and jokey final shot, a feeling not even the gruff charm of Steve James (criminally underused) and the presence of Ron "Superfly" O´Neal as the city´s mayor can fully erase. Director Bill Tannen creates a strong sense of atmosphere, and stages Chuck´s domestic scenes (given surprising prominence in the narrative) with professional skill but his handling of linking scenes is flat-footed, and his rather detached approach to the loosely choreographed action dissipates whatever tension they might otherwise provide. Chuck looks visibly bored in the film´s few de rigueur fight sequences, and actually more engaged in the romantic scenes with his heavily-pregnant partner (Brynn Thayer), whose level of character development far exceeds any other in the film´s under-nourished screenplay.
Despite the picture´s modest ambitions, obvious low budget, sluggish plot, cliched dialogue and mostly underplayed performances, it still remains strangely watchable; the serial killer plot mostly goes nowhere but Chuck has an amiable charisma, and it´s enough of a surprise to see him play a self-doubting family man averse to the public spotlight his own heroism brings, that it almost draws you along through the film´s many flat sections. The unlikely casting of Billy Drago as Moon´s psychiatrist, the atmospheric setting of LA´s Wiltern Theatre (which becomes Moon´s hideout and stalking-ground), the presence of Steve James and Murphy Dunne (of the Blues Brothers band) in supporting roles and the much-sampled, pleasingly old-fashioned score by David Michael Frank provide helpful distraction from the clumsy script, and Tannen displays just enough visual aplomb to make it an acceptable late-night diversion, if nothing more.
The Beast Within (1982)
Night of the Horny Cicadas
One of a clutch of early-80's shlockbusters featuring graphic creature-rape as a prominent plot point (a group which also includes Galaxy of Terror (1981), The Entity and Humanoids from the Deep (both1982)) and, somehow, an unaccountably classy cast, this sordid and slow-moving shocker has plenty of potential but mostly botches it through a mixture of poor plotting, clumsy direction and laughable geek-show effects.
The set-up is a classic Freudian nightmare: whilst on their honeymoon, a husband and wife travelling through the remote Mississippi back-country experience car trouble, and while he walks off to look for help she is assaulted by an unidentified creature from a nearby swamp. Years later their son - now a sickly adolescent - begins showing signs of a genetic ailment, so the family journey back to Mississippi to try and identify the cause. Once there the son begins to suffer bizarre schizophrenic episodes, seemingly possessed by the spirit of a murdered local man, ultimately wreaking a path of apparently vengeful and cannibalistic murder through the small community before undergoing a wholesale metamorphosis into a literal bug-eyed monster and going on a brief (but predictably rapey) rampage.
While the plot is nothing out of the ordinary - recalling standard transformation tropes from werewolf mythology - there's an almost compendium effect at work; the scenario blends up scraps of vampire lore with the traditional folkloric trope of monstrous mutation as a metaphor for the trials of puberty, as well as mixing in some Cronenbergian body-horror and the American rural Gothic of Wes Craven's Deadly Blessing (1981). The incestuous small-town setting faintly recalls Deliverance (1972), while the climactic transformation employs the same glutinous practical effects as The Howling (1981) and The Thing (1982). Unfortunately, in Tom Holland's unsubtle, disordered script (reportedly much butchered by producer Harvey Bernhard, mainly for budgetary reasons) and under Phillippe Mora's ham-handed direction the parts never quite coalesce into a satisfactory whole, and despite the efforts of a committed cast there is never enough textual meat on the film's metaphorical bones to make either the perverse revenge narrative (with its frankly abstruse allusions to the life-cycle of Cicadas) dramatically viable, nor the scenes of gory violence anything more than gaudy, repellent spectacle. Likewise the climactic transformation scene - achieved with untidy and sadly comical bladder effects - creates an impression more ludicrous than tragic (let alone actually scary), and the highly questionable rape scenes are handled in a goofy, almost shamefaced manner.
Although clearly intended as a modern reworking of old-fashioned Gothic horror elements, the film comes off instead as just strikingly garish, almost willfully coarse exploitation, and with the story book-ended by (admittedly short, but still tasteless) scenes of bestial rape the overall effect is mostly one of grubby self-parody, with more laughs than scares and a narrative that cannot be taken even remotely seriously.
Red Sonja (1985)
Red Faces All Round
This is flick basically indistinguishable from the many cheap Italian knock-offs that attempted to piggy-back on the success of Conan the Barbarian (1982) and it's sequel, with the one exception being that it is produced by Dino DeLaurentis, and therefore enjoys significantly greater production values.
Detailing the (rather tame) exploits of the title heroine, here presented as a straightforward distaff Conan, the rambling and co-incidence driven narrative pits Sonja (Brigitte Nielson) and her marry band of admirers - led by Kalidor (Arnold Schwarzenegger, essentially reprising Conan, but renamed for legal purposes) and including the spoilt prince Tarn (Ernie Reyes Jr) and his servant Falken (Paul Smith) - against the evil sorceress Queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman) and her elaborately-armored minions. Along the way there's a mechanized water-dragon, a band of brigands, an all-female priesthood of sword-swinging warrior maidens, numerous bad puns, a score by Ennio Morricone and an apparent attempt by the entire lead cast to avenge themselves on the quality of the screenplay, by each competing to give the most lobotomized delivery of their speech-bubble dialogue.
While there's nothing outwardly offensive about any of it, the film manages, despite it's solid underpinnings, to be a thudding bore, with endless poorly staged fight scenes that go nowhere substituted for plot development, flat direction and crummy FX conspiring to drag the film down at every opportunity. The sumptuous costumes and set design by Danilo Donati needed a more imaginative visual mind than a point-and-shoot hack like Fleischer behind the camera, and Morricone's contibution seems to consist of one ponderous theme repeated unto tedium. As the titular lead, Nielson herself is a serious liability; tall and statuesque, but model thin, physically clumsy and with all the expressive qualities of a mannequin, she fails to provide either a significant physical presence in the action scenes or anything resembling a strong, believable lead performance. Arnold, likewise, gives a lifeless reading of his stock sidekick role, while the young prince and his companion have apparently strayed in from the set of another movie.
Neither violent enough to be remarkable, nor visually arresting enough to be exciting, the film limps across the screen, listlessly trudging from one scene to the next, serving up corny dialogue and amateurish swordplay until somehow arriving at a standard "escape the crumbling supervillian hideout" finale - familiar from nearly every 60's Bond film - when it's run out of other ideas. By the time it's over, the only question on your mind is likely to be "how did any of their careers survive this?"
Swamp Thing (2019)
Swamp Gas
Another stinking turkey from the DC stable.
Whilst he seems to possess a strong cult following, largely thanks to the enduring comic series, the history of Swamp Thing on film or TV is pretty unfortunate, with Wes Craven's lumpy adaptation from 1982 still his most successful outing in either medium. That film's relative high-water-mark was quickly defaced by the infantile sequel from Jim Wynorski, which set a clumsy model for the equally childish (though hugely toned down) late-'80s TV series. All struggled with the essential problem of the character, namely that his monstrous condition and swampland setting simply don't provide much scope for any high-stakes plotlines, or at least any that can be taken seriously.
Oddly, this series also follows several recent monster-flick remakes or reboots, in that the titular creature is more or less relegated to a supporting role, with the overall narrative much more focused on lukewarm emotional drama between a thinly drawn supporting cast. As the substituted lead, the duck-lipped Crystal Reed lacks the emotional depth or range to carry the show, and her waxy, surgically re-sculpted face is both distracting to watch and weirdly inexpressive. No other character achieves enough development to make a proper impression, so cliched is the writing, that even Virginia Madsen is utterly wasted.
