What was the last movie you watched?

[MrTorso]

History of the World Part 1 (1981)
Decided to watch after learning Part 2 is coming out after more than 40 years as a Hulu limited series.
Had seen it before over 30 years ago and remembered enjoying it. There is a line in the movie that I still use whenever anyone says I or someone else says someone looks like something. "You look like you don't feel well" or "you look like my cousin" gets an immediate "well you look like a bucket of shit" response. (In movie what prompted that response is when Mel Brooks is told he looks like the piss boy).
Despite part 1 being in the title and the movie ending with teasers for part 2, part of the joke was that a part 2 was never planned.
Current viewing - movie hasn't aged well. Full of old vaudeville like routines and juvenile fart jokes. Didn't hate it but only scene that I thoought rose to Mel Brooke at his best was the inqusition musical scene.
Also had forgotten that a number of jokes in the movie were based on cameos - many, many of whom you probably have to be my age or older to recognize.

I can still watch History of the World and laugh. I watched the trailers for the new one on Hulu and didn't even chuckle once.

[stethacantus]

Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings ( 2018 )
There were only three Detective Dee films in the franchise?  For some reason I assumed thee were a lot more. The first film in the franchise, Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, was a fictional fantasy based on the real life  Chinese government official Di Renjie who lived in the late 600s. A series of novels where Dee solved crimes as a magistrate  was written in he late 1800s, with a revival of interest in the character as a detective in the 1940s, leading to both more novels, and later  a bunch of television series. Tsui Hark brought the character to the big screen with Andy Lau as Dee. However, Lau didn't commit to a sequel, so instead Hark made a prequel, Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon, starring Mark Chao as a younger version of Dee on his first investigation. I was convinced that a lot more of this series existed, and I had more than two Detective Dee films in my collection before I bought this. But after checking with Wikipedia, it appears that only three films in the franchise exist.

The Detective Dee films are technically fantasies where Dee tries to solve something appearing to be caused by the supernatural, but  turn out to have a rational explanation. Well, if you can call it that. The rational explanations turn out to be science fiction  technology masquerading as supernatural. Al of this as an excuse for very expensive CGI mayhem. This was probably the weakest of the three Detective Dee films, and yet still better than most contemporary Chinese fantasy films.

The Eternals ( 2021 )
I usually begin the new year updating my superhero collection from the previous year's home video releases. Which included completing the MCU Phase Four theatrical releases, after which I catch up on all of the DC films, and a few other superhero films not tied into a cinematic universe. I had been hoping for Disney to begin allowing their MCU series made for Disney+ to get a Blu-ray release. After all, they are now considered chapters in the MCU, which means probably some of the story continues in those shows. So I had no idea if by watching the latest MCU films, I would be lost because they pick up after where Loki or Wandavision left off. I do know that Black Widow ends with a post credit scene that continues into Falcon & the Winter Soldier. Unfortunately, Disney has not yet relented. I suspect they will once Disney+ begins to fail, which it and all the other streaming services will do once people decide it cost too much to subscribe to everything and begin subscribing to one service at a time, binging the shows for a month or two, then cancelling the subscription and moving on to the next service to binge. So.. Disney+ for November and December, Paramount+ for January and February, Amazon for March, Hulu for April, then Netflix for May and June, etc. Thats what you get when you spread content across several pay platforms, jack up their subscriptions, then float the idea of also adding commercials. As subscriptions finally drop off, Disney will begin to finally realize how much revenue they ceded to the bootleggers selling their Disney+ only content on unauthorized releases, and realize the idea of forcing all the Marvel and Star Wars fans to subscribe to their service was not worth sacrificing their home video revenue.

The next two films in the MCU involve Doctor Strange and the concept of the multiverse, which as far as I can tell, is part of a story that began in either Loki or Wandavision.  So it is possible I could get very lost watching those films, or at the least stumble upon a spoiler for those series. The Eternals is mercifully not connected to the MCU other than the characters mentioning some of the events of the Infinity War, but mostly to explain why they have been on Earth for thousands of years, yet did not help to fight Thanos. Someone submitted this on their 25 list for the Worst Superhero Films LoC, and it got a lot of negative reviews, so I was expecting the worst. Okay, I admit that maybe a plot that can be summarized in a single sentence has no business being in a two and a half hour film.  But I didn't think this was bad. Perhaps I would have thought different if I had seen this in a movie theater.  It's not as thrilling as your average MCU film. But it didn't have me wishing it was over already as some bad movies do, or even having me check the clock to see how much time it has been on and how much time it has left, as I do with moderately bad films. It does set up for a good sequel, where these characters will have a lot more to do once they are no longer bound to an origin story. At least, it ends with a set up for a sequel and the caption "The Eternals Will Return" which Marvel Studios left on the Blu-ray release. Although, with the Fantastic Four and the X-Men waiting to join the MCU, there isn't much need for these characters. So perhaps they will show up in someone else's solo film, like they are doing with The Hulk?

[Charles Castle]

I wasn't expecting much of Malignant (2021, directed by James Wan). The film received withering reviews from other quarters and my own experience with James Wan's other horror movies has been indifferent to actively hostile. So imagine my surprise when I found myself cackling like a maniac when the film turned its cards face up and let its freak flag fly. I wasn't expecting a movie that so gleefully followed its muse over the cliff, but by golly, when that moment arrived I was ride or die for the duration. Mind you, I don't want to suggest that Malignant is a "good" movie. It's not, really. James Wan is still who he is and the movie is still burdened with the family über alles moralizing Wan picked up in the Insidious and Conjuring and Fast and Furious movies, but the raw materials? Oh, mercy!

Following a prelude at an experimental hospital where a doctor vows to "cut out the cancer" from an unseen troublesome patient, the story follows one Madison Mitchell, who is pregnant as the film begins. She is the principal earner for her marriage, and bone tired from her pregnancy. It's her third pregnancy; the previous two ended in miscarriage. Her husband is a no-account lout who would rather sit around at home drinking and watching sports than get a job, and he's hostile to her suggestions otherwise. He's also physically abusive, and after he slams her into the wall hard enough to make the back of her head bleed and threaten the health of her unborn baby, she locks the bedroom door and curls up in bed. Her husband is consigned to the couch. He wakes up in the middle of the night to find the house's electricity flickering. He sees a figure in the living room which vanishes as the light blinks. He thinks it's Madison, but the shadow figure ambushes him and hits him so hard that the cops the next day compare his corpse to a car accident victim. Madison has also been assailed, and is found unconscious upstairs. At first, the cops think it's a garden variety home invasion, but since there is no evidence of a forced entry, their suspicions fall on Madison. Those suspicions are heightened when Madison begins to see visions of other murders. Her visions include a glimpse of the murderer, who she recognizes as Gabriel. Gabriel was her imaginary friend when she was a child. The cops are understandably skeptical. Madison's adopted sister, Sydney, takes matters into her own hands and begins investigating both the victims - they are all associated with a sinister experimental hospital - and Madison's past before her adoption. What she discovers is horrifying, but Madison is taken into custody for the kidnapping of a woman found in her attic before Sydney can give the cops her research. And Gabriel has his own ideas about Madison's incarceration.

My first impression of Malignant: its opening shot is overtly Gothic. It reminds me of the locales where those remakes of William Castle's films in the early aughts were set. The establishing shot of the experimental hospital looks straight out of the 1999 version of The House on Haunted Hill. It lacks only Jeffrey Combs as a mad doctor. There is mad science enough, though. The opening sequence suggests a lot: is the monster in this film a mutant? The result of an experiment gone haywire? It's obviously got some X-men shit going on because it can control electricity. As the doctor is dictating her notes, you know that those notes are going to be discovered thirty years on in some kind of expository discovery. Sure enough. The credit sequence features a bunch of surgical footage that suggests that this film is never going to play on TNT. My second impression: the house in the present is still Gothic, with hardwood interiors and dark spaces aplenty. It's one of those movie houses that appears to be larger on the inside than on the outside and in at least one sequence later in the film, shot directly overhead, it seems impossibly tall, too. Third impression: this film has a sense of horror movie justice. The acts its characters commit in life determine if they become monster chum. Poor Derek signs his own death warrant when he lays hands on his wife. You might as well light up a neon sign over his head saying "Victim!" The film is obliging on this point. At this point, I was convinced that this was a variant of The Brood: A pregnant woman creates a monster from the id to murder her familial tormentors? Yeah. That tracks. The film does not oblige on this point, however. It has another, different movie as a role model, one equally steeped in body horror, one equally steeped in rage.

The film pokes around as a mystery for a while. It uses the Seattle Underground as a setting, which would seem a natural locale for a horror movie, but it has sat fallow since it was used in the second Kolchak TV movie, The Night Strangler. The mundane locations have the chilly underlit mopes of most contemporary studio-made horror films. The murder sequences bring the film alive when they come, and Gabriel's lair is anything but naturalistic. It's got a big damned fan as a backdrop that should be visible from the exterior of the space, but which for some reason isn't. It's there to add atmosphere, one presumes. Wan uses a lot of the tricks he developed on the Conjuring films when he places Gabriel in the frame, only for him to vanish once a curtain blows over him or a light flashes off then on again. Wan is a filmmaker who is lazy about his techniques, and doesn't develop new ones unless he absolutely has to. The film saves its most batshit insane elements for the last act, once Gabriel's true nature is revealed and the film plunges off the rails and out into space. Once Sydney finds the video tapes of Madison's pre-adoption life, and once Madison herself is stuck in a cell with a bunch of women who view her as bougie and soft, the movie uncorks its lunacy and gives it full reign. Its like letting a demented djinni out of its bottle and watching it wreck the place and I couldn't stop laughing from that point onward. I had to stop the movie for a bit to catch my breath. This part was more fun than I could have ever hoped for, with Gabriel doling out violent mayhem Terminator-style.

