Review

Bad Girls Go to Hell

by
Gigi Darlene in black negligee on a bed

What great tits Gigi Darlene has. They cantilever out from her body in a way that makes the star of cult sexploitationer Bad Girls Go to Hell hard to miss and easy to appreciate, from an engineering perspective if nothing else. They are the star of this film, the agents of all the action. Gigi Darlene uses them like weapons, pointing them in the necessary direction and making sure she’s got her target located properly, then leaves her breasts to do the rest. Gigi Darlene wasn’t her real name, nor was the actor playing her screen husband called George La Rocque (they were Heli Weinreich and Charles Mazin) but they fit their screen … Read more

The Flash

by
The Flash, in close-up

The Flash is a superhero movie that knows exactly where it is in the scheme of these things – the end of days for costumed heroes – and uses that as a superpower. This film cuts quickly to the chase, doesn’t overdo the lore and knows that laughter is roughage in a superhero diet. It even understands that the obligatory “guys beating the shit out of each other” big finish needs freshening up a touch. We need to talk about Ezra Miller. The onetime star of a film about a teenager with serious issues grew into an adult with problems of his own, problems (multiple lawsuits and accusations flying) that threatened to pull this … Read more

Odd Man Out

by
Johnny hiding in a dark place

The tragedy is Greek but the accents are Irish in 1947’s Odd Man Out, a day in the death of a wounded Republican man on the run in Belfast. The film turned James Mason from a British star into an international one and is often rated as director Carol Reed’s best film. Peckinpah loved it. Polanski also. Mason thought it was the best thing he ever did. An opening statement declares that this isn’t really about partisan struggle in Northern Ireland, where Republican Catholics were engaged in a long struggle against Protestant Unionists. And, true to their word, director Carol Reed and writers FL Green (he also wrote the book the film is … Read more

Coup 53

by
Ralph Fiennes as Norman Darbyshire

It took Iranian exile Taghi Amirani more than ten years to make Coup 53, a documentary about the 1953 coup against the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh. The coup was organised and paid for by the US and UK governments. While the US long ago admitted that the CIA had a role in bringing Mosaddegh down, the ever-secretive British have never owned up. At first it looks like that’s what Amirani is up to, getting the British to come clean. But as his film winds along, it becomes clear he has grander objectives. He unpicks the story of Mosaddegh’s downfall in detail – here’s how as a foreign agent you … Read more

I Saw What You Did

by
Libby, Kit and young Tess

Master of the kitsch gimmick William Castle’s 1965 shocker I Saw What You Did is a cautionary tale about the terrible things that happen to nice teenage girls who make prank phone calls. It’s also notable for being the last appearance in an American film by Joan Crawford. Though not her last film – 1967’s Berserk and 1970’s Trog were shot in the UK – it is like them a horror film, as befits a star who had been around since the 1920s and had become along the way a bit of a gargoyle. However, it’s not really about her. Instead attention focuses on Libby and Kit, two teenagers having a fun night … Read more

Dark aka Dying of the Light Director’s Cut

by
Nicolas Cage as Evan Lake

Dark is writer/director Paul Schrader’s cut of Dying of the Light, the 2014 spy thriller that was taken from him, re-edited, de-kinked and reworked into something more akin to what the studio wanted – a Bourne movie. Schrader was not happy about it at the time and you might remember him, his stars Nicolas Cage and Anton Yelchin and executive producer Nicolas Winding Refn all posing for pictures in matching T shirts bearing the “non-disparagement” clause in their contracts, which prevented them from saying anything bad about the movie. Point made, point taken. Originally Refn had been meant to direct the film, with Harrison Ford starring and Channing Tatum in the Yelchin role. But … Read more

Last Woman on Earth

by
Betsey Jones-Moreland aka the last woman on earth

Chinatown is what the writer Robert Towne will be remembered for, rather than Last Woman on Earth, a cheap and short B movie cranked out by one-man movie-making machine Roger Corman in 1960. But it’s worth a look, not just because it was Towne’s first screenplay but also because he acts in it, under the alias Edward Wain. The screenplay is credited to Towne, though, which says a lot about where his priorities lie. Corman and Towne open the action at a cock fight in Puerto Rico, where rich but dodgy businessman Harold Gern and bored trophy wife Evelyn meet Harold’s accountant, Martin Joyce (Towne). While the men chat, Corman’s camera lingers on … Read more

Beau Is Afraid

by
Joaquin Phoenix as Beau

Three’s a trend, so they say, and with Beau Is Afraid writer/director Ari Aster does just what his previous two films, Hereditary and Midsommar, did – he gets everyone talking. Terrible, some said. Brilliant, said others. Maybe it can be both at the same time, you could conclude, sitting right on the fence. And, fence-sitting coming naturally to some people, that is what it is – a brilliant meta-movie that simply doesn’t know when to stop and so outstays its welcome. In one of many comedy moments which seem less well advised the longer Beau Is Afraid goes on – it’s three hours long – Aster starts the action at the moment Beau … Read more

Dementia 13

by
Luana Anders as interloper Louise

So, a Francis Ford Coppola movie with significant action taking place on a boat. That would be Dementia 13 (aka The Haunted and the Hunted), the director’s first mainstream movie (if we’re ignoring sexploitationers The Bellboy and the Playgirls and Tonight for Sure). Make me something that’s a bit Psycho-esque was producer Roger Corman’s instruction to Coppola, who had already been working with Corman in Ireland on 1963’s The Young Racers. There was money left over from that film, so Corman gave it to Coppola, and lent him the cast and crew from The Young Racers to make his film. The only significant other instruction was that the finished movie needed to have … Read more

Master Gardener

by
Narvel and Maya

The guy who wrote Taxi Driver is at it again. Master Gardener, as so often with Paul Schrader, is a film about human beings in need of redemption, a worthless humanity rather a wicked world. Schrader, it comes as no surprise to learn, was raised in the Calvinist Christian Reformed Church. Joel Edgerton’s Narvel Roth could almost be an older version of Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle. Roth is a guy with a complicated history – or so the alarming tattoos all over his back and chest suggest – who has put his past behind him and now leads a sedate and austere life as the head gardener on an estate owned by grande … Read more