Despite some atmospherically shot locations and decent design work (though the look and quality of Swampy himself has barely progressed since 1988), the series can't decide if wants to be a swampy soap-opera, dark body-horror or a jokey green-tinged Stranger Things (2018-) ripoff. The early cancellation was clearly a mercy-killing.
The Crow: City of Angels (1996)
Angels With Dirty Faces
The death of Brandon Lee in a tragic on-set accident directly affected both the significance and emotional impact of Alex Proyas original The Crow (1994), and elevated what was otherwise a visually stylish and sincere, but largely empty and two-dimensional action film to cult pop-art status.
Released two years after, this seemingly inevitable sequel wisely sets out to broaden the mythology and create a new vision of the original picture's slender storyline, but is torpedoed by clueless, hamfisted direction, inept stuntwork, a terrible script (by the usually reliable David S. Goyer) and lead performances of cring-inducingly poor quality that they'd embarrass a first-year acting student.
Quickly and roughly rehashing the premise of the original, we meet a new vengeful resurrectee in Ashe Corwin (Vincent Perez), who rises from a watery grave to dispatch - in a series of badly shot and clumsily realised action scenes - the cartoonish villains who killed him and his young son. In his quest he's assisted by Sarah (Mia Kirshner), the only returning character from the first film - crowd aside - and now an adult living in a hellish, bizarro world Los Angeles apparently shrouded in permanent smoky haze and peopled by refugees from a cut-price Mad Max (1979) ripoff.
Defenders of this film like to point to the supposed hatchet-job performed on the original director's cut by Ogre De Jour producer Harvey Weinstein, but looking at the available extant versions (there are several) it's hard to credit the idea that this some tragically mutilated classic; novice director Tim Pope shows none of Proyas visual flair, failing to shoot either action or dialogue with any sense of immediacy, while his direction of actors is so incompetent he draws shallow, clumsy work even from talented performers like Kirshner and Richard Brooks. While Pope is clearly unequal to the task, blame must also go to Goyer's flimsy script, which feels both long-winded and under-developed, but the biggest issue is unfortunately the lead performance by Perez; while Lee would always have been a tough act to follow, Perez seems uniquely unsuited to the role of an action hero - physically unprepossessing, fey and hysterically over-emotive, Perez grates rather than ingratiates, and his obvious lack of skill in the hand-to-hand combat sequences undermines the action the point of laughability.
Although it retains Grahame Revell's touching score, and very occasionally threatens to become interesting - Iggy Pop offers some entertaining moments, and some decent ideas surface in the sludge along the way - the film cannot overcome to basic poverty of its vision and the stunning ineptitude of the directing and writing, instead managing only to emphasise the level of talent and verve required to create the original film from the same threadbare material.
Underworld (1985)
Subterranean Standard
Famously disowned by author and co-screenwriter Clive Barker, and cited as one of two experiences (both with director George Pavlou) that convinced him to write and direct his own film adaptations, this bizarre 80's time capsule has a clever premise, interesting cast and more New Wave styling than you can poke a stick of blue neon at, but is hamstrung by an evidently miniscule budget, appalling acting and a script that never properly coheres.
The self-conscious effort to create a stylish, uniquely British sci-fi horror is admirable in its self-evidence: a script concept by edgy horror author and playwright Barker, a score by synth-pop outfit Freuer, a cast comprised of models, stuntmen and venerable character actors like Denham Elliot and Steven Berkoff, as well as Ingrid Pitt playing a brothel madam, and direction by ex-music video auteur Pavlou all make for, a least on paper, an exciting genre prospect. It is, then, all the more lamentable how desperately the finished film fails to live up to the promise of its constituent elements.
The convoluted and poorly articulated narrative swivels on the abduction of a high-class teenage prostitute, by a group of rubber-faced mutants living the sewers. Larry Lamb, offering probably the least convincing tough-guy persona ever filmed, is her former bodyguard and lover, who is hired to track her down by Berkoff's crime boss, and uncovers a confused plot involving a mad scientist (Elliot, natch) who has developed a new wonder drug that causes people to physically transform into the image of their dreams.
With liberal borrowings from film noir, body horror and fantasy forerunners, this story has the potential for a classy genre epic. However, it's evident that Pavlou has no idea how to construct a scene, let alone draw convincing performances from his cast or choreograph effective action sequences. Much of the climactic shootout has the scruffy, amateurish atmosphere of a mid-80s Dr Who episode, and the final denouement, lifted almost entirely from Scanners (1980) is bungled by lousy practical effects and the lack of any consistent buildup. Besides these signature failures, the film's general level of assembly is often alarmingly slipshod; sound recording is muffled and shoddy, the poverty-stricken direction endearingly persists in failing to find an appropriate camera angle for almost any shot, the photography alternates between eye-strainingly dim and glaringly overlit, and the editing was performed with an axe.
In the end it's not hard to see why Barker refuses to acknowledge this one; the germ of his style and concepts are lurking somewhere in this ugly soup of a picture, but the delivery is so poor, and the technical quality so desperate that its surprising anyone associated with this misbegotten farrago will admit to their involvement.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)
King of the Shill
Gareth Edwards 2014 Godzilla remake - the second attempt to create a fully Americanised Godzilla franchise following Roland Emmerich's widely derided Godzilla (1997) - was criticised for what many fans felt was a lack of an actual onscreen presence of the titular fire-lizard; basically, not enough Godzilla in a film bearing his name. This follow-up effort, from Krampus (2015) director Michael Dougherty, sets out to redress that balance, although like the earlier film, seems to be easily distracted from that motive by the plethora of secondary monsters he's also expected to showcase, along with a series of turgid and un-involving subplots focused on the human supporting cast, and has trouble balancing the desire to tell it's own story whilst also fulfilling the necessities of corporate franchise-building.
From the opening frames it's obvious that this is a made-to-order commercial blockbuster, with both Millie Bobby Brown duplicating her look and mannerisms from Stranger Things (2018) and Vera Farmiga giving a curiously deadpan reading of her earnest leading lady perfromance from The Conjuring (2013-2019) series. Their encounter with a cartoonishly rendered CGI caterpillar -the first of the film's ultimately bloated creature lineup - is violently interrupted by a scowling Charles Dance, likewise channelling his own portrayal of Tywin Lannister from Game of Thrones (2011-2019) into a psychopathic "eco-terrorist" apparently intended as a sneery clapback at the likes of Extinction Rebellion.
Kyle Chandler, meanwhile, is given the thankless role of a perma-scowling monster expert (and ex-Farmiga squeeze, natch), morosely stomping about in the background shouting "you can't do this, it'll never work!" at the apparently vast, widely publicly known yet totally off-the-books organisation - known as "Monarch", which is indicative of the film's general level of subtlety - that wants to try and control the beasts, now known as Titans (I guess Kaiju was trademarked), which seem to be surfacing all over the globe.
Despite the haste with which we are introduced to all the various monsters that make up this mash, the film seems strangely impatient with much of the action that should, in fact, be it's main animating purpose. Where Godzilla (2014) was noted for repeatedly, and frustratingly, cutting away from the titanic fisticuffs just as they got going, this picture hurriedly shoves those sequences into the foreground, but is clearly so over-burdened with creature personalities and the requirement to feature each one individually before seguing into successive face-offs between them, that it swiftly drops each confrontation and swerves hard towards the next, seemingly racing to keep up with the audience's (presumably miniscule) attention span. The effect is one of permanently fraught and artificially emotive chaos, where no one aspect is given enough clear focus to fully develop, and the major emotional and story beats fail to land because of a lack of proper buildup.