But, as I say, this film isn't especially good. A great deal of time is wasted following the cops on the case, which contributes very little to the narrative train of the film. It's not the cops who uncover the backstory, in spite of the emphasis on handsome detective Shaw and jaded detective Moss, and the side-narrative of the cute CSI who has a crush on Shaw goes nowhere interesting. A more disciplined film would either find a way for this stuff to contribute or cut it to the bone. The cops seem to function solely to place Gabriel in the police station at the end of the movie so he can engage in an ultraviolent tantrum as he springs Madison from jail. I can imagine the film completely stripped of this stuff. That said, the scene with Madison in lock-up, when she reacts to taking a beating, is one of the highlights of the film and I wouldn't lose it for the world. Wan isn't careful with the geography of scenes either. Even considering the sometimes sketchy nature of the film's ostensible on-screen reality, it feels like this has to indulge in a lot of offscreen teleportation to make the plot work. And Wan almost fumbles the whole thing in the last three minutes. Hell, maybe he does fumble the film outright with his "the real blood ties are the ones we made along the way" bullshit. This sort of thing is so cloying it makes my pancreas hurt just to watch it. There's a regressive subtext throughout the film that conflates happiness with motherhood without even offering Madison any other paths to self-fulfillment. When it's revealed near the end of the film, Gabriel's greatest crime toward Madison is the murder of her unborn children, which is the shock that wakes her up to what Gabriel really is. Nevermind the trail of corpses that has led the audience to this point. Unborn lives, to some viewers, will outrank living adult human beings. This seems either tone-deaf to it's political moment, or on a specific side of the body politic. In any event, it's troubling, but maybe not surprising given the reactionary nature of some of Wan's other films.

The most frustrating thing about Malignant is the way it suggests themes of identity, of invading psychic entities, and of secret sharer doppelgangers, only to leave them unexplored. Given the way the plot all falls out, this could be a rich exploration of guilt and epistomology - the film overtly changes the set of reality onscreen, after all. This would all match the Gothic imagery and plot structure and might result in a richer viewing experience. What is Madison's culpability in Gabriel's crimes? What is her legal exposure after the end of the film? What does a life sharing her mind with Gabriel hold for her going forward (other than potential sequels, given the filmmakers). I mean, a more intellectually curious filmmaker could fill those dead spots where the cops are flailing around with all of these quesitons. How would this play if it had been made by one of the Cronenbergs (Possessor has a familial resemblance to this film, after all)? Or Wan's occasional collaborator, Leigh Whannell (Upgrade is also a cousin)? Wan has the wit to frame his story as a Gothic - complete with a literal madwoman in the attic - but seems indifferent to the possibilities of the Gothic's occasional daliances with doppelgangers even though it's right there in the visuals. There are numerous shots of Madison staring into mirrors (in one she sees the reflection of one of Gabriel's victims staring back at her). There's one particular shot of her staring at her own shadow as if Gabriel IS that shadow. It's like it's the shadow who occasionally slips the leash from Peter Pan. So Wan must know what he has. The imagery is too spot on. But he seems unable or unwilling to think about these things except in terms of how they play out as plot. He's content to describe Gabriel as The Devil, and the motivations behind the film's murders as "The devil made me do it." While I know that most movie-goers just want filmmakers to tell them a story, unadorned plot by itself is boring. Give me more.

Still, I can't discount the genuine pleasure to be had for about forty minutes of its run time, playing almost to the very end of the film. Hell, a lot of horror movies spin their wheels for longer and for less pay-off. Malignant has a genuine monster that is starkly horrifying when revealed on screen and that's not nothing in this day and age. It reminds me a bit of Orphan, which similarly jumps the rails as it reveals its big surprise. If you're unwilling to follow it, its flaws are its undoing and I can well understand an audience that won't dig this at all. But if you are willing to follow it, you might be transported. It's just a matter of matching its wavelength.

[stethacantus]

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin ( 1978 )
So, the movie I was planning to see this week still has not arrived from Amazon as it is still being bounced back and fourth between Amazon facilities
See This Thread: https://forum.rifftrax.com/index.php/topic,36251.0.html
But then the Shaw Scope Vol 2 set I ordered on Friday was unexpectantly delivered overnight. So I cracked that one open instead. As mentioned before, I had begun collecting the Shaw Brothers films over a decade ago when they were being released by Image, Dragon Dynasty, Media-Blasters under their Tokyo Shock imprint label, BCI which was the relaunch label of Brentwood Video, and Well Go. There was a lot of disappointment with the North American releases. Media acquired the rights tot 20 movies and released all 20. But they sought  obscure movies that had cult followings, about half of which were horror and fantasy films with little or no martial arts. They had no interest in releasing anything outside of the 20 the acquired the rights to.  Dragon Dynasty went after the most popular films, such as Five Deadly Venoms and One Armed Swordsman. They were halfway through releasing the movies they had the rights to when the label suddenly stopped releasing new films and began re-releasing their catalog in four to five movie budget sets. Then ceased all releases, yet continued to claim Dragon Dynasty was not a dead label on their website. Tokyo Shock acquired the rights to the popular films Dragon Dynasty didn't get, mostly with the Venom Mob. After releasing 13 movies on DVD, Tokyo Shock announced but did not release a popular Venom Mob movie called Magnificent Ruffians.  Financial troubles with the parent company Media Blasters had them decide to discontinue releasing any new Shaw Brothers films.  Much like Dragon Dynasty, they burned off their surplus discs in budget sets. Both Dragon Dynasty and Tokyo Shock held on to the North America release rights to a good chunk of the martial arts films in the Shaw Brothers library. BCI had the rights to a bunvch of critically acclaimed Shaw Brothers films, but only released before their parent company shut down the entire label. The rights to and video masters of the Shaw Brothers films were given to Funimation, a company that releases anime. Funimation was another label the parent company owned, and were forced to release the Shaw Brothers films, including re-releasing the two previous BCI releases. Once those were released, Funimation announced that they would not be acquiring the rights to any more films. The final company to release Shaw Brothers films was Wee Go, who seemed unacquainted with Shaw Brothers, picked a bunch of obscure pot-boilers, and released them as Swordplay films despite them being in the Basher genre.  Well Go has since become the leader in Asian home video releases in North America, but alas, gave up on Shaw Brothers. In the end, a lot of obscure Shaw Brothers films no one expected to see released in the United States got released, and a lot of long sought after Shaw Brothers classics saw no release.

Arrow Video was the first company to begin releasing Shaw Brothers films again in the United States in eight years when Well Go released the last of the films the had the rights to. The Shaw Scope sets have some of the movies North American Shaw Brothers fans have been waiting years to own. Unfortunately, they also have a lot of films that  had previous releases. At least these are Blu-Ray remasters. But it still sucks that I have very little choice but to double dip in order to get a handful of films. Still, Arrow Video had done an excellent job on the set. Many of these are restorations that surpass the original Celestial restorations, are full of extras and commentary by film historians, and come with thick liner note booklets. So are well worth the money. Just sucks that I have to double dip a lot.

Volume 2 includes:

Disk 1
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin ( a.k.a. Master Killer  ) Previously released by Dragon Dynasty

Disk 2
Return to the 36th Chamber ( a.k.a. Return of the Master Killer ) previously released by Dragon Dynasty
Disciples of the 36th Chamber previously released by Dragon Dynasty

Disk 3
Mad Monkey Kung Fu  previously released by Dragon Dynasty
Five Superfighters which is the first North American release.

Disk 4
Invincible Shaolin  previously released by Funimation
The Kid with the Golden Arm previously released by Media Blasters/Tokyo Shock

Disk 5
Magnificent Ruffians  announced but never released by Tokyo Shock
Ten Tigers of Kwangtung previously released by Media Blasters/Tokyo Shock

Disk 6
My Young Auntie previously released by Dragon Dynasty

Disk 7
Mercenaries from Hong Kong first North American release of what appears to be a Gun-Fu film
The Boxer's Omen previously Released by Image. Has since gone out of print and is currently worth a lot of money on eBay

Disk 8
Martial Arts of Shaolin previously released by Dragon Dynasty
The Barefooted Kid as far as I can tell, the first release on home video anywhere on Earth. This was made long after Shaw Brothers Studios closed for good in 1986, so is one of those productions the studio attached their name to in later years. Possibly a tv movie, or collection of episodes of a series.

This week I watched The 36th Chamber of Shaolin.... again. Okay, classic film.  But I just recently rewatched the copy I bought from Dragon Dynasty ( see that review ). so other than better picture quality, nothing new for me here.


Spider-Man: No Way Home ( 2021 )
So why did the MCU introduce the concept of the multiverse? Possibly to clear up the inconsistencies with the MCU television shows which they seem too determined to erase from MCU canon. It has given Sony a way to rectify the mess they made of their Spider-man franchise. So basically, every Spider-man reboot, every spin off that does not include Spiderman, all of them have now been retrofitted into the superior MCU. Franchise fixed!

Oh, and a good spiderman film. But not the best from the MCU.

[Charles Castle]

My son has much simpler demands of movies than I do. For example: when he sits down to watch a movie about dinosaurs, he expects to see those dinos eating people. In this regard, he was mildly disappointed in the original Jurassic Park, in which very few people were actually eaten by dinosaurs and only one was spectacularly eaten on-screen. Mind you, he approved whole-heartedly of the film's disposition of the lawyer character, but in the long run, it was a brief moment. It's fair to say that he was thrilled with Jurassic World (2015, directed by Colin Trevorrow), though. This is a film that throws plenty of chum to the dinosaurs. I suppose I can't fault it for giving the audience what they paid to see.

The story itself finds In-Gen, John Hammond's company, operating Jurassic World, the fulfillment of his dream of opening a theme park dedicated to the dinosaurs his company has bred from fossil DNA. The park has been operating successfully for years, but revenue has plateaued for the company as people become more and more used to the idea of dinosaurs in the world. In order to keep people interested, they must refresh the public's interest with new attractions, even if they have to invent them from whole cloth. Such an attraction is Indominus Rex, the park's newest super-predator and a creature that has never before walked the Earth. It has been cobbled together from the genes of several dinosaurs and other creatures to boot. Park executive Claire Dearing is wrangling a deal for corporate sponsorship of the new exhibit as the film opens. Claire is also wrangling a visit from her nephews, Zach and Gray, as their parents navigate a divorce. She barely has time for them and foists them onto her assistant. On top of this, her boss, CEO Simon Masrani, has some concerns about the Indominus Rex, and asks her to consult with Owen Grady about the safety measures being developed to deal with it. Grady, for himself, is researching velociraptors. He's trained a quartet of them to take his orders, after having them imprint upon him. Head security man Vic Hoskins sees Grady's research as a springboard into military uses for dinosaurs, something that Grady abhors. The Indominus is bright for a dinosaur, it turns out, and Masrani's concerns are well justified. The Indominus plans and executes an escape, and the race is on before it makes it to the parts of the island teeming with theme-park guests - all 21,000 of them.

