Latest Posts
Trench 11
Trench 11 (aka Death Trench) belongs to a genre that didn’t much exist before the 21st century – war horror. Alongside films like Overlord, Frankenstein’s Army, Ghosts of War and Dead Snow, war horror slickly insists that war isn’t horrific enough, and that what’s needed is a bit more supernatural nastiness on top. Or, seen more positively, that a light sprinkling of generic horror can shift even the bleakest offering more obviously into the box marked “entertainment”. In war horror, ghosties, ghastlies and ghoulies will generally turn up at some point, to help fight against but usually with the Nazis (it’s often the Nazis). But here we’re in the dog days of the … Read more
Bye Bye Monkey
Translating 1978’s Ciao Maschio as Bye Bye Monkey doesn’t really help the film very much. Literally, it should be something like Farewell Machismo, and that title makes a lot more sense when you actually watch the film, whose eventual English-language title has been overwhelmed by the presence of a chimpanzee in the film. So, where to start with this one? It’s a strange movie set in New York, directed by a veteran, very talented Italian director, Marco Ferreri, with a cast of French and Italian stars. All concerned seem to be indulging themselves in what looks like late-to-the-party entry-level absurdist situationism. A bit of plot will help clarify things. In opening scenes we … Read more
Oddity
The TV show American Horror Story is probably partly responsible for Damian McCarthy’s Oddity, a horror movie that cuts through the subgenres with a cackle. AHS does it season by season, but McCarthy is doing it all in one compendious film, a bit of 1970s here, some 1930s there, a hint of silent-era horror even, plus a hefty dollop of 1980s and 1960s, the two epochal mainstays. Which is to say dangerous dolls (1980s) and psychics (1960s). But first the funny old big house, where Dani is in charge of doing up this doer-upper – and very grand it’ll be when finished – while husband Ted works long shifts at the local asylum, … Read more
Where the Sidewalk Ends
Not the best Otto Preminger film but a very good example of what he was about, Where the Sidewalk Ends is a film noir directed with maximum economy that re-teams Laura‘s golden pairing of Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, he again impassive as you like, she almost unbearably long-suffering. It’s not much of a role for her, as Laura wasn’t in fact (her character was literally dead for most of it and for the rest of it represented ideal womanhood). But for Andrews it’s a great example of his abilities inside the noir genre, where minimalism is generally the best option. No one was more minimal than Andrews. He’s Dirty Harry before Dirty … Read more
Kneecap
I’d not heard of Kneecap. The band from Northern Ireland rap in the Irish language, which makes them unusual and worthy alone of a biopic. The fact that they’re good at it and are also buzzy, funny, lairy lads who can act is just a bonus. There are only 80,000 native Irish speakers on the whole island of Ireland, an on-screen info dump tells us, and only 6,000 in Northern Ireland, the bit that remains part of the United Kingdom since Ireland broke away a century ago. So, band members Móglaí Bap (stage name of Naoise Ó Cairealláin), Mo Chara (Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh) and DJ Próvai (JJ Ó Dochartaigh) are a minority … Read more
The Shout
There’s nothing wrong with The Shout that a different screenplay wouldn’t fix. In front of and behind the camera it’s brilliant. But further back than that, at the conceptual stage, there’s not much beyond a spectacularly tedious allegory about something or other. Into the marriage of John Hurt’s Anthony and Susannah York’s Rachel comes a stranger, a domineering man dressed in black whose shout, he says, can rip universes apart, pulp souls, burst brains, and so on. But is Charles Crossley (Alan Bates) just a lunatic, as he appears to be? We have after all first met him at an asylum watching a very English cricket match overseen by a chief medical officer … Read more
Zombie Town
Spoofy rather than spooky, Zombie Town is no good at all if a proper scaring is what you want but a wholly different proposition if you’re after the sort of knowing salute that Ghostbusters made to drive-in horror all those years ago. Dan Aykroyd, yes, Dan Aykroyd, is one of the stars, and one of the joys of the film is that he doesn’t just blur on, say something corny, and, cameo over, blur off again. He plays Len Carver, a reclusive horror-movie legend who hasn’t directed a film in decades, so famous that the town where he lives has been named after him. But he comes out of retirement for a hometown … Read more
100 Years of… Master of the House
More than just a miserable face, arthouse darling Carl Theodor Dreyer could also churn out the hits. Master of the House is one such, a counter to the suggestion that he was just an austere Dane interested only in the beauty of human suffering – see The Passion of Joan of Arc or, much later, Ordet, for plenty of that. Madly successful at the box office, Master of the House is, as near as you got from Dreyer, a Hollywood entertainment, telling a story with a clear beginning, middle and end, emotional arcs, good guys and bad guys, fairly realistic performances and a moral at the end that you can actually see coming from … Read more
The Devil’s Bath
Powerful to the point of punishment, The Devil’s Bath (Des Teufels Bad) is Austria’s contender for the Best International Feature Oscar in 2025. It won’t win. It probably won’t even make the shortlist. Too bleak. Too uncompromising. Seen one way, it’s a group portrait of the extremely grim existence hacked out by peasants in a remote part of 18th-century Austria. Seen another, it’s the progress of one female from fragile, dreamy single girl to married woman in psychological extremis. Anja Plaschg plays Agnes, a sweet, unworldly creature who in early scenes is married off to Wolf (David Scheid), a bear of a man who seems delighted to be married to her. Or maybe … Read more
Fallen Angel
Watching a conman grift himself into a corner is always fun. In 1945’s Fallen Angel Otto Preminger gives us just that while Dana Andrews delivers another of the flat-faced, almost featureless performances he was so good at. He plays the shyster arriving in a small town with barely a cent in his pocket, who sets about trying to work his charms on a town full of hayseeds. Stop number one, another pair of grifters who run a clairvoyant act. But even before he gets stuck into Professor Madley (John Carradine, cadaverous features well deployed) and his assistant Joe (Olin Howard), Eric (Andrews) has had the misfortune of running into Stella (Linda Darnell), the … Read more
Semmelweis
If you know the name, you’ll know the film. Semmelweis tells the story of the 19th-century doctor who introduced hand-washing to labour wards in Vienna and at a stroke reduced the incidence of puerperal (aka childbed) fever, a killer of new mothers. Opening shot: a pregnant woman going into labour on the Austrian capital’s streets screaming blue murder when the police try to hustle her into the “death factory”, as she calls the maternity hospital. We’ve been plunged straight into the meat of the movie. Why is she so reluctant to go? What is regularly killing new mothers in this venerable institution, and why, we soon learn, does the midwife clinic across the … Read more
Fury
In 1936’s Fury, Fritz Lang revisits one of the key themes of M, his 1931 paranoid classic about a child murderer on the run. The focus on mob rule had seemed prophetic in a country about to install the Nazis as its rulers, but how well would it translate to democratic America? Very well is the answer, and it would stand up even better now, in the world of social media, where a rumour is enough to convict in the court of public opinion and the best option for anyone caught up in a pile-on is to disappear entirely. Joe (Spencer Tracy) and Katherine (Sylvia Sidney) are very much in love and plan … Read more