Glimpses of the film that could have been are provided in the few moments that actually manage to resonate, such as the fate of Ken Watanbe's holdover character from the first picture, or the atmospheric underwater sequence that provides the first appearance of the titular hero (outside stock cuts from the Edwards film). Unfortunately, the choppy, rushed narrative and general tone of earnest, humourless grandeur distances the audience from much of what unfolds, and supposedly epic or climactic moments are drowned in a parade of monotonous, noisy spectacle. The flailing attempts at emotional significance are not helped by laboured, 2-dimensional characterisations, nor by the wildly uneven CGI; serious deficiencies of rendering and inconsistencies of scale are added to clumsy and often cartoony-looking creature design, as if the animators were deliberately trying to emulate the creaky, stiff perambulations of the original wire-and-sock-puppet depictions of the film's varied creature cast, as opposed to developing realistic - or at least interesting - original designs.
The end result is a film visibly labouring under it's own competing imperatives, crushed by the resulting internal contradictions and finally collapsing under the weight of it's own preposterous, self-serious pretensions; one that, much like many of its genre ilk, is reasonably diverting when the monsters are onscreen, mildly irritating when they are not, and leaves little impression once it has concluded beyond the colourful nature of its design and execution.
10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)
Bunker Buster
Like a fast-food meal for the mind, this film is slickly assembled, mildly tasty and composed of utterly manufactured elements that contain only the barest quantity of real nourishment.
Treading over very similar ground to numerous other confinement stories, and positioned as a largely in-name-only sequel to the JJ Abrams' found-footage monster flic, the nudgingly titled 10 Cloverfield Lane has a solid cast, sharply written (if episodic and predictable) script and a clean, stylish look, but - much like the subsequent The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) - in the final analysis it simply can't escape the impression that it is an wholly unrelated story that has been hastily modified and had a title slapped on it to shoehorn its narrative into an contrived franchise relationship with the earlier film.
For most of its length, its an effectively staged post-apocalyptic survival picture; as the possibly PTSD suffering, conspiracy-believing, doomsday-planning survival nut, who rescues/kidnaps and browbeats a young woman and a farm hand who helped him build his bomb shelter, John Goodman gives a fine portrayal of quietly spoken, barely repressed insanity, a bit like a shell-shocked Alex Jones (although with a far greater sense of wounded dignity). The other characters are stock and under-developed but ably served by competent work from Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Gallagher Jr.
Though very well produced and tightly directed, the film never really gets going; hampered by a limited budget and PG-13 rating, we never get much of a sense of the destruction we're told has been wrought in the world above, aside from one effective sequence where a lone survivor attempts to enter the shelter from above. Having established the claustrophobic setting and ambiguous anti-hero, the film quickly quickly runs out of ideas, and ultimately resorts to an ill-advised action finale - clearly tacked on at the producer's request - which negates much of the previous built-up tension and tips the whole enterprise into clumsy self-parody.
In the end it's neither the intelligent confinement thriller it could have been, nor an imaginative or logical continuation of the Ahbrams picture, but a curious hybrid assembly that adds up to considerably less than the sum of its parts.
Penny Dreadful (2014)
Pretty Awful
The premise behind Penny Dreadful is a promising one: essentially a sort of Victorian X-Files, set in a milieu populated by many of the best-known characters from Gothic fiction, there's undoubtedly a rich vien of potential for drama and scares contained therein.
Sadly, however, and despite some heavyweight talent behind and in front of thr cameras, it more often lives up to the promise of its title: ugly, cheap looking, nasty, and insubstantial. The cast are certainly game, but arent helped by stock charscterisations and lazy writing. Eva Green has another self-consciously vampish (though oddly ineffectual), overbaked performance to add to her CV (alongside those in 300: Rise of an Empire and the equally dire Camelot), while Timothy Dalton and Josh Hartnet offer weak echoes of their previous-best film roles. The insufferable Billy Piper is (somehow inevitably) given the strongest story arc, however she bottles the opportunity to rise above the rest of the material with a badly misjudged "Oirish" accent, not to mention a screen presence with all the appeal of advanced syphillis. Guest players are a mixture of ridiculous panto-turns and anonymous one-liners, with the sense that mote effort has been put into the costumes they wear than the words mumbled forth.
Cynically concieved and sloppily assembled, this was clearly intended for the US television market; the obvious substitution of contemporary Dublin for Victorian London (acutely visible in both the exterior shots and extras casting) despite vast disrepancies of scale, design, topography and layout, can only be explained thus, although its rather symptomatic of the series narrative sluggishness that an average viewer would be drawn to notice such details.
Don't waste your time.
Dracula (2020)
Out for the Count
Gatiss and Moffat's earlier collaboration, the successful (if not universally loved) "Sherlock" (2012-18), was notable for the slow metamorphosis from genuinely clever, smartly modernised and self-aware pastiche to outright self-infatuated, ludicrously camp self-parody that paralleled its own commercial success.
That same writing/producing team's new take on the much-mutilated Bram Stoker classic dispels any hope that it will prove a return to earlier form within seconds of the first episode's introduction, with notable early highlights of the novel's narrative ditched in favour of cheap, cliche-ridden and totally unscary shocks, annoying characters - most of whom are unforgivably stupid, and serve mainly as 2-dimensional plot devices - and some of the most truly excruciating dialogue heard in any television drama since the last few seasons of "Dr Who" (or indeed the later seasons of "Sherlock").
As the incongruously English-accented Count, Claes Bang chews the scenery (and the supporting cast) with obvious relish, but never gives us a sense of the character's history or charisma. Instead we're offered yet another iteration of a smugly smiling, self-impressed snob arrogantly convinced of his own superiority and wit; like a Mittel-European Moriarty with public-school manners and self-consciously effete affectations, or a buff Boris Johnson with Transylvanian dentistry. This characterisation is so familiar from the Gatiss/Moffat back-catalogue as to have become stock, and its revival here is yet more proof - if any were needed - of their collective artistic bankruptcy.
As the pointedly gender-flipped 'Agatha' Van Helsing, Molly Wells is spirited but hampered by a goofy "Dutch" accent straight out of "Goldmember" (2002), and ultimately undone by a combination of contrived plotting and inconsistent characterisation. The rest of the cast are as perfunctory as their roles; by turns arrogant, ethnically stereotypical, nondescript, whimpering, spineless, idiotic and vacuous, none inspires much sympathy - despite the frequent, heavy-handed efforts to elicit ours by having them pathetically wail as the Count chows down. Occasional attempts to imply a pan-sexual or homoerotic angle to Dracula's lifestyle come off as sophomoric, tokenistic queerbaiting, while the BBC fills its annual diversity quota with a parade of largely anonymous, often jarringly incongruous BAME actors in underdeveloped minor roles.
With cheap-looking effects, canned music, a meandering unfocused plot, terrible writing and an unmistakable air of smug contempt for the audience, this is nothing more-nor-less than a crude defacement of the Dracula legend; a childish, self-indulgent testimony to the overweening vanity and creative exsanguination of the artistic forces behind it.
