I’m happy that I got to end the week with this, Ed Wood’s unquestioned masterpiece of filmmaking. It features all the things that one would want in a film like this: ghouls rising up from the grave and staggering about with their arms upraised, a deliriously insane evil plot, dialogue that begins at hammy and works its way rapidly downward, and a wonderfully appalling misunderstanding of science. Best of all, here Wood managed to correct the problem he’s had with his previous films, diving into the action good and early, and sparing us the dull filler I’ve come to expect from him.
The film follows the heroic exploits of a military pilot and his wife as they face the terrible menace of aliens in flying saucers who have decided to solve the threat humans pose to the universe in the most logical way possible: with Plan 9. Plan 9, for those of you who don’t have access to the Galactic Ruler’s files, involves the resurrection of the dead. Specifically, it involves here resurrecting three people from a graveyard in California and having them roam the graveyard and occasionally menace the nearby home of the pilot.
I’m sure you’ll agree that this is a very solid plan, though I’m uncertain as to what they were hoping to accomplish by this. The aliens alternate between wanting to march their zombies on the various governments of the world, and wanting to hide their actions from the pilot, as though he were going to be a bigger threat than all the world’s armies. Of course, they’re also doing all the talk of hiding their existence after having flown their saucers in broad daylight through Washington and had the army opening fire on them, and shortly before complaining that they tried to be peaceful at first but the world governments refused to acknowledge they existed, so there’s some serious mixed signals going on here. This is all, naturally, to stop us before we can learn the secrets of Solaranite, a type of bomb that would work by detonating sunlight -- all sunlight, everywhere the light from our sun has reached in the entire universe. Because SCIENCE~, that’s why!
The script’s problems, of course, are partially due to Wood having started the movie by filming his friend Bela Lugosi prancing around a graveyard in a cape without any real plan in mind beyond that his friend wanted to make another movie. Then, when Lugosi died with only a couple minutes of footage filmed, he quickly cobbled together a story that could utilize such footage, and cast his wife’s chiropractor to play the rest of Lugosi’s scenes with a cape covering most of his face to compensate (they still look nothing alike, of course, but at least the attempt was there). It also features wonderfully over the top narration by famous prognosticator Criswell, to help further muddle the plot under the pretense of explaining it.
For those of you that have heard of Ed Wood, but were uncertain how to start with his movies, this is the ideal starting point. It contains all the delirious fun madness without any of the more tedious aspects involved in trying to properly develop the plot or pad out the running time (ironically, this was his longest film up to this point, clocking in at a scandalous 79 minutes). This should be required viewing for any fan of cheesy cult movies.
Rating: ***
P.S. Youtube informs me that a remake is currently being filmed, and is quite a bit more graphic and bigger budgeted. We’ll see how that works out.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Plan 9 From Outer Space
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Bride of the Monster
Ed Wood Plus Sick: The Life And Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist Week continues chugging along, this time providing me with the mild disappointment that is Bride of the Monster. Ed Wood has long been my favorite Tim Burton movie, so I went in fully prepared for the delightfully goofy sci-fi plot that this movie has going for it. I was just somewhat less prepared for how damn long it takes for that to get going.
To be fair, it does start right off with two men caught in a torrential downpour out in the woods somewhere, both inexplicably armed with rifles, so we’re on pretty good ground here. After a quick attempt at hiding in a supposedly abandoned haunted house that turns out to have Bela Lugosi residing there with his giant henchman Lobo (pro wrestler Tor Johnson). After fleeing the two of them (Lobo in particular has a great intro, casually popping onscreen behind the two armed men with his arms outstretched, ready for bear -- that’s a terrible description, but if you see it you’ll appreciate how awesome it is), the pair runs afoul of the local legendary monster -- stock footage of an octopus that quickly makes short work of them.