Whether or not this film qualifies as a "good" movie is going to depend an awful lot on what the viewer brings to the film and what the viewer wants out of it. If, as was the case with my son, all you want is dinosaur mayhem, then this film is your huckleberry. There's oodles of dino mayhem to satisfy even the most jaded paleo action fan. This movie doesn't make the mistake of throwing too few Christians to the velociraptors and tyrannosaurs. The film Jurassic World most resembles in my mind is Piranha. Piranha is the smartest of the Jaws rip-offs of the 1970s and it's makers looked at Jaws and decided to one-up it. Jaws kills a little kid and a dog within the span of about five minutes of running time, so Joe Dante and his collaborators decided to send the piranhas after an entire summer camp full of kids. No mercy involved, either. There's blood in the water. It's audacious, and one of the reasons that Piranha is remembered all these years later while Jaws 3 or Mako - Jaws of Death are long forgotten. You can see the makers of Jurassic World doing that kind of calculus in their heads. Certainly, this is a film that name-checks Jaws, too, both with the shark used to bait the mosasaurus and with the mosasaurus itself, so it's aware of its traditions. Where the initial Jurassic Park only fed a skeleton crew to the dinosaurs, this film has a park full to the brim with potential victims. Do people get eaten? Oh, baby, do they! In one memorable scene, a woman is eaten by two different dinosaurs at once! Take that! The scene where the pterosaurs take wing and descend on 20,000 vacationers is mayhem on a scale grander than what one finds in the first three Jurassic films combined. If this is what you want, man, you're going to dig this film. I'll admit that while the mayhem was playing out - mostly absent our protagonists, but sometimes with them - I was digging it.

If, on the other hand, you want something else, something with recognizable human characters? Well, this film is going to be a disappointment to you, then. This is a film with types rather than characters, and depressingly conservative, hetero-normative aspirations for those types. The politics of gender in this film are completely regressive. Claire Dearing is a familiar character: a woman whose drive to succeed in business has unsexed her and turned her into shrew, a woman whose career path has severed her from her motherhood instinct. But worry not! The film is sure she'll find her inherent motherhood eventually and even tells her so in the text of the movie. This movie also recycles the impulse of the third movie to use children in peril as a means of uniting parents who are divorced (or divorcing in this case). The nuclear family is all in this movie, with women in traditional roles and not dabbling in careers. Worse, we're expected to side with the charming rogue who treats Claire like shit. Admittedly, this is stacked because the charming rogue is played by the very charming Chris Pratt and the brittle career woman is played by the frosty Bryce Dallas Howard. Most of the film's non-dino jokes come at her expense, not his, starting with the high heels she wears through the entire film. The movie never questions why her shoes might be useful to her in her realm (as opposed to the jungle where red of fang and claw reigns). The movie never stops to suggest that she might have sensible sneakers in the drawer of her desk. Instead, you have a parody of femininity, placed where "femininity" isn't "appropriate." I call bullshit on this, because it sets goal posts at both ends of the field. Claire isn't feminine enough because she pursues a career in preference to a family, but she's too feminine because she expresses her femininity in realms where it's a hindrance. Feh.

Also: let's talk about the coding of the male characters. Hoskins, played by Vincent D'Onofrio, is dinosaur chum from the start. He's familiar to any fan of monster movies. He's the guy who wants to weaponize the monster. He's a bully-boy version of Carter Burke from Aliens. Feeding him to a velociraptor is so de rigeur that it robs it a bit of its catharsis when his time eventually comes. Grady, played by Pratt, is just as much of an asshole - albeit not a militaristic asshole - but he gets the designated hero immunity idol. He's the guy upon whom the producers want men to imprint themselves. He's buff. He's sarcastic. He's good with kids. He's good with animals even if those animals are velociraptors. He's horrid to women. "Horrid to women" is something you see growing inside Nick Robinson's Zach, too. He's not as interested in dinosaurs as he is in girls. He's a player in the making, which turns him into kind of an asshole, too, given that he's seen saying farewell to a (presumably) steady girlfriend at the beginning of the film. This is compounded by his complete indifference to his brother. I desperately wanted him to be eaten by a dinosaur. The movie did not oblige me. And if the film punishes Claire for her life choices, that's nothing compared to what it does to her assistant, Zara. Who is stuck with two disobedient kids and gets eaten by a mosasaur and a pteranodon at the same time. The one character who is out of the ordinary is Masrani, played by Irrfan Khan. He's a character type who is usually a villain, but the film chooses to make him a hero instead, although an incompetent one. I'd like to have seen more of him, but the film kills him off too soon.

This is not a film for anyone who likes movies about human beings. This isn't new to the series, but even in that context this is bad (which takes some doing). Much as I like the dinosaurs, I'm jaded at this point. They're not the same kind of cinematic miracle they were in 1993. You have to give me more if you want my love, and this movie doesn't provide me with anything beyond more chum for the dinosaurs.

[Charles Castle]

I was searching the internet for appropriate screen grabs from Matinee (1993, directed by Joe Dante) and I came across the above still, which as it happens took me to the blog of an old IMDB message board friend. It's the perfect summary of the kind of nostalgia at work in Matinee. In the movie, John Goodman's character, one Lawrence Woolsey, is a huckster, a small time b-movie producer along the lines of William Castle. He's got creditors after him, his girlfriend is fed up with his eternal adolescence, and he's opportunistically taking advantage of the fears generated by the Cuban Missile Crisis to prime the pump for his new movie. While the movie views him with a great deal of affection, he's not a particularly admirable character. He's a small fry in a big pond. Except, that is, when his shadow is cast on the movie screen. Then, he becomes huge. As a metaphor for how the romance of grade-z monster movies lured an entire generation of kids to the old movie palaces, it's ideal. The movies? They were crud. But in our memories of those movies, whether seen on the big screen or half seen on late-night TV, they were always bigger and better.

Curiously enough, this phenomenon seems to have overtaken Matinee, too. I remembered it being better than it actually is. Sure, the stuff that I love is still there. Dante's catalogue of in-jokes is still a treasure trove, and the parodies of movie culture from "Mant!" to "The Shook Up Shopping Cart" are creditably faithful to their inspirations while also being credibly awful. It's the coming of age stuff that seems stale.

The story itself follows new kid Gene and his brother to a new school in Key West. Their dad is stationed at the naval base, and has pulled blockade duty around Cuba. Gene is a "monster kid." He's the kind of kid who reads Famous Monsters of Filmland like some people read the Bible. He recognizes the shills Goodman's character has hired to protest his film and wheedles himself next to him. I presume that Gene is a proxy for Dante himself, who famously got his start writing for monster magazines. The spectre of the Cuban Missile crisis hangs heavily over the film, including a memorable nuclear dreams sequence. This sequence is echoed by the big climax at the Saturday matinee where all the movie's plot threads get tied up in a tidy knot. The problem with this is that Dante's kids aren't all that engaging. They are totally outshined by Goodman, and by Dante's own love of movies. Once upon a time, that was enough for me. Hell, it's still enough. I still love the movie, but I think there's some nostalgia at work there.

But not totally.

The thing that really sells the movie for me is "Mant!" the film within a film. Most films within a film are pretty awful, but "Mant!" is a dead on re-creation of a Big Bug movie from the late fifties/early sixties, even down to the music cues. Hell, it even has actors from 1950s sci fi (Dante regular Kevin McCarthy being prominent). Sure, it's played for laughs, but it's not too far off the mood of something like The Beginning of the End or The Deadly Mantis. It certainly has much better special effects than those movies.

I was disappointed when Matinee finally appeared on DVD. The old laserdisc version had the complete "Mant!" as an extra, but it's absent on the DVD. Fortunately, nothing is lost forever in the internet age. Here's the complete Mant! on YouTube. Enjoy.

[stethacantus]

Return to the 36th Chamber ( 1980 )
Lau Kar Leung didn't want to do a sequel to 36th Chamber of Shaolin.  As far as he cared,  he had completely told the story of San Te, the historic Shaolin monk who convinced the Abbot that the temple should teach commoners their martial arts instead of just their monks, and there was no more story left to tell. But Shaw Brothers insisted. Worse than that, the massive success of the Jackie Chan films Snake in the Eagles Shadow, Drunken Master and Fearless Hyena had changed the Hong Kong film industry, so that every studio wanted their martial arts films to be comedies.  So not only was Lau Kar Leung forced to do a sequel to his most successful film, but it needed to be a comedy.  Gordon Liu returns, but not as San Te. Instead, he plays a con artist who impersonated San Te, and eventually cons his way into Shaolin to learn Kung Fu for real. ( A different actor plays an older San Te. ) Not the classic that the first film was, but still immensely fun.




Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness ( 2022 )
So the plot depends on something that happened on something Wanda did in Wandavision which I have not seen yet as it is only available on Disney+. Kevin Feige wants to know why the latest MCU film tanked at the box office? Maybe because the MCU is a continuing story, which no longer appeals to those who have to miss chapters due to them being on a steaming service which relies on high speed internet which many do not have, or can afford the extra $100 a year for a basic subscription with commercial interruptions, or like me just dont want to pay for a streaming service just to see about ten dollars worth of programs.

This movie relies on the concept of the Multiverse. A plot device which has just won a best pictur Oscar for Everything, Everywhere All At Once, which probably means this will be something every studio will adopt for their franchises. The Multiverse was originally a concept for D.C. Comics, originally as a gimic to publish stories where popular characters died or heroes secret identities were outed, only for the issue to end with the caption "This All Took Place In An Alternate Universe." But eventually D.C. adopted the Multiverse to explain away continuity errors in their comic book histories, explaining some of those stories from the 40s and 50s probably took place in a parallel universe. For the MCU, the Multiverse could possibly explain away Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Daredevil or any of those other MCU series they suddenly do not want to be part of the MCU. In the short term, a way for Sony to fold all their Spider-Man and Spider-Man related films into the MCU despite their differing continuities. It is still unknown if the X-men  or Fantastic Four will have their own MCU counterparts with origin stories, or wander in through a Multiverse portal from a univers they always existed in. Certainly the Multiverse gives Disney a way to reboot the MCU and still claim it was no reboot, but instead stories from an alternate universe.  Or at the least, a way to claim the Ang Lee Hulk as an origin story without claiming it takes place in the current MCU.

