Review

The Rule of Jenny Pen

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Jenny Pen

Horror films are often about old age without being explicit about it. Think of all those shuffling zombies. The Rule of Jenny Pen cuts right to the chase to tell a story about nasty goings-on in a care home, where tangential horror occurs but the care home itself is the real concern of co-writer/director James Ashcroft. It’s a punchy and effective 100 minutes or so. Stephen King is a fan (“one of the best movies I’ve seen this year”). Maybe you should be too. Ashcroft starts with a joke. The actor Geoffrey Rush, five years absent from our screens thanks to legal wrangles, playing a judge. A New Zealand judge struck down by … Read more

Operation Cross Eagles

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Richard Conte

Operation Cross Eagles is the only film Richard Conte ever directed. Great at playing bad guys and constipated good guys, in Conte’s one and only go calling the shots he never quite works out what he’s meant to do with the camera and the film is a bit of a mess. That said, it is a fine example of a particular type of movie made at a particular time and came out the same year as Where Eagles Dare, 1968, which does the same thing but better. We’re talking not just about the adventure movie but about the adventure movie stacked with ageing thespians, in reality too old for the action hijinks their … Read more

Crumb Catcher

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John and his crumb catcher

In Crumb Catcher a doorstep salesman makes his big pitch in a revenge-of-the-nerd thriller with a comic edge, served straight-up with no messing about. Bloody and funny, it’s not bad for a debut at all, though director Chris Skotchdopole did co-write the story with Larry Fessenden (who’s also a producer), one of the stalwarts of low-budget horror. None of the relationships in it are quite right and Skotchdopole and Fessenden get us straight onto that trail with opening scenes set at the wedding of Shane (Rigo Garay) and Leah (Ella Rae Peck). A street guy, possibly the son of a gangbanger, Shane is also a writer and is currently in the middle of … Read more

The House of Laughing Windows

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Restorer Stefano with girlfriend Francesca

Pupi Avati isn’t one of the big names of giallo and yet The House of Laughing Windows (La casa dalle finestre che ridono) easily stands alongside or even ahead of the best of Argento, Bava and Fulci. It’s a triumph not of concept or style, though it has both of those, but of a thousand careful craft decisions. It is simply a beautifully made film with a fabulous gothic eloquence, luxuriating in old places and odd faces as it tells a story about a picture restorer in 1950s Italy being menaced by characters from the church fresco he is working on. There’s a hint of Don’t Look Now in the idea, but really … Read more

Thunderbolts*

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The Thunderbolts group shot

What is that little asterisk doing at the end of Thunderbolts*? Yes, that one there. By the end of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s 36th adventure all has been revealed. Or maybe not. Thunderbolts is both a sequel and an origin story tonally harking back to the MCU when Joss Whedon had a hand in it. It’s not quite as quippy and doesn’t reference popular culture as much as Whedon would, but it’s on his spectrum, and the film is full of actors who do that sort of thing well. Like Julia Louis-Dreyfus, David Harbour and Geraldine Viswanathan (underused, word of her upstaging superpower obviously having got out). Florence Pugh, though, Florence Pugh. She … Read more

Szindbád

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Szindbád and a conquest in an alley

“One of the unsung masters of Hungarian cinema,” says the press blurb about Zoltán Huszárik, director of Szindbád. Full disclosure: I’d never heard of him before a review copy of the Blu-ray boxset fell onto my doormat. It contains Huszárik’s entire collected output, two films and a handful of shorts. Hungary is quite a source of “masters” of cinema, from Alexander Korda and Bela Lugosi to Michael Curtiz, Vilmos Zsigmond, Béla Tarr and György Fehér. Having now watched Szindbád (with Csontváry and the shorts still to come), I’d happily add Huszárik to that list. He’s clearly a remarkable talent, with a visual style all his own and a confidence to match. His film … Read more

Hell of a Summer

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Mike

Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard met as actors on the Ghostbusters: Afterlife shoot, realised they had similar tastes and decided to write a movie together. Hell of a Summer is the result. It’s an “everyone dies” slasher set at a summer camp where counsellors have assembled before the kids arrive to have some bongs’n’beers before settling down to their more serious duties. Gruesome comic death is the idea, which Bryk and Wolfhard establish in a pre-credits sequence in which a guitar played around a camp fire ends up where campfire guitars should probably end up more often, and both the senior counsellors at this remote place take a one-way journey to eternity. After … Read more

Vampyr

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Julian West in his coffin

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr was the first psychological vampire movie, or so some of the books say. Cut to FW Murnau in the wings asking forlornly, “So what was Nosferatu?” made ten whole years earlier in 1922. How about Vampyr being the great Dreyer’s first sound movie? There is no doubt about that, even though Dreyer is working as if he’s still making a silent movie, right down to the use of intertitle cards. Really, this is a silent movie with added sound. Murnau stole the Dracula story from Bram Stoker but Dreyer bases his film on In a Glass Darkly, an earlier collection of gothic shockers by another Irish author, Sheridan Le … Read more

Walker, Texas Ranger: Trial by Fire

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Close up of Chuck Norris

So this is how it ended. The 2005 TV movie Walker, Texas Ranger: Trial by Fire was meant to be a reboot for Chuck Norris and co. Instead poor ratings turned it into a swansong for Norris’s most famous character, the taciturn tough-but-fair cop who over an eight-year run on TV (1993-2001) had always had a martial-arts roundhouse kick at the ready for anyone who wouldn’t come quietly. Norris borrowed most of his shtick from Clint Eastwood in his Man with No Name days. Just stand there and look enigmatic is a sound choice if you can’t really act, which Norris can’t. That lack of basic chops – he’s a beat behind even … Read more

Wooden Crosses

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A man lies dead

1932’s Wooden Crosses (Les croix de bois) is more death, less glory than your average drama about the First World War. That might explain why it doesn’t always make it onto the “best of” lists, where The Big Parade, 1917, All Quiet on the Western Front, Paths of Glory and Westfront usually jostle for a place on the podium. It’s more about the collective experience of warfare than individual heroics, which might also explain that absence, though there is a lead character, in the shape of Gilbert Demachy (Pierre Blanchar). Constructed in classic style, it starts with war being declared to scenes of national jubilation in France. Men eagerly signing up. Trains loaded … Read more