So that’s a pretty effective, charmingly silly opener. Unfortunately we then get about a half hour of chitchat at the local police station, where our heroic trio is introduced, discusses the recent disappearances, complain to each other about various levels of secret keeping (two of the heroes are police officers, and the third is the reporter girlfriend of one of said cops), and various other nonsense that grinds the film to a halt. Eventually the reporter manages to drive down to the haunted house (well, she drives near it, at least, before running off the road just like a woman and getting menaced by a snake and fainting, and being carried to the house by Lobo), and the film picks up quite well from there, but when the film is only 68 minutes long, you really can’t spend such a vast length of time setting everything up.
It’s a shame, too, because when the film is working, it works pretty darn well. That’s obviously a fairly subjective statement, as we are describing a movie where the evil monsters tend to be whatever animal stock footage Wood found prior to filming (in addition to the octopus and snake, we also get an alligator attack) for the characters to point offscreen at in horror, but the goofy, low budget charm of it all really is quite effective. After all, who among us can hear a line like “Maybe it’s like the papers say, all those atom bomb explosions distorted the atmosphere”, in response to all the thunderstorms they’ve been having lately, and not have a smile on their face? Who wouldn’t enjoy hearing Lugosi’s grand monologue about how he was going to create a new race of Atomic Supermen to rule the world with, starting with the plucky female reporter for reasons that I never understood? And who could possibly dislike how Lugosi’s secret laboratory contains stone walls, manacles on one wall, tons of stock fifties mad scientist lab equipment, and in the corner a regular kitchen sink, countertop, and refrigerator? Nobody I’d like to continue knowing, that’s for sure.
So yes, the film does have some legitimately fun parts to it. It’s just that the film is deeply schizophrenic, with half the film made into a fun little science fiction movie, and the other half being what I can only assume was an attempt at recreating the magic of His Girl Friday, only without the humor. I suppose you can just skip it all and have a much better viewing experience as a result, just be aware that you may want to have another film to watch with it, because it’ll be over really quickly.
Rating: * ½
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Jail Bait
Well, I now know why Jail Bait isn’t really mentioned when people are discussing Ed Wood’s oeuvre, and as I had guessed yesterday, it’s because it’s terminally boring. If I don’t want to commit to saying it’s the worst film noir I’ve ever watched, that’s mainly because I have a bad enough memory that, while I certainly can’t remember any that were worse, there’s always an outside chance that there was and I just blocked it out of my mind.
The plot concerns an attempted heist that goes wrong, in which the elderly night watchman is killed. Of the two would be robbers, the one that shot the watchman is wracked with guilt, and decides to confess, and is subsequently killed by his partner, who then demands that his partner’s father, a renowned plastic surgeon, give him a new face so that he can evade the police. Of course, the father has his own ideas…
Reading that, one can imagine, if not a great story, at least a serviceable one. That’s not what we get here. Instead, what we get is so dull that I want to go to sleep just thinking back on it. Wood directs this in as generic a manner as possible, planting the camera down Kevin Smith style and just assuming the material is good enough to carry the film, despite his amateur actors (just like in Glen or Glenda?, he cast his girlfriend Dolores Fuller in a prominent role) behaving in such a stiff manner one could almost suspect they were reading off of cue cards (aside from Herbert Rawlinson, who plays the old doctor -- he keeps pausing halfway through each sentence because he‘s trying to remember his lines, so he obviously isn‘t reading off of any cue cards), as they no doubt had absolutely no time to rehearse the material at all. To be fair, there is one future star in Steve Reeves, in his first film role before finding fame in a long series of gladiator movies, but outside of randomly showing off his abs he really doesn’t do much here.
It’s a shame too, because there are honestly some good moments in the story (as there would have to be, to balance out the hideous inappropriateness of the blackface routine early on), such as the idea of the plastic surgery, which to my knowledge had only been done once before in the gimmicky Humphrey Bogart vehicle Dark Passage (and which is done more like Face/Off here, half a century before that movie was made). It’s just executed so poorly at every turn that it’s impossible to enjoy any moment of it, even at such moments when the witness to the attempted robbery points the finger at the murderer and says she saw it happen even when we know full well she didn’t. In a better movie her false claims to have witnessed the whole event would lead somewhere. Here it’s just a continuity error.