The Shining (1980)
Cold and Empty
Stephen King, like horror's other Maine man HP Lovecraft, has at best a patchy record when it comes to successful transfers of his work to the screen. Ironically, it is often the least faithful adaptions that make for the more effective and satisfying pictures.
What can be said, then, about this film? An adaptation of King's dense and personal novel that dumps about 80% of the book's narrative detail, substituting arty visuals and sub-Hitchcockian compositions for anything resembling a developed script or well-rounded characters, preserving the superficial elements and iconography of the book, but failing to provide any compelling hook on which to hang it's virtuoso production values. The product of a notoriously painstaking, difficult (mostly due to the director's auteurish fastidiousness) and long-drawn-out shoot, this version of The Shining is undoubtedly beautiful to look at, sumptuously shot and packed with minute visual detail. Where it falls down is in its near-complete absence of compelling human drama, with characters so thinly drawn as to be almost translucent, and an incredible, overripe lead performance by Jack Nicholson.
As the blocked writer who accepts a job as winter caretaker of The Overlook hotel in the picturesque Colorado mountains, slowly succumbing to the hotel's evil influence as snow and isolation draw in, Nicholson's performance is possibly one of the most spectacularly misjudged lead portrayals in American cinema. No slow, detailed progression from calm family man to unhinged, axe-swinging maniac for Jack it seems. Rather, he comes across as a man teetering on the brink right from the get-go, making the simple announcement that he has an appointment with the manager of the hotel seem like a veiled threat. Shelley Duvall fairs a little better as his beleaguered wife, but it's clear Kubrick sees her mainly as a prop, there to be placed in peril, scream and cry and suffer hysterics.
As in command as he is of the film's aesthetic aspects, Kubrick shows himself seemingly incapable of handling the ordinary business of building a narrative, or of drawing layered performances from his heavyweight cast. If reports from the shoot are to be believed, Kubrick's relentless perfectionism forced as many as 120+ takes on his actors in certain scenes. How then to account for the stilted, one-dimensional nature of the family's early interactions, or Nicholson's obviously unhinged manner from their very first arrival at the hotel? While never known for his restraint, Nicholson goes full bore here, and the effect - although occasionally chilling - is weirdly self-conscious and distant. Similarly, if he is to be credited for the picture's fine qualities, then Kubrick must also bear responsibility for its gaping flaws; the sloppy structure, the jarring whip-pans and clumsy crash-zooming, the conspicuously English accents of all the ghostly Overlook staff and guests despite the Colorado setting (betraying the fact of its actual production on a London soundstage), the choppy editing, the melodramatic musical score, the emotional vacuity and absence of feeling in the human relationships, and the general sense of paralysis that permeates the whole project, as if the director's exacting standards had so intimidated everyone involved that they could only follow his strict commands, and all creative energy was effectively beaten out of them.
By its final frames, this film has inspired neither terror nor sympathy, neither interest nor tension, but has merely served as an exemplary lesson in the folly of directorial arrogance, and a cautionary to the dangers of forgetting, or deliberately neglecting to tell, an actual story.
Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017)
Star Wars: The Worst Said I
"What we've got here is, failure to continuate..."
Although highly derivative of earlier installments, and plot-wise largely a retread of George Lucas's original Star Wars (1977), now retconned to Episode IV: A New Hope in the official chronology, JJ Abrams' franchise-restarter The Force Awakens (2015) was at least a clean, unpretentiously juvenile action-adventure that played effectively on fans' expectations, and set up both a serviceable new cast of characters and a charted a direction for future installments that offended (nearly) no-one.
With this follow-up installment, however, writer-director Rian Johnson appears to have deliberately taken Abrams' fan-service blueprint and chucked it in the shredder, scotch-taped the strands back together in an impressionistic collage and embellished it with more new featured characters seemingly parachuted in from the the type of edgy, self-referential indie flicks with which he made his name.
To say that the plot is disjointed, dull, illogical, full of narrative blind alleys and almost mischievously nonsensical twists, or that it carelessly dumps most of the more interesting supporting roles and subplots from the previous installment in favour of cutesy-annoying ethnic stereotypes and campy guest-star turns by the likes of Benecio Del Toro, or to observe that Johnson seems not to possess any firm concept of space, time, distance, gravity or narrative consistency, would be to rake over territory covered in far greater detail elsewhere. Suffice to say that nothing that The Last Jedi introduces to the Star Wars universe has any value beyond momentary audience disorientation, and that the few effective sequences Johnson does pull off - the Hyperspace ramming sequence is undeniably impressive - are all immediately undercut by dramatic scenes which fall hopelessly flat, thanks largely to a strand of self-referential humour that is neither funny nor particularly clever, or by Johnson's borderline malicious determination not to deliver any of the really big moments longtime fans of this series might reasonably expect.
Among the casualties of this revisionist approach are Daisy Ridley's lead performance as Rey, carried over from the previous picture but here reduced to a shrill, one-dimensional "good-girl", whose abilities in force-control and light-sabre fighting are accomplished in ridiculously easy, low pressure fashion (mainly by swinging one around a rock for about a minute), thus robbing her journey of any drama or sense of fulfilment. Likewise Jon Boyega's Finn, relegated to secondary plot status and mostly a figure of comic-relief, Gwendoline Christie's Captain Phasma (killed off in a listless duel aboard a burning space cruiser, which strangly still manages to have functioning gravity), Bill Nighy's Lord Snoke (heavily set up in The Force Awakens as a final boss for the new trilogy, but likewise dispatched with irritating abruptness) and, perhaps most tragically for fans, Mark Hamill as an aging and embittered Luke Skywalker, diminished by both the size of his role and the pathetic emotional condition of the character to a whiny, cynical old recluse, beaten in a stick-duel by Rey and eventually force-ghosted with little explanation or impact.
Ultimately, this fails to be either a satisfactory follow-up to Abrams's fan-film homage, an interesting recalibration away from simple crowd-pleasing heroics or even a well-told escapist fantasy in its own right. Instead, it's a janky, badly plotted and annoyingly contrived mess, with pointless supporting characters, pointedly unexplained departures from the previous films (which feel crudely shoehorned in for plot convenience) and a dimly perceptable inbuilt contempt for the audience, one that colours the film's treatment of main series characters and the overriding themes of previous Star Wars pictures.
It's clear that what Johnson set out to create was essentially an anti-Star Wars picture; in that he has been successful, but this film is a disaster.
Razorback (1984)
Piggy in the Middle of Nowhere
One the last interesting Ozploitation efforts from the 70s-80s heyday of the genre, Razorback plays a bit like a compendium of previous successful Aussie pictures, with a setting and secondary characters straight out of Wake in Fright (1971), even going so far as to shoot in the same locations (Broken Hill, NSW), the vehicular fetishism of The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) along with the original Mad Max (1978) and it's sequels, as well as the Man-Against-Nature theme of Long Weekend (1978).
The plot is a pretty straightforward retread of "Jaws"(1974), with the marauding shark of Spielberg's seminal picture here replaced by a man-eating wild pig, inexplicably grown to Rhinoceros dimensions, and the earlier film's coastal New England setting here becoming a ramshackle rural backwater in the Australian Outback.
Opening with a nod to the infamous Azaria Chamberlain dingo-baby case, the film quickly establishes both its breakneck pace and a peculiarly perverse set of supporting characters, as Old Jake (Bill Kerr), whose grandson is taken by the boar, is charged with murdering the child and acquires and Ahab-like obsession with killing the animal. Some years later, a crusading American TV journalist (Judy Morris) arrives in town to report on illegal Kangaroo hunting, and is killed by the giant pig after running afoul of the locals. Her wet-behind-the-ears Canadian husband (an ineffectual Gregory Harrison) arrives in town following her trail, eventually joining forces with Jake and a conveniently pretty blonde ecologist (Arkie Whiteley) to hunt the monster down.
