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Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter
There’s a bat stuck “splat!” on to someone’s face at a certain point in Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, which just about sums up this film made in 1972 (released in 1974), an attempt by writer/director Brian Clemens and his crew to breathe new life into the vampire genre and the Hammer Studio’s output. Clemens was the moving spirit behind the British TV spy-fi series The Avengers, which had ceased production in 1969 after an eight-year run. Never one to let the grass grow under his feet, in the interim he’d created the comedy series My Wife Next Door, and written for TV shows The Champions and The Protectors, and also penned the screenplay … Read more
Zola
A nasty-ass neo-noir, Zola is based on the true story of Detroit dancer and waitress A’Ziah King, Zola to her friends. Over 148 tweets written in a clear and vivid prose style she laid out how her new stripper friend Stefani had tricked her into taking a job as a prostitute. Tweet one starts, “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out?” The tweets went viral and the story got picked up by Rolling Stone, who turned it into a feature: Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted. Movie offers followed. At what point James Franco came on board is unclear … Read more
Woman in the Dunes
Whether you call it Woman in the Dunes, Woman OF the Dunes, or go with the original Japanese title, Suna No Onna, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s wildfire success from 1964 (arthouse wildfire – it’s relative) is surely unique in being the only absurdist erotic Japanese drama. Tarkovsky rated it as one of his top ten films, and you can see why from almost the first shot, which announces that there’s going to be less a narrative, more a poetic approach to the storytelling with an image of a boulder that in fact turns out to be – as the camera pulls back, back, back – just one among millions of grains of sand, sliding, flowing, rolling … Read more
Encounter
Close Encounters? No, just Encounter, though the choice of title is deliberate. Instead of Richard Dreyfuss on the road, heading towards alien contact, Encounter offers Riz Ahmed’s Malik on the road with his two sons, heading towards something… or perhaps something else… or perhaps nothing at all. It’s all a massive tease, really, and it’s Michael Pearce doing the teasing. He was the writer and director of Beast, a similarly playful story all about innocent people who might not be innocent, strapped to a slightly sensational (if you live in Edwardian England) story about a pretty young woman (played by Jessie Buckley) of some status going all Lady Chatterley with the possibly murderous, dirty, … Read more
Force of Evil
Though tricked out in an almost offhand way like a film noir, Force of Evil is actually something else entirely, an old school Greek tragedy, featuring a noble hero cursed by a fatal flaw in his character, one which will first be exposed and then cause his downfall. John Garfield plays Joe Morse, a lawyer working for the boss of an illegal numbers racket. As the curtain goes up on a story that isn’t always that easy to follow, boss Ben Tucker (Roy Roberts) is trying to turn his business legit, but first he wants to bankrupt all of the smaller rivals also running numbers rackets so he can come through the other … Read more
Red Rocket
Red Rocket is the latest news bulletin from Scuzzville USA by Sean Baker, who gave us bitching transexual sex workers in Tangerine (the one “shot on an iPhone”) and the travails of motel-dwelling poor white trash in The Florida Project. Both of those flirted with poverty porn and so does Red Rocket, more literally this time with the story of busted porn star Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), who returns to his Texas hometown to re-ingratiate himself with his his estranged wife Lexi, who lives with her mother in however you designate a dwelling that’s one up from a trailer. Constant background noise, or something big and ugly hovering at the edge of the … Read more
Shoot the Piano Player
How do you follow a classic like The 400 Blows? With another one, if you’re François Truffaut. Shoot the Piano Player (aka Shoot the Pianist, or Tirez sur le pianiste in the original French) debuted in 1960, one year after 400 Blows had made Truffaut’s name as a director. Just in case there was any doubt about his talent, he’d also written Breathless (A bout de souffle), another classic, with Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol in the interim. Let’s get the story out of the way, because in a way it’s not interesting, though the way Truffaut tells it is. Charles Aznavour plays a concert pianist called Edouard Saroyan who meets a young … Read more
Labyrinth of Cinema
At a certain point words won’t do. So it is with Labyrinth of Cinema, a wild kaleidoscopic three hours designed as a farewell by an old man to an art and craft he has loved, and to the world he’s been living in for around 80 years. The man is called Nobuhiko Ôbayashi and he’d been making films since 1944 – his first one minute short – when he was eight years old. In 2016 Ôbayashi was diagnosed with terminal cancer while making his previous movie, Hanagatami, and told he had only three months to live. He finished that film and, amazingly, started work on this next one, designed as a vast summing up … Read more
On Dangerous Ground
One of the most cultish of Hollywood directors, Nicholas Ray, made his directorial debut in 1949. 1951’s On Dangerous Ground was his seventh film in two years (eighth, if you count Roseanna McCoy, where he replaced director Irving Reiss). If this maverick made films in a hurry, he also made films that moved at speed. On Dangerous Ground almost tells two stories before heading off to tell two more. The linking factor is Robert Ryan, in one of his trademark masculine-but-neurotic roles, playing Jim Wilson, a cop with a tendency to punch first and think later. First up, there’s a cop killer on the loose, and Wilson, along with buddies Pop (Charles Kemper) … Read more
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
The world is at Peak Ben Gazzara and Peak John Cassavetes in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, a neo-noir from 1976 full of techniques – handheld camera, sparse (if any) lighting, crash editing, semi-improv – that seemed weird at the time but have since been absorbed into mainstream film-making. Cassavetes had worked on the early stages of the film with Martin Scorsese (a protégé) and there are parallels with the style and content of Mean Streets – a “hey we’re just guys talking” aspect to the storytelling and a loose shooting style which Cassavetes pushes a lot further than Scorsese. Here, the camera often becomes more obviously subjective and emotional, the image swinging … Read more
The Tunnel
In the opening moments of The Tunnel, an onscreen notice informs us that there are over 1,100 tunnels in Norway, and that, in the event of an emergency situation in any one of them, it’s really just a case of every person for themselves. There have been eight major fires in recent years, we’re further informed. Guess what’s about to happen? The Tunnel is a disaster movie happy to stick to the formula laid down in the ancient texts like The Poseidon Adventure. And so it is that in The Tunnel a group of people going about their every lives is suddenly subjected to an extreme ordeal testing their physical and moral endurance. … Read more
The Tall Target
A director on his way up meets a star on his way down in The Tall Target, a 1951 B movie about a plot to assassinate president-elect Abraham Lincoln in 1861, the year the American Civil War broke out. Anthony Mann directs, one year on from his breakthrough into the big time with the western Winchester ’73, and Dick Powell stars as the New York cop who’s uncovered the plot and is finding the world reluctant to hear him out. Bizarrely, the cop is called John Kennedy, and the plot consists of shooting the president from an upstairs window using a rifle with a telescopic sight. Work that into one of the many … Read more