There’s not much I can really say about this movie. It isn’t written that badly, surprisingly enough, but the acting and directing just crush any possible entertainment value the film might have otherwise had. I can honestly say that I feel sorry for any young film buff whose first experience to film noir is somehow this movie here, because it’s about as low as the genre goes (to say nothing of the wildly misleading title). Go check out Go check out The Third Man or Kiss Me Deadly or something instead, so that you’ll feel better about yourself after this ordeal. You’ve earned it.
Rating: *
Glen or Glenda?
I feel like I’ve been living a bit of a lie all these many years, and there’s really no better place than here, in my review of Ed Wood’s infamous ode to transvestites, to finally admit it to all of you. This is a little hard to admit, but despite my love of both terrible movies and cult films, and my love of the Tim Burton movie Ed Wood, before this week I hadn’t actually seen any of Wood’s movies aside from Plan 9. Thankfully, with the help of the Ed Wood Box Set, I am now able to enjoy such completely insane efforts as this one.
As mentioned above, this is at least theoretically Wood’s appeal to the masses to become more accepting of transvestites (one of whom was Wood himself), and in that regard it can be regarded as both fairly noble and very ahead of its time, coming as it did in the early 1950s, when being different was something that could outright get you arrested or beaten to death. Of course, what makes the film truly sublime is how Wood feels he can’t let it just be a straightforward tale of a transvestite terrified at his girlfriend/wife finding out his dark secret (and one told almost documentary style at times, due to Wood’s fairly minimalist directing style), and so has his friend Bela Lugosi play the Puppet Master (damn it, I just can’t get away from that series!), who sits in his chair on some gothic horror set while spouting random madness that has nothing to do with anything in the main story of this film or any other, while we get stock footage of bulls running or whatever. Also, when we hit the forty minute mark, it suddenly derails and gives us like ten minutes of women doing strip teases and a woman lying on a couch while a man cracks a whip above her.
One has to admire the sheer bravado on display here by Edward D. Wood Jr. On this, his debut feature, he wrote, directed, and starred in it, also coming out as a transvestite in the process (in later films he’d also take on producing and editing chores, because he was just that much of a workaholic). That he was woefully incompetent at every one of these jobs is almost beside the point; being able to accomplish even this much is pretty damn impressive, no matter how poorly executed.
Of course, that’s not being entirely honest, as the main audience for this film is people wanting to see just how incompetently made it was. They largely won’t be disappointed, as, in addition to the aforementioned goofy kitchen sink approach to storytelling (though I’m pretty certain he only threw in Lugosi and the way too long strip teases as a means of padding out a story that barely has enough plot for half an hour) we get intensely wooden acting, awkwardly spliced together takes of scenes that leave characters standing there with their mouths abruptly shut while they finish their sentences like ventriloquists, hilariously terrible dialogue that badly misinterprets transvestites, homosexuals, and hermaphrodites (it misunderstands gender relations too, but since virtually all non noir movies did back then I’ll give Wood a pass) while admirably trying to remain understanding of them all, and through it all framing the whole endeavor as a police investigation into a transvestite suicide that seems to serve no purpose beyond having a major authority figure in the form of a cop growing to understand these poor, misunderstood people. In short, it’s everything a fan of campy, culty nonsense would want.
Of course, being his first movie, he had yet to develop his style (or budget) enough to really get his craziness going properly, but it’s a very promising start to a week of Ed Wood movies. You know, aside from the Bob Flanagan movie. Up next is Jail Bait, which isn’t really one of his more famous films. I’m going to go ahead and guess that’s because it’s not as interesting as his other movies, though I can‘t imagine how that could be, if it holds true to that title.
Rating: **
Thursday, July 22, 2010
North By Northwest
So here I was, wrapping up my review of this damn movie, when my computer spazzed out on me, deleted the entire thing, and put my Diabolique/Vertigo review back. So if this seems a bit rushed, it’s because I am so very cranky. Anyway, this film has Hitchcock going back to his favorite theme, that of the Wrong Man, though here it’s done better than in most of his other films. Chronologically sandwiched as it is between Vertigo and Psycho, this one suffers a bit by comparison, but it’s still a superior effort by Hitch, and well worth a look for any thriller fans.