So stated, it would seem pretty standard stuff, but what matters about this tale is the telling. Being the feature debut of director Russell Mulcahy (fresh from a successful run making music videos for Duran Duran and others), who would go on to helm the original Highlander (1986) shortly after this, and with future oscar-winner Dean Semler (Mad Max 2, Dances With Wolves) behind the camera, the film is shot in a richly textured, bold and often hallucinatory style which, while at times excessive, both effectively captures the vivid colours of the Australian landscape and sharply evokes the delirious, inhospitable atmosphere of the country's interior.
Clearly aspiring to more than simple genre status, the film's kaleidoscopic visual language sketches a uniquely uninviting portrait of Australia's rural landscape, and peoples it with some of the most bizarre examples of humanity ever committed to celluloid. By wisely keeping the titular beast mostly off-screen, or glimpsed only fleetingly (through the iris of a camera or scope of a rifle), Mulcahy allows the creature to acquire a semi-mythic quality, equating it directly with the character of the land itself. Like in the Speilberg film, the monster pig is explicitly drawn as a broad metaphor for the hostility of the natural world; a ferocious, devouring archetype devoid of sense, reason or purpose, but simply opposed to the human protagonists as implacably as a natural disaster. Its purity is contrasted with the degraded state of many of the Outback's human inhabitants, largely depicted as unwashed, hard-faced, beer-swilling neanderthals, whose deaths by boar-tusk would almost seem to be a mercy. These themes are adroitly highlighted in an extended sequence where the lead character is marooned in the desert overnight, chased by a pack of feral pigs, and suffers hallucinations brought on by thirst, exposure and sunstroke. The film even takes a deep dive into the more rancid aspects of rural Australian life, particularly in the portrayal of two (possibly inbred) brothers who run a Kangaroo meat-packing operation out of a dilapidated, Blake-esque factory and live in a disused mine-shaft decorated with Barry Manilow posters.
Although at times the film's assembly is a little rough-shod, with a patchy script, scrappy editing and poor sound quality all problematic features, and with Mulcahy's exaggerated visuals sometimes detracting from the suspense as much as adding to it, this picture still manages to stand out by virtue of its bold style, nimble sense of humour and its undeniably ambitious attempt to be more than just another monster-on-the-loose popcorn stuffer.
The Great Wall (2016)
The Corn Ball
Another visually beautiful but rather empty patriotic (not to say propagandist) picture from Zimou Zhang, this time with an incongruous Western star (Matt Damon, phoning it in) headlining as opposed to Jet Li or Zhang Ziyi.
A picaresque comic-book plot involving a secret army fighting elaborate (but largely unconvincing) alien creatures storming the eponymous Great Wall, provides the carelessly-sunk hook upon which Zhang enthusiastically drapes his rich visual imagination, with the kind of broad, sweeping scope and heightened primary-colour definitions that have become his trademark.
There's plenty of action and a strikingly good-looking cast, but never even the slightest amount of depth or meaning to any of it, and some of the battle scenes - while certainly inventive and kinetic - are so ludicrously over-designed as to be laughable. The monster antagonists are given only the slightest of explanations, and in any case never become anything other than giant, snarling, green-skinned locusts looking to devour all in their path, and as such present a pretty one-dimensional threat.
The performances are all terribly earnest but rarely engaging, and Damon's peculiar choice of accent (Irish, Scottish, English, what?) grates even more heavily than the leaden, speech-bubble dialogue he solemnly pronounces in it. And, for all of the film's obviously lavish production values, the CGI is sketchy, with some seriously 2-D traveling shots of the wall, along with some hazy creature effects that sometimes resemble sweepings from the cutting-room floor of Starship Troopers (1997).
Probably fine for small children and undemanding teenagers, but ultimately a very minor film.
Maniac Cop 2 (1990)
Extremely Guilty Pleasures
The original Maniac Cop (1988) was a campy, semi-satirical slasher that cleverly took the popular 80s iconography of masked, seemingly invulnerable killers and transported them from their normal suburban or woodland setting to the mean streets of NY, and dressed the lead antagonist in a police uniform. Though too clumsily made to live up to its intriguing premise, it nonetheless had a crudely wrought charm, a level of visual style and enough black wit to carry along its blatantly silly script and hack lead performances.
This sequel, from the same writer-director combo, actually manages to improve on the original with a combination of swift pacing, well-staged action sequences and a weirdly sincere tone that elevates the ubiquitous B-movie aspects of the plot above their usually gutter-trash station.
Picking up shortly after the conclusion of the first film, MC2 gets underway in standard slasher-sequel fashion by briskly dispatching the survivors of Part 1 and shifting its focus to a new central lead couple, portrayed by genre veterans Claudia Christian and Robert Davi. Usually confined to supporting roles, these two actors grab their opportunity for the limelight with both hands, developing a believable, spikey chemistry (though the film thankfully avoids the swamp of a contrived romantic relationship). Having survived impalement and drowning at the end of Part 1, the big, scarred zombie-cop Matt Cordell (Robert Z'Dar) is back on the beat, this time joining forces with a Kenneth Bianchi-ish serial strangler (well played by the usually sympathetic Leo Rossi) who has been preying on hookers and strippers in NYC. The motive for this alliance is never entirely clear, but their oddball buddy-killer arc works as a neat inversion of the standard mismatched buddy-cop formula popularised by Lethal Weapon (1987), and endlessly rehashed throughout the 80s and 90s.
Though it eschews any pretence at serious character development, Larry Cohen's atypically (for this kind of film) literate script manages to pack enough resonant genre tropes around the standard-issue stabbings and mutilations to ensure that there's scarcely a dull moment in the film's compact 85min running time. The stunt work, including one of the longest sustained full-body burns in cinema, is particularly distinguished considering the film's low budget, while director William Lustig, although he demonstrates a weakness for self-conscious visual mannerism, keeps things moving and handles the set-peice action scenes with aplomb.
Naturally, a film with a title like Maniac Cop is never going to be an unvarnished classic, but there's enough skill and obvious care taken over this particular B-grade effort to elevate it above the standard horror-thriller sequels it shares the Blockbuster shelves with, and as an example of how to play on genre cliches while also smartly commenting on and subverting them, it manages a level of depth almost never found in such a crudely commercial project.
Spontaneous Combustion (1989)
Creative Burnout
It's something of a cliché to observe that Tobe Hooper's later work never truly lived up to the urgent promise of his original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), but few films illustrate the point more acutely than this spectacular misfire. Following the ludicrous - but enjoyable - sci-fi excesses of Lifeforce (1985) and Invaders from Mars (1986), as well as the camped-up vandalisation of his own finest work in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1987), this picture signalled a terminal decline in Hooper's talents, and would be one of the last to receive a cinematic release.
Borrowing both the central hook and a good deal of its basic setup from Firestarter (1985), Spontaneous Combustion has all the ingredients necessary for superior genre effort: a shady conspiracy, a secret experiment gone awry, an ordinary man imbued with extraordinary powers, a conspicuously blonde damsel in distress, a seasoned pro in the director's chair and Brad Dourif in the lead. It is, therefore, almost astonishing how badly the picture fails in the execution.