A lot of talent from pre-MCU successes contributed to this movie. Sam Raimi who who wrote and directed Spider-Man 2, once considered the greatest superhero film ever made. Composer Danny Elfman who composed the score to the 1989 Batman, once considered the best superhero movie ever made ( or second best to Superman II  according to some critics. ). And one guest star ( no spoilers ) from another superhero franchise once considered the best. The result, a fairly standard MCU film which is still entertaining, even if you have no idea what Wanda's problem is.

[Pastor of Muppets]

I hadn't really thought of how the plot to Doctor Strange 2 would have seemed to someone who didn't see Wandavision.  I remember he mentions the events at his first meeting with Wanda, and I knew people would wonder what he was referring to when he mentioned Westview.  I guess if you didn't know about that show, you would wonder why she seems to have children that you've never seen or heard of before.  It's hard for me to see this objectively since I'm a pretty voracious devotee of all things related to the MCU.   I do know the feeling of a plot point not making sense because of an outside reference.  I remember seeing Solo: A Star Wars Story and wondering how the hell Darth Maul was alive.  It turns out that was explained in some TV show (Clone Wars I think).

[Charles Castle]

There's a sense of the world moving on in David Cronenberg's new film, Crimes of the Future (2022). A lot of Cronenberg's films seem like they depict a world on the brink of collapse, but this one seems like it takes place afterwards, rather than on the brink. The director has watched the world tumble over the falls in the decade since his last movie, precipitated by many of the very things that make up the unease and horror in his earlier films: a pandemic, right wing conspiracies, unfettered capitalism, a brain-washing media landscape. The various apocalypses postulated in the director's earlier films are a fait accompli at the present historical moment. In Crimes of the Future the director says, "yeah, all that happened and this is the result: a world in which no one can feel anything anymore. "

The plot of Crimes of the Future follows performance artists Saul Tenser and Caprice. Saul is on the cutting edge of a brave new world: he produces new organs and the art that he and Caprice make is a show of removing them for an audience. Lately, the government has been stepping in to register new organs, to make sure that what constitutes "human" doesn't drift too far off model. They've created a department to regulate this, the National Organ Registry, a sub-department of the Department of New Vice, which polices bio-crime. When Saul grows his current new organ, he and Caprice go to register at the NOR's local office, where they meet Wippet and Timlin, the bureaucrats in charge. Both of them are fans of Saul's work. Timlin's job is to tattoo new organs for registration. Wippet handles the paperwork. He's also organizing a show of "Inner Beauty" and he wants Saul as the headliner. Saul and Caprice, meanwhile, have their own problems: the special bed that keeps Saul comfortable as he grows new organs is malfunctioning and he's having trouble eating, perhaps as a result of his body's inner changes, perhaps as a result of the technology that supports him. They also have a new show to prepare, so they bring in mechanics from the manufacturer to adjust things. The mechanics discover that Saul and Caprice also have a SARK, a surgical bed that is out of production, which they use in their shows. They're envious and want to examine it. They all convene in the audience for Saul and Caprice's new show, where an aroused Timlin whispers to Saul that surgery is the new sex. Also in attendance is Lang Dotrice, whose wife has suffocated his son because he cannot eat food, only plastic. Lang is the leader of a resistance group who have modified themselves to eat plastic as a next stage in human evolution, but Lang's son, Brecken it seems was born with the ability. He approaches Saul to stage Brecken's autopsy as a show, as propaganda for his organization. But Saul has a secret. He is a covert operative for the Department of New Vice, and his controller views Lang's offer as a means of infiltrating his group.

I'd say that there's an apocalyptic ambience laced throughout Crimes of the Future. It's a film that feels like it takes place in the same post-apocalyptic landscape as eXistenZ, only a few years further on. The technology in Crimes looks like an evolution of the tech in that film, and furthers Cronenberg's long project of examining the borderlands between biology and technology.  The controller for the SARK module, for example, might be a descendant of eXistenZ's game pods. Some of the other props - particularly Saul's breakfast chair - look to have been constructed from the carcasses of mugwumps. Cronenberg has been working with production designer Carol Spier since the 1970s, so the continuity of design is not unexpected.

In other ways, the film is a break from the director's previous work. Shot in Greece rather than in Cronenberg's usual Toronto haunts, it has a different light than his previous films. This is an effect amplified by being shot by someone other than Peter Suschitsky (it was shot by Douglas Koch). The composition and lighting of the frame have a subtly different look to them, particularly in the way it aestheticizes the ruins of capitalism. There is a motif of derelict ships in this film that ties it to the derelict wasteland at the end of Videodrome. In this film it looks a lot like the ruins of empire one sees in epic paintings of the 19th century. Part of this is the light. Part of this is the happenstance of photogenic wrecks. Part of it is the tone of the film, which instead of being a vivid and angry portrait of the collapse in all its grotty aesthetic blight, is rather a sense of, I don't know, resignation. The film seems positively serene at times.

The absence of some of the director's other usual collaborators are less obvious. The overall pace and rhythm of the film feels unchanged from Cronenberg's previous films, so the departure of editor Ronald Sanders is relatively seamless. Perhaps the most important returning artist is composer Howard Shore, whose score is a relative of the music he wrote for Crash all those years ago. It's an arresting piece of music.

Cronenberg has had access to astonishing actors since the early 1980s and even in a current filmmaking climate that is inimical to filmmaking that isn't going to gross a gajillion dollars opening weekend, he's still able to attract actors who are on board with his weirdness. This is Viggo Mortensen's fifth collaboration with the director, and Cronenberg knows what Mortensen can give him. The two wild cards are Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart. Seydoux is unusual in Cronenberg's filmography in so far as she gives one of the least theatrical performances. Her Caprice is warm and complicated even when she engages in the weird science of the film's plot. She adds a touch of glamour, too, particularly in the performance art scenes, that provide the "it" quality of a by-god movie star. That's not something that Cronenberg has indulged much in the past, if at all. Stewart, by contrast, is very much a Cronenbergian character. Her performance as Timlin is a bundle of neurotic mannerisms and tics. Stewart can be a movie star in her own right, but she doesn't turn on that part of her persona in this film at all. In some ways, she's doing the same kind of things her Twilight co-star, Robert Pattinson, did when he worked for Cronenberg. Down the cast list from the movie stars one finds a pair of performances by Tanaya Beatty and Nadia Litz as the perky repair techs/assassins who get it on in Saul and Caprice's surgical casket. They remind me a bit of the two gay assassins in Diamonds Are Forever, but I can't quantify that association in the actual text of the film, so make of that what you will. Seydoux's performance isn't the only un-Cronenberg-y performance in the film. Lihi Kornowski's scenes as Brecken's mother are naturalistic in comparison to the characters around her. It's a good cast, and they prop up the film's ideas by committing to them fully. Cronenberg has always been good at getting his actors to buy into his private obsessions.

In the run-up to the film's debut at Cannes, in which the director himself fueled speculation about the film when he said that he expected walkouts, a narrative has evolved that this is Cronenbeg's return to the body horror films of his early career. I don't think that's quite right. The thematic preoccupations in the foreground are echoes of late films. There is an emphasis on the fusion of mind and body and art that plays to my mind more like Cosmopolis or eXistenZ, though it's a theme that's as old as Scanners. In this film, it ties in more closely with the idea of what it means to be human. Human beings extend themselves by hacking their biology either with more biology or with technology, but this film suggests that they extend themselves with art, as well. The characters in this film have turned the act of hacking their bodies (or hacking up their bodies, as the case may be) into performance. This goes hand in hand with the odd theatrical performances Cronenberg elicits from most of his cast. There is a layered meta textual commentary on the making of his own films here, I think, that suggests that the director himself is venting his spleen in the same way that his actors are shown venting theirs. It's easy to interpret Mortensen's Saul Tenser as a version of Cronenberg himself: intellectual, a man whose art is visceral and coldly clinical, a man who is getting old and seeking to stay ahead of his past work, a man who is frail and reliant on technology if not for survival, then for comfort.

Anyone who has seen a few of Cronenberg's most famous films will recognize images and themes that are the long-term sinews and nerve endings of Cronenberg's brand of cinema. One of my favorite scenes in Crimes of the Future recapitulates the vaginal slit in James Woods's abdomen in Videodrome and makes overt what was merely symbolic in that film. Timlin's insistence that surgery is the new sex in a world desensitized to feeling corresponds the Vaughn character from Crash and his cult of car crash fetishists. Body modification through scarification and sub dermal implant take the role of tattoos in Crash and Eastern Promises. Even the nature of the relationship between Saul and Caprice echoes The Fly, in which a caring lover watches her partner disintegrating in front of her eyes. There's more, but it's easy to turn an essay on Cronenberg into an inventory of these images. At some point they become background radiation to the central themes of this film.

The evolutionary imperative is stronger in this film than in any Cronenberg film since The Fly. There is an ecological element lurking in the background of this film that puts pressure on all of it's characters to either adapt or die. We see the reactionary impulse against change in the film's opening scene, when Djuna, Brecken's mother, smothers him with a pillow. Her son has crossed an evolutionary boundary beyond what she views as human. Lang, on the other hand embraces the change. He wants to accelerate it. The subtext of the film suggests that the world has become so polluted by plastic that the only way forward for human beings is to adapt to subsist on it, and Lang and his organization push for that outcome. Brecken is assumed to be the next stage of that evolution, a fact that his father wants to reveal to the world by dissecting him for the public to see. Saul himself is an ambivalent figure: a man who can grow new organs, he's the vanguard of the new flesh. But he's also a spy for the old order. Anthropologically, he's what's known as a marginal man, someone suspended between two cultures - or in this case, two evolutionary identities.

There is a strong undercurrent of biological self-determination under threat in Crimes of the Future. As a functionally empathic human living in the moment with friends and loved ones that have thoroughly hacked their own biology, I respond to this theme and find horror that other viewers might not in its depiction of a future where the biology of individuals is registered by the government in a bid to control both the individual and the direction of the species itself. Given the date of this review in late March of 2023 and given the fact that I live in a United States that is now beyond the verge of making biological self-determination into its own category of crime, I find this to be one of the director's most unsettling films even if it doesn't seem more overtly horrific than the nightmares of his early career. Because the future is right now.

