Month: October 2023

Slotherhouse

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The sloth hides among the toys

“It all started,” Slotherhouse co-writer Brad Fowler said in an interview, “when a little old man in Florida asked, ‘What is the dumbest idea you can come up with?’ ” After about five minutes of “joking around”, Slotherhouse had emerged – a concept and a title in one fell swoop. Sloths. The least predatory creature in the jungle, an animal that spends most of its time apparently asleep. Furry. Small. Cute. Not an anaconda, or a shark or a tyrannosaur. How about taking sloths and using them to menace a sorority house where a Mean Girls vibe separates out queen bitch Brianna (Sydney Craven – a Wes Craven-adjacent name to conjure with) from all … Read more

Ludwig

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Helmut Berger as Ludwig

As mad and excessive as the king it portrays, Luchino Visconti’s Ludwig – about the “mad” King Ludwig II (1845-1886) of Bavaria – is a vast, sprawling and endlessly sumptuous display of the excesses of a monarch who’s clearly off his chump. It got absolutely hammered by the US critics when it opened there in 1973 – Roger Ebert gave it one star and described it as “lethargic and persistently uninteresting”. The New York Times said it was “bereft of ideas”. And neither of them had seen the full-length four-hour version. At least 30 minutes had been lopped for its US distribution. Which is a pity, because the sheer unwieldy size of the … Read more

Barber

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Barber in a dark alleyway

When not turning up in moneyspinning TV shows like The Wire or Game of Thrones, or the Maze Runner franchise or in smallish roles in big-money movies like Bohemian Rhapsody the actor Aidan Gillen can often be found in small-scale features, often as their anchor. Barber doesn’t quite fit into the same category as The Good Man, Mister John, Still or Rose Plays Julie (crackers all, marked out by brilliantly intense Gillen performances). But it is enjoyable, a wee Irish movie made for a small budget which seems to have all the hallmarks of the tryout pilot for a possible TV series. By which I mean more characters than strictly necessary for the … Read more

Odds Against Tomorrow

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Slater (Robert Ryan) and Ingram (Harry Belafonte)

There are a lot of ways of approaching 1959’s Odds Against Tomorrow. It’s that sort of film. But let’s be boring and approach it from the usual angle and say it’s the first film noir with a black lead actor in it. It’s Harry Belafonte, whose HarBel company also produced it, and he plays one of three men involved in a bank job. Ed Begley plays the organising force, an ex cop called Burke hoping the job will plug the gap where his pension would have been if he hadn’t been been the fall guy in some police corruption scandal. Robert Ryan is Slater, the ex soldier whose anger issues are partly down … Read more

Blue Beetle

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Xolo Maridueña as Blue Beetle

The DC Extended Universe’s lowest-grossing movie of all time, as I write, is Blue Beetle, which is a slightly unfair way to look at it, since it was originally intended as an HBO or HBO Max or Max (or whatever it’s currently called) release, but got bumped up to theatrical as a result of musical chairs at DC HQ. It’s clearly not had movie money spent on it and you can see that in the special effects, which are used more sparingly than is normal in a superhero movie. Whose plot, you’re wondering, is what? Jaime, a Mexican kid just back from college and hanging out with his struggling family, is physically invaded, … Read more

The Crimson Kimono

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Sugar performs shortly before dying

The posters are much more direct about what’s going on in The Crimson Kimono than the film itself is. Over a picture of a couple in a clinch they klaxon – “YES, this is a beautiful American girl in the arms of a Japanese boy!”. YES, this is a movie about a transracial relationship! Columbia boss Harry Cohn wasn’t convinced that American audiences would be interested, or happy about, a story about such shenanigans but greenlit the film anyway, undoubtedly influenced by writer/director Sam Fuller’s ability to turn out profitable films quickly and cheaply – this was his second of three in 1959. Perhaps Cohn’s doubts also influenced Fuller’s decision to open his film … Read more

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

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Close up of Miles Morales

More of the same, that’s what Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse delivers. The follow-up to Into the Spider-Verse is another blistering, migraine- and epilepsy-inducing collision of animation styles, the sort of thing which, if it had been done in the 20th century, would have taken the entire 20th century to do. And if you like it, there’s still more to come. This is the second instalment of the tripartite series and it ends with an abrupt “to be continued”, comic-book style. Beyond the Spider-Verse will complete the cycle. Quick recap. There are many parallel universes out there. And in many of these there are parallel Spider-Men too. Some look a bit like this, others … Read more

The Damned aka Götterdämmerung

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Interloper Friedrich with Baroness Sophie

Luchino Visconti’s The Damned aka Götterdämmerung is like several seasons of the TV show Dallas run together. It’s big, melodramatic and camp. There’s even a “Bobby Ewing back from the shower” moment. It’s the first of Visconti’s German trilogy – Death in Venice and Ludwig would follow in 1971 and 1973 – but is in many respects a return to the territory of 1963’s The Leopard, being the story of a great old family’s tussle with political forces beyond its control. In The Leopard it was the arrival of democracy in 19th-century Italy upending certainties. In The Damned, aka Götterdämmerung, it’s the Nazis. We’re in Germany, it’s the 1930s, Hitler is newly in … Read more

The Crown Jewels aka Kronjuvelerna

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Alicia Vikander as Fragancia

If this is the age of helicopter parenting and the Young Adult (YA) genre is its cultural manifestation, then 2011’s The Crown Jewels (Kronjuvelerna in the original Swedish) is as good an Exhibit A as you’ll find in any case for the prosecution. Life is full, absolutely full, of bear traps and kids need to know about them. People can be horrible. Open water can kill. Boyfriends can turn out gay. Mums can die. Dads can lose their legs. Rape can happen any time. Insanity lurks. Make sure you turn the gas off. The story is told in flashback, from a Swedish police interrogation room where a kindly inspector (Tomas von Brömssen) wants … Read more

The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.

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Ilya Kuryakin and Napoleon Solo

The death of David McCallum a few days ago prompted a return to the show that made his name in the 1960s. Well, not the show itself, but a 1983 TV movie “return”, which looks as if it was intended to relight the fire under the series itself. It was not to be and so this remains the final hurrah for McCallum and co-star Robert Vaughn as Ilya Kuryakin and Napoleon Solo, the spy-fi buddies working for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. The show had been part-devised by Ian Fleming as a response to the surge of interest in all things spy after the success of James Bond and ran … Read more