Much like Hooper's career, the film starts off well and then quickly deteriorates; an effective preamble sees a young couple, having taken part in a curious nuclear-radiation exposure experiment (clearly they learned nothing from the experiences of Dr. Banner), being delivered of a baby son before suddenly exploding into flames. Unfortunately, the picture then seems unsure how to proceed, lurching forward in time to follow the now adult son, played with appropriate diffidence by Dourif, and staggering uncertainly through the gradual revelation of his bizarre pyrokinetic abilities, before finally experiencing a total meltdown of narrative logic in an abrupt ending that cuts the story off before the action has really begun.
Although Hooper's visual eye remains keen, his grasp of story structure and continuity appears to desert him, as characters and plot threads wander in an out of focus, scenes begin and end with no discernible impact and the cast look confusedly at each other, presumably wondering how all this will come together in the edit. Much of the time, the film seems to be in a hurry to deliver its (probably expensive) pyrotechnic effects, rushing certain scenes through to the climax instead of allowing for any proper buildup. The main character's powers receive only the haziest of explanations, as though the film were actually disinterested in this delivering this - typically crucial - plot point. At times, it even feels palpably affected by a deep cynicism about its audience's motives, apparently assuming they're only there to watch people be inventively incinerated. In keeping with the film's generally slipshod assembly, the pace is alternately leaden and rushed, with an abiding sense that major scenes have been left out of the final cut. And, whilst he remains a fine actor, Dourif never fully grows into his leading-man role. The thinly drawn supporting cast likewise never has enough to work with, despite the actors bravest efforts, and by the time it's all over some of their motives remain frustratingly unclear.
Handled properly, this subject could well have made for an intelligent thriller; a kind of more horrific, adult take on standard superhero tropes, where the protagonist's new-found abilities are as big a curse as they are a blessing. As it is, it's a dispiriting waste of talent both behind and in front of the camera, and a poor testament to a once-dynamic directorial imagination. Though not the absolute worst of Hooper's late-career output (that dubious honour surely belongs to the atrocious Night Terrors (1993)), this has to be by far the biggest missed opportunity.
RoboCop 2 (1990)
Dead Man Shooting (alot)
Given its status as one of the most highly regarded, popular and enduring sci-fi/action pictures of the 80's, it's truly surprising how bad all the sequels to and spinoffs from (including the recent remake) Paul Verhoeven's original RoboCop (1987) turned out to be. Like the original Jaws (1974) or The Crow (1994), the reputation of the first picture has been heavily tarnished by the series it inspired, and the charactistics that defined the original's quality are almost universally lacking from any of the (almost universally dire) subsequent pictures.
This, the first direct sequel, and the only follow-up entry to feature Peter Weller in the title role, is by far the best of a very bad bunch, but nonetheless manages to trash much of what was enjoyable about the first picture for the sake of a conventional, ultra violent shoot-em-up, laced with crude sadism and a heavy-handed conservative anti-drugs message.
Gone is the sly, lightly satirical tone of the original, replaced with an almost misanthropic cynicism. Also missing is Basil Poldouris's iconic score, replaced with a braying, brassy accompaniment that hampers more than it inhances. Likewise absent is the first film's note of humanising sentiment, or any sense of ambiguity around its (essentially fascist) moral structure. In this film's reduced vision, Weller's RoboCop is an unreconstructed, summary-justice-dispensing human tank, who's gruesomely inventive executions of cartoonish villains we, the audience, are openly invited to cheer (thus becoming largely indistinguishable from numerous, dubious 80's action heroes as portrayed by Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Norris et al). While the original film essentially parodied such simplistic ideas of justice or law enforcement, this film offers them up wholesale, devoid of any intent other than eliciting crude excitement or sado-masochistic glee.
Plot-wise, it's a straight-forward continuation of the first film; a bankrupt "Old Detroit", beset by a prolonged police strike and plagued by a new, super-addictive designer drug called Nuke, is on the brink of a hostile takeover by amoral super-corporation OCP. RoboCop is one of the few officers still on the beat, and apparently divides his time between stylised, bloody nightime shoot-outs in narcotics factories with longingly driving by his former wife's new house in the (surprisingly peaceful) suburbs. The chief antagonist this time out is the psychopathically twisted gang-leader behind the manufacture and sale of Nuke, the permanently spaced out Cain (portrayed as a kind of diabolical old hippie by Tom Noonan). Meanwhile OCP, seeking to capitalise on the police union action to promote a new line of improved RoboCops, find their efforts stymied (in a darkly funny sequence) by a string of failed prototypes that keep committing suicide.
Superficially, there's nothing acutely wrong with the setup, and generally speaking there's just about enough of the original's humour, style and hard-edged action to drive the thin narrative forward. The special effects remain impressive for the time, and Weller's protagonist is still an effectively tragic figure, his bouts of callous murder and maiming notwithstanding. Where it really falls down, however, is in its disjointed narrative, dramatically unfocused storytelling, bleak outlook and lack of a coherent message. The threads of RoboCop's internal struggle established in the early scenes are completely discarded once the film gets down to it's real business (of delivering brutally violent action thrills), and the satirical elements are reduced to a few clever but inconsequential television inserts, mostly copied from the first picture. Cain is never more than a two-dimensional baddie, and his cohort - including a conspicuously hot Spanish señorita and a murderous, slick-haired tyke who takes over his drug empire - smacks of cynical controversy-bait. The plot convolutions required to shoe-horn Cain's brain into the corporation's new, bigger, badder cyborg (and thus set up the final act of the film) are so tortuous as to be laughable, and the ending is a damp squib, with the ultimate villians at the top of OCP apparently escaping clean.
And yet, for all those screeching flaws, it somehow manages not to be completely without merit. While director Irvin Kershner's grasp of human drama may have an olive-oil coating, he proves that he's lost none of his touch for deftly choreographed action and judicious use of special-effects since The Empire Strikes Back (1981). Though some of the early shootouts are scrappy and aimless, the scenes with the new improved RoboCain deliver the goods, and Kershner displays an old-fashioned pro's sense of how much to show and how much to imply. While almost reduced to a supporting role in his own picture, RoboCop is still an entertaining figure, when either casually blowing a creep's brains out through the scope on his own rifle, or earnestly reading Miranda rights to a glassy-eyed corpse after a bout of reprogramming sends him haywire, and capable assistance from the supporting cast is available in the form of Dan O'Herlihy, Felton Perry and Nancy Allen.
So while RoboCop 2 is undoubtedly a disappointment, its combination of bloody action, sick humour, morally dubious elements and slick, ambitious effects are just close enough to the original for it stand head-and-shoulders above any of the (increasingly childish) sequels, spinoffs, remakes and rehashes that followed it. If you absolutely must have another RoboCop in your life, this is by far the one to choose.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
Dr Who and The Satanic Toymaker
Though frequently lauded as a classic by horror fans, director John Carpenter's tyro slasher flick Halloween (1978) is hardly a great film; cheaply produced, with a weak script, underpowered cast and cardboard characters, it is redeemed mainly by its storytelling economy and simple, direct formula, which would become the pattern and prototype for a legion of subsequent imitators (though few would be even as modestly well executed).
This, the second sequel - following a retreaded second effort on a considerably expanded budget but with a considerably poorer return - although directed and co-scripted by Tommy Lee Wallace, who would go on to direct the TV version of IT (1990), bears all the hallmarks of producer/co-writer/composer Carpenter's late-80's creative slide; after the relative heights of Escape From New York (1981), the big-budget breakout of The Thing (1982) and the genre-bending lunacy of Big Trouble in Little China (1984), Carpenter's output entered a terminal decline from which he has never fully recovered, characterised by weak storylines, low production value, underdeveloped scripts and often careless filmmaking.
