Steve

Dead Man’s Wire

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Tony Kiritsis with Richard Hall on the end of his lethal wire

In 1977 Tony Kiritsis walked into a loan company in Indianapolis and took mortgage broker Richard Hall hostage. With a gun to his hostage’s head, and a wire connecting Hall’s neck to the trigger, Kiritsis had the broker where he wanted: any interference and Kiritsis would pull the trigger; should Hall make a sudden movement, then the “dead man’s wire” would activate the trigger. The police, who were soon on the scene, were helpless. Kiritsis had a beef with the company, which he claimed had lent him a lot of money to develop a shopping mall and then engineered things so the project would fail. In the process Kiritsis had gone bust and, … Read more

The Killer That Stalked New York

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Landlady and Sheila

You don’t need to know that the smallpox vaccine was first developed in 1796 but it adds a layer to The Killer That Stalked New York, a pandemic thriller from 1950 inspired by a real-life outbreak of smallpox in New York in 1947. That it did not become more widespread is thanks to thanks to swift action on the part of the authorities, who rolled out a massive vaccination campaign. Evelyn Keyes plays our Patient Zero, Sheila Bennet, a woman newly in from Cuba, where she picked up smallpox though she doesn’t yet know it. She also picked up something else: a consignment of hot diamonds, intending to smuggle them into the USA … Read more

Ne Zha

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Ne Zha having a piss

Ne Zha, to rhyme with Treasure, is a landmark piece of Chinese animation, the first from that country in IMAX, made by debut feature director Jiaozi in his own studio, using voice talent that no one had ever heard of. There is more back story to Jiaozi – a nickname, real name is Yang Yu – enough for a hundred magazine rags-to-riches feature pieces. Suffice to say he went from living with his widowed mother on her pension to making the highest-grossing film in mainland China in 2019 via a couple of shorts not many people ever saw, then followed up with a sequel, Ne Zha 2, which also broke records. The nickname, … Read more

100 Years of… The Strong Man

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Harry Langdon as Paul Bergot

Two people do special things in 1926’s The Strong Man. The first is director Frank Capra, inventing film language on the hoof in his feature debut and showing us why he was such a force on the 20th-century film scene. The other is Harry Langdon, demonstrating an ability to animate dead space with his fluid features and expressive body. The story is really a case of the tail wagging the dog and it takes a long time to get to the film’s point – elaborately conceived and expertly executed stunts. First there’s a preamble in the Great War, where Harry’s hapless soldier Paul Bergot is taking potshots at Germans with his catapult in … Read more

Wuthering Heights

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Cathy and Heathcliff face to face

It’s “Wuthering Heights”, in scare quotes, rather than just the plain old Wuthering Heights of Emily Brontë’s imagination. Adapter/director Emerald Fennell wants us to know she’s messing about with the text a bit and having fun. Either that or she’s hiding out behind a bit of punctuation. Good luck with that. Actually, the story remains pretty much as Brontë wrote it, though Fennell leaves out the entire “next generation” plotline, as did William Wyler in 1939. Cathy and Heathcliff grow up together on the top of wild and windswept Yorkshire moorland – she the wilful daughter of drunken Mr Earnshaw (an excellent Martin Clunes), he the orphan child Mr E brings home one … Read more

How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying

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J Pierrepont Finch reading the book that will change his life

How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying was a massive hit on Broadway in 1961, winning seven Tony awards, including best musical and book, plus a Pulitzer prize. It was quite the thing – Bob Fosse did the choreography, Frank Loesser did the music, audiences flocked to see it and it ran for nearly four years. Since then it’s done US national tours, transferred to London (twice) and also been been successfully revived on Broadway twice, once with Matthew Broderick in the lead and once with Daniel Radcliffe. And here’s the film version, made six years after that Broadway debut, with most of the stage stars back in the roles they originated, … Read more

The Undertaker

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Paul McGann

The Undertaker has a novel suggestion for gangsters needing to dispose of dead bodies in a hurry. Instead of going to all the fuss of running a waste disposal business, why not just bury the bodies in a the ground, beneath the coffins of legitimate new arrivals at their final resting place? Who’s going to look in a cemetery? And if you can’t be bothered with the rigmarole of being an undertaker yourself, just get a real one to play along, and pay him handsomely to keep his mouth shut. That is the simple and effective premise of Michael Wright’s debut feature, which he wrote and directed. Wright started out in the world … Read more

Signale: Ein Weltraumabenteuer aka Signals: A Space Adventure

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Juana flots weightlessly

The influences are obvious in Signale: Ein Weltraumabenteuer (Signals: A Space Adventure), a big-budget sci-fi actioner that’s higher on chat than actual action but was popular in the Eastern Bloc when it came out in 1970. A co-production between the German Democratic Republic and Poland, it takes its cues from Star Trek and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with its informal multi-racial crews, silent spaceships gliding through the solar system and its fascination with weightlessness. As the film opens the spaceship Ikaros is being bombarded by meteorites. Devastation. Everyone on board dead, or that’s the official line at any rate. One man isn’t so sure. Veikko, captain of the spaceship Laika, decides to … Read more

Anaconda

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Jack Black and Paul Rudd in the jungle

Clever, this Anaconda, a vastly ironic comedy horror written and directed by the guys who did The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent – which was also as clever as it was ironic. It follows a bunch of flaky dudes whose lives have been less than fulfilling in a last ditch attempt to do something meaningful by remaking 1997’s corny creature-feature Anaconda on a micro budget. Off they head, wedding videographer Doug (Jack Black) and useless actor Griff (Paul Rudd), with childhood friends Kenny (Steve Zahn) and Claire (Thandiwe Newton) to the Amazon, where the snake wrangler they hire will be as good as useless, and the pilot of their boat will turn out to … Read more

Phase IV

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Ant in foreground, Kendra in the background

The legendary titles guy Saul Bass (he did the opening credits sequence for Psycho, The Man with the Golden Arm and Casino) made only one feature film and Phase IV is it. A fascinating sci-fi/horror tale set in the desert, it has ideas, some great acting, excellent close-up cinematography, gorgeous locations and an excruciatingly static sense of pace. It also has Nigel Davenport, a real asset as Dr Ernest D Hubbs, a scientist alarmed at what’s happening out in Arizona (Kenya, in fact) and heads off there with fellow scientist James R Lesko (Michael Murphy) to investigate. The ants, it turns out, have started building huge structures, with square quasi-industrial chimneys. What can … Read more