[stethacantus]

Disciples Of The 36th Chamber ( 1985 )
This was the last major Martial Arts movies to be produced by Shaw Brothers. The third in the 36th Chamber trilogy, and considered the last gasp of the Old School martial arts era. Jackie Chan had filmed his final Old School martial arts film in 1980,  Dragonlord. That same year Kwan Tak-hing  made his final film as Wong Fei Hung, Dreadnaught, Golden Harvest itself would produce it's last Old Schoo, martial arts film in 1981, Sammo Hung's classic The Prodigal Son ( The same year releasing their final Bruce Lee film, Tower of Death which was compiled from deleted scenes from Enter the Dragon ). In 1982 Seasonal Films released their final Old School martial arts film Ninja in the Dragon's Den.  For Shaw Brothers to continue to produce and release Old School martial arts films even when their competition was abandoning them was amazing. And if not for the brothers running the studio to decide to shut it down in 1986 so they could put all their assets into their television network, they would have probably continued producing martial arts films into the 90s. Perhaps the confusing thing for western audiences is  that it seemed like Hong Kong was continuing to make these films.  Jackie Chan continued to make movies. Jet Li just arrived on the scene, as was Michelle Yeoh. There was a lot of new stuff from Sammo Hung and the other Golden Harvest stars. But these would be the New Wave. Martial arts would be mixed with action or fantasy or horror.  When pure martial arts films returned towards the end of the decade, it was with a new fighting style that relied more on gymnastics,  special effects and wire work.

As what is considered the conclusion of the Old School martial arts era, Disciples Of The 36th Chamber is a bit of a letdown. It is a good film with some great fight scenes. But you sort of wish the era went out with a bang instead of a laugh. Shaw Brothers go to martial arts comedian Hsiao Ho plays martial arts legend Fong Sai-Yuk who is presented as a rascally trouble maker who after starting trouble with a Manchu martial arts academy, is sent to Shaolin by his mother to hide, and to learn discipline. It is there that he becomes a pupil of San Te. Both Fong Sai Yuk and San Te were popular martial arts legends, so having the two meet should have been a lot better than this film, most of which is about Fong Sai Yuk sneaking out of Shaolin and befriending a Manchu general who is secretly setting Yuk up to lead his fellow Shaolin students into a trap. In other words, this is a really good film. But it had the potential to be a lot better. Especially if they didn't insist on making it a comedy.


Thor: Love and Thunder ( 2022 )
Is it just me, or did the plot of this film seem like something from an average Star Trek film rather than an MCU film? Considering that Thor is the least popular of the original MCU heroes, it is amazing that he is the only one of them to get a fourth solo film, and even more amazing that this film ended with a caption promising there would be a fifth. I was a bit disappointed that the Guardians of the Galaxy were in so little of this film. I had hoped after the ending of Avengers: Endgame that we would either get the Guardians for an entire Thor solo film, or that he would be a character in the third volume. Considering Marvel has said the third volume of Gardinas of the Galaxy would be their final film, it would have been nice to get an extra film with the crew in a solo Thor film ( just as we got an extra Avengers film with then third Captain America solo film ) I have no idea if this was already introduced in the Disney+ shows, but with this movie Marvel Studios has come up with yet another way to resurrect the characters they killed off in the previous films. The afterlife. Add to that the multiverse, alternative time lines, plus injecting the dead with Kree blood and downloading their brains into aneroids as they did to bring the same character back twice in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,  it should not be long now until a lot of previously dead characters, both heroes and villains, return. ( Which is exactly what happened at Marvel Comics, where everyone but poor Uncle Ben has ben resurrected. )

[Charles Castle]

By 1941, Cary Grant was THE movie star. Grant had cultivated a screen image based on charm, charisma, impossible good looks, and a refusal to take himself seriously. He was the ideal leading man for the age of the screwball comedy. But there was always something more to the Grant persona. Something darker. You saw glimpses of it in His Girl Friday, in which Hildy Johnson laments of Grant's vile Walter Burns, "I just wish you weren't such a stinker," and tells her fiancee of Burns's charm "he comes by it naturally; his grandfather was a snake." There were glimpses of it, too, in the callousness as armor against loss in Only Angels Have Wings. Even before his major stardom, there was Grant's antagonist opposite Fredric March in The Eagle and the Hawk, in which Grant played the most brutal character he was ever asked to perform. Alfred Hitchcock spotted it right away, and exploited Grant's potential as a sinister leading man in the first two films of their collaboration. In their first film together, Suspicion (1941), Hitchcock confronts the audience directly: could this man, this polished movie star, this easy light comedian, be a murderer?

Suspicion charts the marriage of shy heiress Lina McLaidlaw and charming deadbeat Johnnie Aysgarth. As they often do in Hitchcock films, Lina meets Johnnie on a train, where he is short the price of a ticket for the first class booth he enters. He begs Lina to lend him the difference, which she does. She spies him in the society column in the newspaper she's reading even as this unfolds in front of her. For his part, Johnnie has spotted Lina, too. She's "out of your line," one of his society acquaintances tells him, but he's bored with women who are "in his line." He contrives an introduction, and instead of escorting her to church, he sweeps her out into the wild, where he beguiles her with a ridiculous sense of humor. She finds him hard to resist. When he vanishes abruptly to London without a word, she pines for him, as much to spite her family's expectation that she'll be a spinster for life as for her attraction to Johnnie. But Johnnie is attractive and when he returns from London and finds her at the local ball, she's caught up in a whirlwind romance and marriage. They embark on a honeymoon across the continent and return to a house that Johnnie has arranged to rent, but there's trouble in paradise. Johnnie is in debt for the cost of their honeymoon and hasn't a shilling to his name. At her urging, he goes to work for his cousin, Captain Melbeck. But Johnnie is used to being a sponger and living beyond his means. He lies to Lina about his finances. After discovering that Lina will see no inheritance of consequence from her father, he intends to go into business with his friend, Beaky, to develop real estate. While they discuss the venture over a game of anagrams, Lina sees the words "doubt," "murder," and "murderer" in the tiles and has a premonition of Johnnie pushing Beaky over a cliff. When Beaky actually does turn up dead during a trip to Paris, Lina immediately suspects Johnnie. A conviction that she herself will be his next victim takes hold, exacerbated by a dinner with her friend, Isobel, a writer of mystery fiction, and her doctor friend. Johnnie describes his perfect method of murder--arsenic--and all Lina can hear is the means by which he will be shut of her. When she retires for the night, Johnnie brings her a glass of milk. Is it poisoned? Lina chooses not to drink it. Does she dare go on a drive with him? He seems increasingly desperate after being caught embezzling from his cousin, so perhaps? Or perhaps not? Does Lina love him more than life itself?

I wonder what Hitchcock thought of Hannah Arendt. Covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, Arendt described the man as "an efficient bureaucrat," and "nicht einmal unheimlich." "Not even sinister." This is the root of her conception of the appalling banality of evil. Hitchcock was a fellow traveler, I think. Hitchcock was motivated by the idea that a murderer had to appear to be attractive, or normal, or harmless, else that hypothetical murderer would never get close enough to kill anyone. Suspicion is among the first of his films to explore this thinking. He would refine it subsequently in Shadow of a Doubt, Rope, Strangers on a Train, and (most famously) Psycho. The banal murderer has some basis in reality, too, a fact that would soon be made manifest on a grotesque scale during World War II, in which the murderers were everyday citizens with the restraint of morality removed and given permission to murder a specific class of people. Hitchcock was sensitive to this. Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt has given himself the same kind of permission. When the younger Charlie tells her uncle "They're alive. They're human beings!" he replies, "Are they? Are they, Charlie? Are they human or are they fat, wheezing animals, hmm? And what happens to animals when they get too fat and too old?" The two murderers in Rope are equally ideological, finding in fascist philosophy a justification to kill for their own pleasure.

Johnnie Aysgarth, if he actually IS a killer, is blank-faced. Banal. Attractive, even. His motive is money. I doubt he even thinks about a philosophy. When confronted by a conversation about murder, he's pragmatic: nothing fancy, just poison, he tells the guests at the dinner party, planting the seed of distrust in Lina's head. As played by Cary Grant, were Johnnie to actually succeed in killing Lina, he would be the most beautiful and most charming murderer in all of film. His grandfather was a snake indeed.

As it was originally conceived in the source novel (Before the Fact by Francis Iles), Lina drinks the poison Johnnie places at her bedside, knowing full well that it will kill her. But she has incriminated Johnnie in a letter sent to her mother, and he is caught and punished for her murder. Hitchcock either did or did not intend to use this ending, depending on when he was talking about it. To hear Hitchcock tell of it, it's Schrödinger's murder, which is the whole point of the film up until the very end when you open the box and look. It plants suspicion, but confirms nothing. RKO pictures, on the other hand, did NOT want to use the book's ending because they felt it would alienate a paying audience to see Cary Grant play a murderer, both in this film and in subsequent films. Would that effortless charm tarnish with blood splattered on it? Could Grant ever play something light and funny again afterward? Instead, the film shrinks away from its natural conclusion, though it leaves it in play until the very end. There is something to be said for the ambiguity in Johnny Aysgarth's actions. Even when he's trying to save Lina in the end, he still looks like he's trying to kill her. RKO may have had the last laugh. Suspicion was a mammoth hit for them. It cemented both Grant and Hitchcock as bankable talents (as if that was even necessary for Grant at that point). Joan Fontaine took home an Academy Award for the film, making her the only actor to ever win an Oscar in a Hitchcock film. It was a success for all involved. But in truth, Suspicion creates an awful muddle of its ending. It can't go through with it. It doesn't have the instinct for the jugular. I think the end of the film seems like a cheat. It feels like bait and switch.

Suspicion is most successful when it demonstrates the flexibility of the Cary Grant persona. It takes it in directions that previous films barely hinted at. At the outset, Johnnie Aysgarth is recognizable as the Cary Grant of previous films. He's affable, funny, impossibly handsome. He's a composite of other characters from Grant's portfolio, particularly Johnny Case in Holiday. who dreams of a life of ease after making it big. Johnnie Aysgarth is Johnnie Case without the savvy or the luck, but with all the charm. The scene where he does up Lina's braid and dubs her "monkey face," is the prime Grant persona: self-deprecating, ridiculous, hilarious. It resurfaces when Lina's father delivers two heirloom medieval chairs to their new home and Johnnie lounges in them without an ounce of respect. Even when he's irresponsible, as he is when he borrows money to take Lina on a honeymoon or rent a lavish house upon their return, it's hard to dislike him. But even in the early going, there are hints. Johnnie first enters Lina's life in shadows, while the train is in a tunnel. When we first see them together out in the wild, they appear to be struggling, as if he's already attempting to do her harm. Hitchcock is keenly aware that an overt heel turn would lose the audience in an instant, so the sinister notes, when they first start to appear, are subliminal. The lighting does a lot of the work, particularly the ever-present spiderweb pattern of their house's great window, but also in shots where Johnnie is either partly or entirely in shadow. But is Johnnie malicious or just irresponsible? Johnnie is never overtly menacing until near the end of the film when he moves through the shadows with a glowing glass of milk. The shadows do the work because Grant's face is in darkness. The pattern is a spider's web. At that point, the audience knows. Or thinks it knows. It has been eased into the realization rather than bludgeoned with it, and by the time it comes, the Grant persona is intensely sinister without so much as a hair out of place.