Dispensing with The Shape/Michael Myers, the silent, unkillable, knife-wielding stalker that animated the first two pictures (indeed going so far as to present both as fictional narratives, effectively rubbishing them in the process), H3 plays like an R-rated Dr Who episode, with a contrived plot concerning an evil Irish toymaker who plots to kill millions of children on Halloween night, in order to return the festival of Halloween - or Samhain - to its roots as a pagan right. A Doctor (who?) and the daughter of a toyshop owner killed by a zombie-ish suited assassin, who then immediately self-immolates (why?), set out to solve the mystery.
If that sounds a little like an extended Scooby-Doo plotline, well, you're not far off. Originally scripted by Nigel Kneale, whose Quatermass series established a kind of low rent, tatty-but-interesting, cerebral sci-fi formula in British film and television, the concept has all the markers of belonging to a 1960s TV serial, and is crudely fleshed out (pun intended) with some relatively soft 80s gore and titillation. Managing, at least in Carpenter and Wallace's rewritten form (Kneale sued to have his name removed from the credits) to be both illogical, dull and highly improbable all at the same time, the listless plot and undernourished script feel impossibly stretched, even at the film's modest 95min running time, and remains unredeemed even by the sterling presence of Dan O'Herlihy (best known as The Old Man from RoboCop (1987)). The usually dependable Tom Atkins and newcomer Stacy Nelkin are astonishingly blank as the leads, and a parade of clumsy stereotypes ("top o' the morning to ye, to be sure") make up the undistinguished supporting cast.
Much of this would be forgivable, or at least tolerable, if the film were competently assembled. Unfortunately it is almost blinding inept on virtually every level; the photography is murky and opaque, sound effects and music alternate between irritatingly insistent and amateurishly crude, scenes begin and end with no discernible impact on the plot, characters fall in love after a few unremarkable moments of screen time, the villian reveals his grand scheme in detail for no particular reason (and it still makes no sense), and his plans are ultimately foiled with ridiculous ease...
Really it would be churlish to list all of the film's faults, as virtually every scene contains anomalous or incredible details that should never have passed script review. Better simply to describe this as a catagorical failure of screen craft, a crudely cynical undertaking from the concept stage forward, and a bewilderingly worthless extension of a film franchise that had clearly exhausted the interest of all those involved in it to that point. Although this still, somehow, made book at the box office in 82, it would be 6 more years before another Halloween picture would surface, and that would wisely return to the simple stalk-and-slash premise that had served the earlier installments. Hardly oscar-worthy stuff, but still vastly preferable to this childish, Saturday-morning-cartoon rubbish.
Punisher: War Zone (2008)
The Punisher: Bore Zone
This is one of those films which has you quietly shaking your head in bemusement from start to finish, just from the sheer level of technical ineptitude that butchers what should have been a cracking comic-action movie.
All the ingredients are there; a solid B-movie cast, gritty violence, a plot confected from various strands of the comic and a well-chosen villain in Dominic West's Jigsaw, but director Lexie Alexander - a former kickboxer and stunt performer - demonstrates no apparent gift for coherent storytelling, nor for making the copious scenes of bloody action even remotely compelling.
Instead, the picture seems content to slope across the screen, serving up one inventively sadistic atrocity after another, but never once providing any dramatic justification for the parade of carnage that eventually overtakes any sense of narrative logic. Ray Stevenson (a naturally sympathetic actor) portrays Frank Castle as an emotionless, one-dimensional cipher and looks like he'd rather be somewhere else, while West hams it up as the cardboard baddie in a weak impression of Jack Nicholson's Joker from Batman (1989) - whose story arc the script lazily cribs almost in its entirety.
There's a corny child-in-peril subplot shoehorned in for good measure, and a gallery of ludicrous supporting goons that the nominal hero must wade through in the long, monotonous climax of the film; a tiresomely protracted warehouse shootout that manages to be both grandiose, excessive and startlingly dull, thanks largely to Alexander's more-is-more approach to the endless fistfights and gun battles, which eventually exhaust the eye and ear with their repetitious, uninspired choreography, clumsy framing and lazy editing.
Visually garish, ugly and cheap, with poorly recorded sound that reduces the hard-bitten-as-imagined-by-a-12-year-old dialogue to an inaudible mumble, this is both a remarkable failure of film craft and an embarrassing blot on the resumes of everyone involved. If your idea of fun is a low-grade feature-length stunt reel, heavy on the blood but light on imagination or skill, then this might be the film for you. Otherwise steer well clear; the much despised '89 version with Dolph Lundgren looks like a classic in comparison.
Leviathan (1989)
It Came from the Bottom of the Barrel
A surprising dud, this contribution to the late 80s slew of "Aliens Under the Ocean" flicks - a cycle which also includes The Abyss (1989), Deep Star Six (1989) and The Rift (1989) - has a bigger budget and better cast than most, but wastes it's potentially interesting premise on a clunky script and feeble direction, failing either to generate sufficient atmosphere or tension and collapsing into hopeless self-parody by its final act.
The plot plays like a creative mash-up of several previous genre hits, with the obligatory brorrowings from Alien (1979) mixed with elements of The Thing (1982), plus a helping of submarine-movie clichés and traces of Shivers (1974); a futuristic deep-sea mining crew come across the wreck of a Russian naval vessel, and after scavenging the shell they inadvertently bring back a failed Secret Experimental Bio-weapon (those pesky Russkis, always at it with the reckless bio-engineering experiments), in the form of a virulent genetic pathogen that mutates, absorbs and transforms its victims.
If that sounds like a promising set-up, well it is as far as it goes, and for at least the first half-hour Leviathan does the job. However, once the creature-feature elements start to kick in, the film quickly self-destructs into a remarkable mess of incoherent plot dead ends, stilted, poorly framed scenes and repetitive dialogue. While the ick factor is high, and the effects convincing, several key connecting scenes appear not to have made the final edit, and the major action set pieces are handled with so little skill it looks like the director and cinematographer took a toilet break while they were shot.
The monster (or monsters, for they are many) when it appears is an impressive Stan Winston creation, and the concept of live victims remaining conscious and alert even though absorbed into its hide is a pleasingly horrific touch. Unfortunately, again, it's handled so poorly from a visual perspective that it creates little impact, undermining both the design and concept, and the final "it's not over" scare is both cheesily telegraphed and clumsily executed.
With a little more patience, a better director and more creative script this could have become a superior genre film. As it is, it's a tired and listless rehash of other ideas done better elsewhere, whose glossy production values can't conceal the creative bankruptcy at the heart of the project.
The Puppet Masters (1994)
The Slug-Files
This so-so update of Robert A. Heinlein's turgid but influential sci-fi paranoia parable does a respectable job of shoehorning the original tale into a clean, commercial mid-90s package (though many of the author's concepts are, understandably, toned down) but betrays it's true motivations by cleaving hard to a model quite clearly borrowed from TVs contemporary pop-culture phenomenon The X-Files.
Adapting the spine of Heinlein's story to the present day, the well-trodden narrative of alien takeover by stealth gets another airing; this time the culprits are nicely designed manta-ray-like parasites that affix themselves to the backs of human hosts, controlling their movements and actions if not thoughts or feelings. The standard-issue Secret Government Taskforce investigates, and there are many twists and turns before the slugs are finally defeated, in a perhaps deliberate nod to H.G. Wells, by human pathogens.
