Popular Reviews
Soul to Squeeze
Hell is someone else’s pubic hair in your bath. WM Weikart’s feature debut hits us with this and other observations – some grimly funny others just bizarre – in Soul to Squeeze, a psychological moshpit of a drama about a guy on a trip into his own unconscious mind. There’s a Red Hot Chili Peppers song of the same title, and Weikart borrows its sentiment – “Insanity it seems/Has got me by my soul to squeeze/Well all the love from me/With all the dying trees I scream…” – to tell the story of a disturbed man, Jacob (Michael Thomas Santos), who opts for a revolutionary treatment designed to rid him of his psychiatric woes. All … Read more
Dead Reckoning
Dead Reckoning cashes in on the Humphrey Bogart persona big time – a drawl and a rough and ready way with women but beneath it all a courtly gent with a thirst for truth. It was made in 1946 when peacetime mopping-up was the order of the day. War is over. Men are returning to where they came from. Things are going back to normal. Or that’s what’s meant to be happening, at any rate. As we meet Bogart’s Rip Murdock, he’s covered in blood, scared and on the run. If this is a reset then something has gone wrong. With plenty of voiceover from Bogart, and the useful shimmer of an extended … Read more
Cuckoo
Allusional rather than visceral, Cuckoo is a stew of horror sub-genres served with a big side order of Grimm, and is pretty fabulous if you are used to drinking deeply at the well of the macabre. If you are not a horror nut, it’s probably a bit less necessary though fascinating all the same. It’s the story of a young woman who has been uprooted from her old life in the USA after the death of her mother and taken to Germany, where Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) is now expected to fit in with her estranged dad’s family without making a fuss. Dad Luis (Marton Csokas) is now married to Beth (Jessica Henwick, so … Read more
Vampires vs. the Bronx
Cockneys vs Zombies given a wipe-down and relocated to the US, maybe? But Vampires vs. the Bronx isn’t a reworking of the 2012 British film even though it’s also about the denizens of a run-down part of a world city taking on a mythical horror foe. Are the vampires even the foe, or is it gentrification? This film gets caught up in its cape over that one but survives largely on likability (it’s certainly not scary) and that’s down to the casting of the three youngsters at the centre of it – Jaden Michael, Gerald Jones III and Gregory Diaz IV as three 14-year-olds, softies in a hard world, though one of them … Read more
Decoy
Decoy is a tightly wound, plot-driven noir from producer/director Jack Bernhard, who made it in an attempt to turn his British wife, “Miss Jean Gillie” as she’s billed, into a Hollywood star. It didn’t work, though Gillie is actually very good as Bernhard’s female lead. Anticipating the femme fatale character of Gloria Grahame to some extent, complete with overpainted top lipline, Gillie plays Margot Shelby, the girlfriend of condemned murderer Frankie Olins (Robert Armstrong), who comes up with a plan to spring him from death row – by injecting an antidote to the lethal toxin administered in the gas chamber, thus bringing Frankie back to life after his execution. Do not try this … Read more
Call Northside 777
Call Northside 777 tells the true story of a miscarriage of justice – Joseph Majczek framed for killing a cop in 1932 and sentenced to 99 years – and the crusading journalist from the Chicago Times who got the case overturned. The same story was the source material for Railroaded!, released the year before in 1947. It’s probably the better movie all told – better pace, fewer digressions – but Call Northside 777 has the advantage of a big spend and very well cast actors in its lead roles. James Stewart as cynical journalist PJ McNeal , Lee J Cobb as ballsy editor Brian Kelly and Richard Conte as the wrongly imprisoned man. Joe … Read more
After Yang
Philosophical (ie moody) sci-fi movie After Yang picks up on Philip K Dick’s sci-fi reflections on the possibility of consciousness in bots. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and all that. Dick’s stories tends to arrive on screen dark – Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report – but director Kogonada decides to go one better than any of those with a film that is almost stygian in its gloom. No matter which way you come at this movie – soundtrack, acting, delivery of speech, clothing, cinematography, framing, screenplay – that doomy, gloomy mood is there. It makes for a meditative experience, if you’re up for something that could also be … Read more
Panic in the Streets
Steve Soderbergh’s Contagion seemed to be required viewing during Covid, Panic in the Streets not so much. But Elia Kazan’s film from 1950 has much to say about epidemics, why nipping them in the bud is important, how government can be a force for good and why scepticism needs to be countered not with shrillness but facts, reason and the force of argument. All this wrapped up in a tense, noirish thriller starring Richard Widmark and handing Jack Palance the first of a long string of “mad dog” roles, which he was uniquely suited to playing. As Soderbergh, so Kazan – realism and immediacy are the key concerns. Panic in the Streets is … Read more
The Dig
The Dig re-imagines the events around a discovery so fabulous it needs no re-imagining – the excavation of the Sutton Hoo hoard. First unearthed in the 1930s, and originally thought to be Viking, the hoard turned out to be much older, Anglo Saxon, and eventually yielded up remarkable treasures made of gold, plus examples of everyday household objects that rewrote our understanding of the time, and perhaps most eye-catching of all, a 6th-century ship, buried in a mound as a funeral barque for its owner. You don’t actually learn an awful lot about the actual treasures of Sutton Hoo in The Dig, though the skeletal frame of the part-excavated ship acts as a visual … Read more
Shanghai Express
A train heads from Peking to Shanghai and a woman from disgrace to redemption in 1932’s Shanghai Express, the fourth collaboration between director Josef von Sternberg and star Marlene Dietrich. Another transformation is evident, of Dietrich, from the plubby Mädchen in The Blue Angel two years before to the star who’s all cheekbones and chiselled angles. This is the film that gave us the iconic image of Dietrich toplit and eyes imploringly turned heavenward. DP Lee Garmes got the credit for it and won an Oscar for this film’s spectacular lighting but Von Sternberg did almost all of it, according to Dietrich’s biography anyway. Strangely, it doesn’t look like her film at all … 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
The 100 Candles Game
Compendium horror – who’s it for? That question formed in my mind as The 100 Candles Game told its seven different stories, plus another one that links them all together, Arabian Nights style. Are audiences hungry for this sort of thing? I don’t think so. Film-makers love the portmanteau horror film, though, because it gives directors a chance to hawk their wares, in affordable chunks, often supported by a producer who knows his way around the business. But on the whole they are patchy affairs, usually a mix of the OK, the pretty skanky and, rarely, a magnificent outlier. There is no true magnificence here, though the film-makers on display are a lot … Read more