Suspicion is not all about Grant. Grant himself didn't enjoy making the film. He initially bristled at Hitchcock's working methods and he didn't like Joan Fontaine. He never intended to make another film with the director, but recanted when he saw the results on the screen and at the box office. Suspicion finds Hitchcock coming into his own as "The Master of Suspense" for an American audience, just as his earlier films did the same for a British audience. Moreover, he was generally in more control of Suspicion than he was of some of his other films of the early 40s because he was on loan to RKO rather than under the thumb of David O. Selznick. Many of the hallmarks that make what we think of as a "Hitchcock" film are here in full, including what may be the apotheosis of the director's use of "significant objects." The director's ghoulish sense of humor gets more of a workout here, too. And the shadows. No other film in Hitchcock's portfolio makes such extravagant use of shadows in its storytelling.

Suspicion is filled with significant objects, maybe more so than most Hitchcock films. Viewers will remember the lighter from Strangers on a Train and the money from Psycho and the key in Notorious, among others. Hitchcock was obsessed with the narrative significance of objects. In Suspicion, there's a purse clasp when Johnie tries to kiss Lina for the first time, there's the letter Lina composes that perhaps incriminate Johnnie, there are the chairs whose sale catch Johnnie out in his lies, there are the Scrabble tiles spelling out Lina's fears, and there is the fatal glass of milk. The milk is the most ostentatious object in Hitchcock's considerable catalogue of such things, more so than the outsized props in Dial M For Murder (telephone and scissors). To draw attention to the glass, the director famously put a light inside of it, then dimmed the entire frame so that the glass was the entire focus of the movie. You can't even see Cary Grant's face as he brings it up the stairs (the image at the head of this piece is a production still, not a frame from the film). As with the shadows, or, more accurately, in concert with the shadows, this is Hitchock's most florid example of his technique on full display.

While the humor in the film is mostly an example of Hitchock exploiting Cary Grant's film image, not all of it is. The dinner party late in the film when Lina and Johnnie have dinner with Lina's mystery-writer friend, Isobel, shows the director amusing himself for the sake of amusing himself. This is particularly the case with the doctor, who relishes Johnnie's idea of poisoning someone with an approving "Ah! Arsenic!" while cutting into his Cornish hen like he's performing an autopsy. This scene also features Isobel's "companion," Phyllis, which is both a commentary on the last film Hitchcock made with Joan Fontaine (she played a paid companion in Rebecca, and Lina is a very similar character to the second Mrs. De Winter), and one of Hitchcock's frequent episodes of homoeroticism. The Breen office insisted Hitchcock delete Phyllis because she's obviously a lesbian even if no one says so outright, but Hitchcock simply ignored them. Because he was the producer of the film in addition to the director, he apparently had that power. What's so striking about Phyllis and Isobel is how unremarkable they are. Not villains, not major players in the plot. Just a couple happily existing in the margins.

This was Hitchcock's second film with Joan Fontaine, and as a mousy, sexually repressed character who is swept off her feet by a dashing, Byronic, dangerous leading man, it's hard not to associate her performance in this film as an extension of her role in Rebecca. The idea that Fontaine's Oscar for Suspicion is a "make-up" Oscar for being passed over for Rebecca is deeply rooted among film people, but they really are distinct performances. Unlike the second Mrs. De Winter, Lina actively pursues her object of desire and is definitely more of a fool for love. Even her posture throughout the film is more assured than it ever was in Rebecca. Lina is a considerably stronger character. Cary Grant felt that Hitchcock lavished undo attention on Fontaine during the filming of Suspicion, but Lina is the point of view character so it's entirely understandable why Hitchcock might want to focus on her performance. How good is Joan Fontaine, anyway? It's instructive to compare her performances for Hitchcock with comparable films like Jane Eyre or Frenchman's Creek (which like Rebecca is based on Daphne Du Maurier), which reveal that the heroines she played in Rebecca and Suspicion were outliers. While Jane Eyre is superficially a similar character, she has more spine than either of them, and the heroine of Frenchman's Creek is confidently sexual. So her performance in Suspicion is well modulated to the needs of the film rather than her own persona. Grant was right about Suspicion. It's Fontaine's movie even if Grant's name is first in the credits.

Suspicion was Grant's last film before America's entry into World War II, and as such, it acts as a signpost of sorts. It comes at the end of a series of films in which Grant's stardom went supernova. While I don't want to take anything away from the films that Grant made during the war--Destination Tokyo is a particular favorite of mine even if it is a propaganda film--Grant wouldn't ascend to the full flower of his stardom again until the war ended. Coincidentally, the film that kicks off Grant's post-war career was also directed by Alfred Hitchcock in spite of Grant's intentions in the matter. By the end of his career--and by the end of Hitchcock's career--the collaboration between them would be a defining element of both of their legacies.

As a personal note, Suspicion is the first film by either Grant or Hitchcock that I ever saw in a movie theater with an audience. That long-ago showing was a revelation for me, because it demonstrated the effect of both actor and director on more than a solitary viewer watching on late-night television. The crowd was a sell-out, which was surprising given that it was college students. Such was the drawing power of Hitchcock and Grant. There's a transcendental element to the collective experience, a sort of mass catharsis. It confirmed to me that movies were going to be my version of church for the rest of my life, only, y'know, fun and with less guilt.

[stethacantus]

Mad Monkey Kung Fu ( 1979  )
This was among the Lau Kar Leung directed  films made between [i[36th Chamber of Shaolin[/i] in 1978 and 8 Diagram Pole Fighter in 1984  which are considered classics of the martial arts  cinema. At least eight of which are unanimously called classics and another five which various critics consider underrated classics. Mad Monkey Kung Fu is among the definite classics, but I would call it a flawed classic.  With inspiration from The Monkey King, it is a monkey themed comedy that goes a little overboard on the topic. In one of the few films where Lau Kar Leung is also the lead actor, he plays Chen, an actor in a traveling show where he plays The Monkey King.  The villain is a rich man named Tuan ( Lo Lieh ) who is secretly the leader of the local crime gang  collecting protection money from the merchants and running the brothel. Tuan has fallen for the lead actress in the play ( Kara Wei ) who is Chen's sister. As the troupe is getting ready to leave town, Tuan invites the Chen and his sister over to his house for a celebration, then gets Chen drunk in an attempt to beat him in a fight, but is constantly bested by even a drunk Chen. So he arranges for his wife to pretend Chen has raped her.  As a condition for him not taking Chen to the authorities to be executed, he takes his sister as his concubine, and has Chen's hands beaten so severally that he is crippled for life. A few years later Chen returns to the town as a merchant, who attracts customers with a pet monkey that does tricks. And it is here the monkey theme to this film starts to go overboard. Chen meets the town's local pick-pocket  who goes by the name Monkey ( Hsiao Ho ) who has pity on Chen when the local crime gang kills his pet monkey for not paying protection money. Monkey agrees to replace Chen's pet monkey by wearing a monkey costume. When he too starts to get beaten up by the gang,  he convinces Chen to teach him his Kung Fu, which just happens to be Monkey style. Of course, they style is taken to the extreme, with Monkey imitating a real monkey during his fights. And after the inevitable showdown between Chen and his student Monkey against Tuan and his gang, the film ends with Chen walking off triumphantly with his student by his side, walking stooped like a real monkey. The numerous monkey references get annoying really fast, as does the constant monkey sounds coming from the human monkey. But once again this film has some of Lau Kar Leung's best fighting choreography.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever ( 2022  )
Yea, this is one of the better MCU films. But it is also has two of Marvel Studio's worst decisions. One was not to recast T"Challa after Chadwick Boseman's death, but instead announce that no one else would play that character, not even resurrecting Black Panther as a CGI character. According to some reports, Boseman knew he had potentially terminal cancer when he accepted the role of T'Challa, fully aware that any character Marvel was introducing to their cinematic universe would be part of an ongoing franchise which would last several films. So he not only knew  there would be at least one Black Panther sequel in his future, but that the character would show up in a lot of other upcoming MCU films. With that in mind, does he really deserve to have his character retired? Add to that how many other characters in the MCU have been recast, and how in the comic books, T"Challa is one of the few superheroes that has not passed down his mantle to another, and is still the Black Panther to this day ( or at least was still The Black Panther last time I checked. ) So what we end up with here is another origin film for a second Black Panther instead of a full Black Panther adventure.  Second big mistake, Namor. Okay, I get it. Submariner was created two years before Aquaman. But D,C. already has a talks to the fish superhero in their botched cinematic universe. And quite frankly, we don't need any. The only reason the DC version works is because theirs is a rip-off of MCU's Thor, and barely resembles the comic book Aquaman. I mean, we have so many better Marvel characters waiting to be debuted in the MCU. Furthermore, Marvel seems to realize that D.C. has beat them to the punch with a character from Atlantis, so has reimagined Namor as a Myan? Because apparently they drank a potion hundreds of years ago that turned them all into fish people? I mean, the idea that the citizens of Atlantis suddenly evolved the ability to breath under water because their continent sank into the ocean was pretty stupid to begin with. It was stupid with Submariner, it was stupid with Aquaman, it was stupid with The Man from Atlantis, it was even stupid on Futurama.  But Myan's drinking a potion that turns them into fish people is even stupider. If Marvel insisted on putting Submariner in the MCU, then they should have stuck with his original Atlantis origin. About the one thing they didn't change from the comic book was the wings on his ankles, and that is the only thing I would have removed from the comic book. It always looked silly in the comic book, and it looks really silly in this film! The conflict between Wakanda and whatever empire Namor comes from seems ridiculous and forced and makes zero sense other than they thought it would be cool if the fish people had a war with a landlocked African nation.  How they get a good film out of this mess is a miracle. But they f*&ked up a lot of good Marvel characters to get it.