This is all fine and well handled as far as it goes, however the film hedges its bets by adopting both a look and style quite unapologetically lifted from Chris Carter's popular TV series, with the visual cues extending all the way to the physical casting of the two leads - Eric Thal coming off as a bland halfway point between Jimmy Smits and David Duchovney, while Julie Warner's look, height, hair and costuming making her look like Gillian Anderson's body-double just wandered onto the set - and to the cinematography, which resembles the flat, grey, underlit sheen of numerous Canadian-lensed sci-fi programs.
With a solid supporting cast, just about enough action, some effective moments and a few of Heinlein's original concepts floating around in the mix, the film is almost entertaining enough to survive its wet leading actors, lack of genuine inspiration and openly cynical conception. However it's ultimately too timid and safe an offering to warrant close attention either from hardcore sci-fi buffs or devotees of Heinlein's work.
Prophecy (1979)
Frankenheimer fumbles Jaws in the Wood.
At his best, director John Frankenheimer displayed an unique and powerful affinity for austere urban locations, crafting atmospheric thrillers where the concrete and steel jungle landscape of American or European cities became virtual supporting characters in their own right.
His tense, cerebral style is therefore, not surprisingly, spectacularly ill-suited to this woodlands-set ecological horror flick, where Mercury leaks at a paper mill have caused sickness and deformity among the local indigenous population, and mutated certain wildlife in the area to King Kong proportions. Possibly taking his cue from Speilberg, this daft B-movie premise is treated with the kind of epic, solemn seriousness one would normally expect in a highbrow proceedural drama (indeed, the very genre to which Frankenheimer was normally best suited). The monster - formerly a bear, though it appears to follow Freddy Krueger's skincare regime - is rarely seen clearly (which is wise as it's a pretty ludicrous creation, and doesn't remotely resemble either the creature of the novel or the depiction on the film's poster) and is responsible for some mildly impressive carnage - in the campfire scene, the final pursuit through the woods - as well as one of the funniest kills in the history of cinema. The surprisingly heavyweight cast chew their portentous dialogue and the film rolls forward without ever really picking up steam; Frankenheimer's camera never really lets the Canadian (standing in for Maine) forest locations live and breathe, seemingly finding the natural contours and colours less appealing or logical than the man-made structures of his better work, which means the film is unable to generate sufficient atmosphere to make the predictable appearances of the Beast actually exciting, and the climax is bungled by both an ineffective buildup, janky pacing and an ultimately unbelievable ending. Adding insult to injury, there's a clumsily tacked-on coda that sees another mutant animal rear (in an unfortunate closeup, given the quality of the effects) into view behind the end credits.
All that being said, there's something oddly endearing about the film's po-faced determination to take itself seriously, the dedicated manner in which it goes about its B-movie business and the sincere, if clumsy, attempts at relevance by trying to address the evils of not only industrial pollution but also inequality, racism and social division - notably in the first act where the squalor and injustice of urban black poverty is juxtaposed with discrimination and dispossession of rural Native Americans. That's a lot to pack into what is essentially a traditional creature feature, with plot tropes reheated from a thousand 50s/60s exploitation pics, but the the effort is curiously winning.
So ultimately it's a fail from Frankenheimer; no decent scares for anyone over the age of 8, a disappointing and badly handled monster (its height, in particular, seems to vary from shot to shot and scene to scene, with the opening sequence seeming to imply a gigantic creature capable of plucking animals from a 30-foot cliff-face, while later scenes indicate it's just an average-sized bear standing upright), sententious environmentmental lectures and mawkish relationship drama shoehorned in for good measure. Yet it remains strangely watchable, the score is fun and effective in a retro way, and the earnest performances by a fine cast help the silly script over most of its sharpest speed bumps.
Rogue One (2016)
Star Bores
This is a pointless, poorly written and acted cash-in, that wrecks several points of series continuity for no discernable purpose while adding nothing of value to the canon.
Godzilla (2016) director Gareth Edwards has another visually well crafted but otherwise empty action spinoff to add to his short CV; concerned with telling the story of the rebel spy faction that stole the plans of the first Death Star, mentioned in passing in A New Hope (1977), Rogue One is a sloppily contrived fan film peopled by two-dimensional (in some cases literally, with both Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher represented by doll-eyed CGI clones) characters and a tired storyline, the conclusion of which can surprise no-one who has viewed any of the original episodes.
Felicity Jones makes little impression in the lead, her permanent expression of sulky insouciance failing to endear, while Diego Luna is possibly the wettest leading man since Patrick Duffy. The supporting cast, including Donnie Yen as an amateur Jedi and Alan Tudyuk as a sarcastic droid fair a little better, but are given distressingly little room to develop.
Pace, narrative focus and dialogue are all of highly variable quality, and the shrill, hand-me-down score can never reach the evocative heights of John Williams' venerable theme music. FX (CGI Leia and Moff Tarkin aside) and visual compositions are predictably impressive, but without an emotional centre to the story it becomes hard to care, and with the outcome already known it's ultimately a wearisome affair, made worse by some egregious plotting that bungles the attempt to link with the original trilogy.
At least we are spared any embarrassing histrionics from Darth Vader, ala Revenge of the Sith (2005), but it's small consolation in a totally misconceived and gratuitous exercise in cinematic fan-fiction, that adds nothing and only further degrades the canon while trying to enlarge it.
Brooklyn (2015)
The most bizarrely overpraised film of 2015
Honestly, can't get my head around this one. Standing ovations at Sundance? Really? For this?
So Saorse Ronan plays an emotionally blank young woman with a perpetual look of slightly pained superfluity, who emigrates to New York from a picture-postcard Ireland, depicted as a pursed, gossipy village of church-on-Sunday piousness and coded snobbery. Once in the Big Apple she drifts meekly through a succession of not-very-interesting adventures, with the blandest supporting cast of cardboard cutouts assembled in any film since the 1950s. Eventually she ends up back in Ireland for a stretch, works as an accountant (the drama!) and walks on the beach a couple of times with Donal Gleeson, before having a teacup spat with the old cow that she used to work for and deciding, almost reluctantly, to return to her husband in the 'States.
And that's it.
While it's basically inoffensive fluff, the sheer volume and intensity of critical praise heaped on this picture completely beggars belief. Ronan, while watchable, is entirely one-note from start to finish. The entire supporting cast are pasted in from kiddult romances from the 1950s, with cheerful stereotypes taking the place of any meaningful character development. Slavishly constructed around Ronan's mooney presence, the film floats aimlessly across the screen, providing neither insight into its lead character's emotional life or throwing up any truly troubling obstacles for her to overcome. In the end, so little happens, and all the characters are so thinly drawn that the viewer (or this one anyway) finds themself asking, "what did I just watch, and was I supposed to care? If so, why did they make the lead character so dismally, relentlessly uninteresting? Why did she ditch the quirky, outspoken girl in her boarding house for the shallow, mean-spirited bimbos she works with? Was she actually into the young bloke she was romancing back home, or was he just a pleasing distraction? Would she really have left her husband just like that? Why wasn't he more angry with her for not writing or calling?"
Ultimately, with stakes this low, such an empty lead character and a story so devoid of dramatic incident it's almost astonishing that this even garnered a theatrical release, let alone the fulsome admiration of critics worldwide.