[stethacantus]

Safety Last ( 1923 )
Early noon on Saturdays, also known as brunchtime, is usually reserved for watching MST3K episodes, or a RiffTrax. A tradition that went back to when MST3K was still on Syfy  and I would watch it while eating a pancake  breakfast, but migrated to 1pm once I began watching on home video. Occasionally I break the tradition for family stuff, or if a chore needs to be done. Rarely do I break it to use the time to watch something else. ( Last time I did that was to catch up on Game of Thrones episodes on iN Demand so I could watch the series finale live. This time it was done so I could fit this film into my schedule.

Harold Lloyd's Safety Last turned 100 on Saturday. Rare for any movie to reach the centennial mark and people still give a shit about it, even more rare that  it still exists as a full unabridged print. Something that came close to not happening.  Lloyd was one of the few filmmakers who believed in film preservation, and therefore held on to every master of every film he made,  including the Lonesome Lukes. But he refused to take his son-in-law's advice and transfer the films onto safety stock, and in  1943 one of those nitrate films burst into flames, taking out the rest of the films in the vault. Lloyd severely burned himself  running in and out of the film vault with cans of films he wanted saved. But he was only able to save a handful of films, and as luck would have it, most of the tins he grabbed off the shelf turned out to be the sound films he didn't care for. He had to immediately rebuild his library by tracking down prints from collectors. Fortunately, one of them had a print of Safety Last with only a couple of minor splices. A theatrical print and not the original negative, but with no more than a few frames missing from the complete movie.

Not really much to say abut this film that  no one else has said. If you have seen a silent movie before, then odds are you saw this one. It is not Lloyd's best. He has many better films. The first half is a mildly amusing comedy about a department store salesman. The second half is the part that made this film famous. In order to earn a thousand dollar bonus for creating a publicity stunt, Harold gets his construction worker roommate to agree to climb the outside of the building the department store resides in from the ground up to the roof some 18 stories above the street. But when his friend is chased off by a cop, Harold must do the climb himself. It is the climb which elevates this movie into greatness.

I bought this film ten years ago as part of  The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection released by the Harold Lloyd estate on New Line Home Video. I had my complaints about the collection back then, such as the New Line logo playing twice in a row due to them insisting on attaching it to each film, and having it pop up whenever anything is played on the set, yet somehow not realizing viewers were forced to watch the logo twice in a row. And a lot of films that should have been in the set were not included due to the Lloyd family deciding it wasn't grandpa's best work. And New Line went cheap by deciding that there would be only one picture disk per set, and to save money the second disk would be one of those two sided disks. But watching it in 2023, I realized that New Line also went cheap by compressing the disks so that  each side had about three features and a bunch of shorts. This wasn't much of a problem on my old analog set. But the flaws from compression are very visible on a modern television screen. Hopefully there will be a Blu-ray release of these films with all the existing Harold Lloyd films, and no compression.

5 Superfighters ( 1978 )
Some questionable films on Shaw Scope Volume Two. 5 Superfighters is not a classic film. It is well known as one of the handful of Shaw Brothers films Warner Bros. released on home video in the United Kingdom, ending up among the bootlegged Shaw Brothers films of the 90s. It's a fun film, but by no means a great film. It's title is even misleading, as the only way you can get to five fighters is if you include the villain. A thug wanders around from martial arts school to martial arts school, forcing each to close because he has decided their kung fu is weak. When he beats up the master of a small martial arts school and orders it to close, the master's three students decide to split up, find new teachers, and return on their master's birthday with new fighting skills to beat the bully. Only for him to kick their asses all over again. Yep, another Shaw Brothers attempt at a martial arts comedy. Directed by Lo Mar, a.k.a. John Law, who's most notable film is Bruce Lee: His Last Days, His Last Fights, a bruceploitation film starring Betty Ting Pei, the actress who's apartment Bruce Lee died in, and claimed in that film that she and Lee had an affair.  5 Superfighters is a fun potboiler from the Shaws, but with all the great films yet to be released in the United States, one wonders why Arrow chose to give this movie a Blu-ray release.


The Batman ( 2022 )
Warner Bros. proves they are a bunch of idiots when it comes to their DC superhero films when it comes to this movie. It's not bad. In fact, a pretty good film. But if they were going to do a Batman film in this style, then why not one with Ben Affleck in the already barely existing DC cinematic universe? This is why the MCU is so successful. They are not releasing off canon films. Even all the Spider-man related films have been retconned  into the MCU via the last Spider-man film. Meanwhile, as Warner Bros. gets ready to have James Gunn do a soft reboot of their DC universe, which you just know they will have second thoughts and take away from him and re-edit or reshoot or permanently shelve, they introduce a competing Joker and separate competing Batman franchise.

As I said, a good film. But I would prefer  film makers didn't keep insisting on reinventing the villains. If you are going to have the Riddler in a film, then actually have the Riddler in a film. Not a serial killer in a  fetish mask who uses riddles. I mean, what's the point? And what's the point of a Penguin who barely looks and acts like Penguin and doesn't use an umbrella?  The whole point of these characters being popular was that they both had themes and costumes that set them apart from the usual gangsters Batman battled.

[Charles Castle]

The Narrow Margin (1952, directed by Richard Fleischer) was completed in 1950, but wasn't released by RKO Pictures for another two years. When a studio shelves a film for two years before releasing it, that ordinarily means that the powers that be have no faith in the project or that the studio is going through some kind of transition at the top. It's almost never a good thing for the picture and it is often an omen portending a financial or critical disaster. In the case of The Narrow Margin, however, RKO and its then-owner Howard Hughes felt that the film was too good to waste on non-bankable actors. Hughes wanted to remake the film with Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell. At some point, he had the film delivered to his private screening room where according to legend, he promptly forgot about it. And there it sat for two years. When it finally saw release, it proved to be RKO's biggest money-maker of 1952, a turn of events enhanced by the film's minuscule $230,000 budget, which was small even by 1950 standards. Hughes's instinct about the film was correct. It was good. Damned good. While it might have worked just fine in color with Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, it's hard to imagine such a film bettering Fleischer's film or improving on the hard-boiled performances of perennial B-movie actors Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor. This was born to be a pulpy B-feature, one of the best of its kind, and it needed those pulp actors to give it just the right flavor.

The story finds hardboiled Detective Sgt. Walter Brown escorting a deceased gangster's wife, Frankie Neall, by train from Chicago to Los Angeles in order to testify against her husband's associates. A cadre of hit men is on their trail to silence her before she can testify, and Brown must keep Frankie alive against a series of assassination attempts, the first of which takes out Brown's partner and friend. Complicating things for the assassins is the fact that nobody knows what Frankie Neall looks like, which Brown uses to maneuver her to safety. Unfortunately for Brown, this results in the assassins watching him instead in order to smoke her out. Once on the train, Brown secures Frankie in a stateroom that he conrives to have listed as empty, as having been designated for his deceased partner. To further throw off the scent, he mingles with the rest of the passengers. In particular, he strikes up a friendship with a woman, Ann Sinclair, and her son. She is a polar opposite of Frankie. Wholesome, the very model of upstanding womanhood. Brown falls for her a bit. But things aren't as they seem, and the endgame sees Brown confronted with his ideals and prejudices.

Although I probably saw her in other things when I was a kid--she was in a TON of stuff, not excluding sci-fi films - the first time I remember seeing Marie Windsor in a film was in Tobe Hooper's TV mini-series, 'Salem's Lot, in which she was partnered with fellow noir regular Elisha Cook, Jr. I like to think that Hooper transplanted their characters from The Killing into Stephen King-land, Maine. After 'Salem's Lot, I noticed Windsor all the time in B-movies, whether noir, melodrama, sci-fi, what have you. It's not for nothing that she was sometimes called the Queen of the B's. She had a long and prolific career on the fringes of stardom. If ever there was a movie that would make Windsor a star, it was The Narrow Margin. The part of Frankie Neall is a distillation of the hard-boiled gun moll from a hundred other crime movies into a kind of archetype. The film weaponizes this. Even before he sees her, Brown has an idea of her. He bets his partner five bucks: "I don't have to wonder (what she looks like). I know...A dish...sixty cent special: cheap, flashy, strictly poison under the gravy." And just like that, the film has conjured her. Then, when Marie Windsor appears on screen, she's the very picture of this mental image. She's a multi-purpose femme fatale in the film, one whose appearance and role in the plot are mercurial throughout, all the way until the end, when the film gives the audience the blow-off. It's all sleight of hand. It's the set-up of the three-card monte dealer, encouraging the marks to look for what the dealer wants them to look at while his other hand is doing something else entirely. The Narrow Margin is an epistemological noir, one where reality is untrustworthy, and Windsor is the chimera at its center. Jorge Luis Borges once wrote of another more famous film that it was a "chaos of appearances;" that description applies here, too, both to the film and to its leading lady. Maybe that's why The Narrow Margin didn't make Windsor a bigger star. Her persona in the film is slippery, and varies from scene to scene. It works marvelously for a film that's an elaborate con. Other filmmakers maybe had a failure of imagination with her. More's the pity.

This was Richard Fleischer's second film with Charles McGraw. McGraw played the gruff lead detective in the director's Armored Car Robbery, a hard-nosed character that bears a familial resemblance to Sgt. Brown in The Narrow Margin. McGraw appeared in a lot of crime films on both sides of the law, in a career that was a parallel to Marie Windsor's career. I first saw him in The Night Stalker on television when I was a kid (so far as I can remember), but he fit into the genres television preferred like he was made for them, Westerns and crime shows mostly, so I may have seen him elsewhere. He had an unexpected turn as Rick Blaine in a short-lived television version of Casablanca, too, which turned out as well as that sounds. Unlike Windsor's character, McGraw's Det. Sgt. Brown is fixed in stone, begging only an actor who fits the type. If, as I've said, The Narrow Margin is a con game, then Brown ranks first among the marks, and McGraw plays it perfectly, as a man who is too rigid to know he's been had until the game is nearly over. That said, if Windsor is the queen of spades, then McGraw is the hands shuffling the deck. Most of the film watches him as he thinks his way through the problems their pursuers present. He may be a mark, but he's not a fool. The film lets him show a keen head for tactics.

The third part of the equation is Jacqueline White, who plays Ann Sullivan. Like Frankie Neall, Ann is an archetype. She's the wholesome mother, the platonic ideal of 1950s womanhood, and the character that is the starkest contrast to Brown's comments about a gangster's wife being a 60 cent plate. She's ultimately a strong rebuke to the unreflected misogyny Brown feels throughout the film. Ann is the film's wild card, an ambiguous figure whose true role doesn't come out until the very end of the film and upends everything the marks have been fed about the plot. This was White's last film role, after which she married and moved to Wyoming.

Richard Fleischer's early films noir were models of low-budget efficiency. There is no fat on this film - it runs a bare 71 minutes - nor any fat on the lead performances. It's a masterpiece of narrative economy. It had to be. Filmmaking on this scale required efficiency and this production narrows its gaze down to the train sets for most of its running time. It has an Aristotelian sense of dramatic unity. What's amazing about the film is that it manages to delineate its important characters without rushing through it, it gets to all its important plot points and wastes no time on anything that doesn't advance the narrative, and feels completely unhurried about it all. It risks being a utilitarian piece of filmmaking, but for the tools of the noir idiom. The alternating areas of black and white provided by the train sets gives the film a visual richness and poetry that doesn't interfere with its narrative drive, while its dialogue layers the patois of hard boiled over its narrative impulse. The scenes between McGraw and Windsor in particular have a hard boiled theatricality to them, with McGraw's lines delivered in a voice that sounds like a bearing going bad and Windsor's etched on the film's soundtrack in acid. There's a hard discipline to the way this film's dialogue serves the plot. Both the text of the script and the delivery of the performances provide multiple layers. They pull double and triple duty over and above their need to move the story forward creating a density of information about both the characters and the plot that translates to narrative concision. Nothing is wasted. That's the film as a whole, too, with scenes following scenes in a tight succession that reveals new information to the audience with every transition. It's a marvel of filmmaking precision. It's no wonder Fleischer graduated to A pictures after this one, hired by Walt Disney of all people in spite of his family's pedigree as rival animators.

In addition to its financial success, The Narrow Margin accomplished the rare feat of garnering an Academy Award nomination for its screen story. Such nominations from b-movies are vanishingly rare and one presumes that it happened at all because of the film's outsized box office. Oscar loves a rags to riches story, after all. Screenwriter Earl Felton lost the award to the team of writers behind De Mille's The Greatest Show on Earth, so it's a moral victory. Seventy years later it's as plain as the nose on your face that The Narrow Margin was the best film in its category. Decades later, long after RKO went the way of the dinosaurs, The Narrow Margin got its remake, a film that shows that Hughes was dead wrong to want more than what the film provided. The remake (as "Narrow Margin" without the definite article at the start) had A-list actors and a budget beyond the original's dreams of avarice, but it could not buy one iota of the cinematic moxie of its forebearer. Gene Hackman isn't a bad choice for the lead, but Anne Archer was never a 60-cent plate of anything. It played the notes but missed the music. It mostly reaffirmed the fact that The Narrow Margin in its original incarnation was a pretty damned good movie to start with.

[Charles Castle]

According to his autobiography and many many interviews over the years, Roger Corman made the first of the Poe films, House of Usher (1960), out of a sense of exhaustion. He had been making three and five day wonders like Little Shop of Horrors, The Creature from the Haunted Sea, and Bucket of Blood for a couple of years at that point and he was tired of the go go go nature of that kind of filmmaking. He wanted to slow down. More, he wanted to make something that was aesthetically a cut above the films he was making. Samuel Z. Arkoff and James Nicholson, Corman's nominal bosses at AIP were amenable. The kinds of films Corman had been making were starting to play out to diminishing box office and they were keen on the next big thing for the drive-in theaters that were their primary market. To hear Corman tell it, they weren't keen on Poe, but Corman was persuasive. They gave him a shooting budget of $200,000 - a fortune compared to their usual budgets, but modest compared to the industry - and let him have his head. That's the official story, anyway. I think what actually happened was somewhat different. I think Corman, Arkoff, and Nicholson looked covetously at the box office returns of Hammer's Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula and decided that the Gothic horror movie on the Hammer model was the next wave and acted accordingly. They weren't alone in this, either. Filmmakers in Europe and America were already eyeing a Gothic revival and Gothics came to dominate the horror marketplace during the first half of the 1960s. Don't think Corman wasn't aware of this. He was quick to poach Barbara Steele for his second Poe movie. Whatever the actual origins of the Poe movies, Corman started work on House of Usher in late 1959. It took him fifteen days to shoot it in January of the next year for a summer release. It was a huge hit.

House of Usher opens on the desolate landscape around the ancestral home of the Ushers and follows one Philip Winthrop as he seeks to gain entree into the mansion to see his fiance, Madeline Usher. Standing in his way is her brother, Roderick, who tells Winthrop that the engagement was a mistake. The Ushers, it seems, are in decline, and Madeline is in confinement for an undisclosed illness. Roderick Usher, for his part, suffers from a heightened sense of hearing such that loud noises and raised voices cause him excruciating pain. Madeline is happy to see Winthrop, but has conceded that she should stay with her brother through her final illness. She was always destined to die young, she says. Winthrop insists on staying, then. When night falls, Winthrop wanders through the house chasing odd sounds, until he finds Madeline out and about. She sleepwalks, the Usher's manservant, Bristol, tells him. Eventualy Madeline takes Winthrop into the family crypt, where she shows Winthrop the casket where she will eventually lie. This hardens Winthrop's resolve to remove Madeline from the house that very day. Roderick takes a hand and gives Winthrop a tour of the family history, and the evil that has been done in the Usher name. It infests the house, he says, and their blood. There is no escaping it. Indeed, the house it self suffers tremors and can be seen attempting to do Winthrop harm. When Madeline agrees to leave with Winthrop, she has a huge argument with Roderick, culminating in her collapse into apparent death. Roderick, Bristol, and Winthrop place Madeline in her intended casket, but during the funeral, Roderick notices Madeline twitch her fingers. He shuts up the casket to hide this from Winthrop and they take her to the crypt. Bristol lets slip to Winthrop that the Ushers are prone to catelepsy, spurring Winthrop to charge down into the crypt to see Madeline's body for himself, but he's too late. She still haunts the house of Usher, but she is now quite insane.

The core elements of the Corman Poe films are in place from the outset. Vincent Price is on hand, and delivers a performance as Roderick Usher that would resurface again and again as the 1960s went on. He's an effete, neurasthenic madman in this film, and would only depart from this model occasionally over the course of the Poe films. Screenwriter Richard Matheson would write several of the Poe films, and he brought the economy of his own work to adapting Poe, distilling the core of the story to something that could be filmed while taking liberties with the material to make it commercial and to pad the length - Poe wrote short stories almost exclusively. Corman had his eye on the box office, always, and if he couldn't make the Poe films commercial, there was no point. It was an ideal pairing of director and screenwriter. Also on hand is production designer Daniel Haller, who had a gift for making the resources at his disposal look vastly more expensive. It helped that House of Usher was a chamber piece featuring only four speaking parts. What Corman saved in salary, he poured into the production itself. The score by Les Baxter is less ideal. It has a tendency to highlight moments that aren't there on screen. But then, he composed the score in a hurry and recorded it in a single day, so one makes allowances. Some of the matte paintings created for the film were by the great Albert Whitlock, though he worked on Usher unbilled, presumably because he was under contract to Disney. While the technical limitations of budget and era are fully in force in this film, it manages the tricky feat of translating the end of Poe's story into a visual that is almost poetic.

House of Usher gave Corman the opportunity to demonstrate his chops as a director and separate himself from low-budget grifters like Ron Ormond or Bert I. Gordon. This is most apparent in the way Corman composes some of his scenes in depth, in particular the scene between Winthrop and Madeline in the crypt and Madeline's funeral. In the former, Corman runs up against some of the limitations of shooting in depth and cameraman Floyd Crosby occasionally loses the image's focus, probably because the set was underlit. Madeline's funeral looks to have been shot with a split diopter or possibly as a matted double exposure, with Madeline in clear focus in the foreground and Winthrop and Roderick in equally clear focus in the background. Corman got better at these kinds of compositions as the Poe movies went on and the last ones are especially attractive.

Corman's urge to experiment is in force with the dream sequence late in the film, in a style that would later be called "psychedelic." Corman loved his dream sequences, and the Poe films were a proving ground for the effects he would employ in films like The Trip at the end of the 1960s. Usher also shows off Corman as an opportunist. The footage of Winthrop riding through a blasted landscape at the start of the film was shot in the aftermath of a wildfire, while the climax of the film is a barn Corman was allowed to burn. He liked the burning barn footage so much that he used it for several of the other Poe films and later lamented that if he had known that people would be able to watch them all so close together, he would have thought twice about his frugality. These kinds of improvisations are something that the filmmakers who worked for Corman in the 1960s would refashion into a key element of the American New Wave films of the 1970s. Corman's use of "found" images wasn't above outright thievery, either. The scene that conveys the true horror of Madeline's entombment is stolen wholesale from Val Lewton's Isle of the Dead.

House of Usher is a full-dress Gothic, complete with blasted landscape, crumbling manor, blowing curtains (literally), family secrets, even a dungeon. As a narrative, it follows the high Gothic technique of slow reveal rather than diving into the horrors. Corman is keen on Freudian interpretations of Gothic horror - his interviews and disc commentaries are explicit on this point - and he structures the film a bit like slow intercourse, building to an ecstatic climax. But House of Usher invites scrutiny from a feminist point of view over and above Corman's stated intent. At the level of its basic construction, it's about two men in conflict over the agency of a woman. Roderick goes even further than that: he sees Madeline herself as a threat to his position as family patriarch and his willingness to continue with her entombment even after he knows she is alive is indicative of a man who will break a woman unto death if she defies him. It doesn't take a lot of mental calculus to suspect that Madeline's ailments are the result of systematic gaslighting on the part of her brother, though the film is ambiguous on this point given her demonstrated capacity for catalepsy. Winthrop is no less a patriarch even if the film chooses to view him as a white knight. The film is a cautionary tale about the danger of the monstrous feminine, with its madwoman in the crypt rather than in the attic.

I don't think anyone involved with House of Usher expected it to be as successful as it turned out to be. It was the fifth-highest grossing film of 1960, almost all of it pure profit. The returns on House of Usher funded all of the subsequent Poe movies and more besides for years afterwards. It concluded the process of transforming Vincent Price into America's favorite boogeyman - ongoing since House of Wax - making his name synonymous with horror movies until the end of his days. And because Corman was first to market with his take on Poe, he got the franchise. His name - and Vincent Price's name, too - was to be linked with Edgar Allan Poe's forevermore.