The film stars Cary Grant as a salesman who, about one damn minute into the movie, is mistaken for a spy, kidnapped by a villainous spy ring led by James Mason and Martin Landau, and almost murdered. After escaping, he gets caught up in a vast maelstrom of craziness that involves drunk driving to safety, a massive frame job, a murder at the United Nations, a train ride, a whirlwind romance with Eva Marie Saint, an assault by a villainous crop duster, and even a chase atop Mt. Rushmore. It’s as though Hitchcock, stung by criticisms that there wasn’t a deep enough plot in Vertigo, decided with his next film to go overboard the other way and through far too damn much plot in.
Indeed, the main criticism I have with the film is the sheer overwhelming nature of the plot. While this does allow him to throw in quite a few more set-pieces than normal (the most iconic, of course, being the crop duster attack and the Mt. Rushmore scene), a lot of it seems a bit rushed, as though he were too busy speeding along through the film to properly enjoy several of the scenes. The climax on Rushmore, in particular, only lasts a grand four minutes, presumably because Hitch needed more time to devote to subplots about guns loaded with blanks, and how Grant can attract Saint’s attention with coins and matchbooks without also attracting other attention, and…what I’m saying is that, despite this film being even longer than Vertigo, there’s so much story crammed into it that it’s outright bursting at the seams.
Which is not to say that it’s actually bad, of course. Once you come to accept the fact that it’s going to hurtle along like a Bourne movie (something that may actually be a plus to many people), there’s quite a lot to admire about it. The acting ranges from good to great, there’s a surprise cameo by Edward Platt six years before he appeared in the greatest sitcom ever made (I will fight anyone who says otherwise), there’s some bourbon that seemed suspiciously carbonated and made me giggle, and among the many great scenes, there’s one at an auction where Grant makes the biggest scene I have ever seen anyone that wasn’t in Taxi cause. Additionally, there are so many chases, guns drawn, and vehicles destroyed that one could almost mistake this for an outright action movie. Almost.
In many ways, this could be considered a palate cleanser after Vertigo. It’s a good deal more light-hearted and silly, avoiding outright the dark emotional depths of its predecessor, and rushing the pace along so swiftly that you can cheerfully shut your mind off during it, content that any plot point you may accidentally miss probably didn’t really matter anyway. I prefer his darker, more serious efforts from this time period, but given that this is sitting pretty on IMDB right now as the 34th best movie ever made, I have a sneaking suspicion that I might be in the minority.
Rating: *** ½
Diabolique/Vertigo
Okay, this one requires a bit of back-story. Back in 1955, French director Henri-Georges Clouzot managed to make the film Diabolique after allegedly purchasing the rights to the novel scant hours before Hitchcock called up authors Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac to try to get the rights. By way of apology, they wrote another novel (whose English translation was “From Among the Dead”) specifically for Hitchcock, who then adapted it into the film Vertigo. There was also a remake of Diabolique in the mid-90s, but I’ve seen enough bad remakes already this month, so I didn’t really go out of my way to track it down for this.
Since it came first chronologically, I’ll start with Diabolique. Originally intended by Clouzot to be a scary story for his daughter, it wound up becoming one of the greatest horror movies of the decade, terrifying adult audiences for decades to come. Set in a French boarding school, it follows a sadistic headmaster (Paul Meurisse), his ailing wife (Vera Clouzot, the director’s wife), and his mistress (Simone Signoret). After he’s decided to wait for his wife’s weak heart to give out so he can claim ownership of the school, the two women hatch a plan to first try to divorce him, and then, when he violently opposes such a plan, to murder him and dump the body back at the school. But when the body doesn’t turn up when it should, and children start claiming to have seen him, it becomes clear that something has gone horribly wrong with their plan. Is he still alive and stalking the school grounds, or is there another explanation?
Clouzot was Hitchcock’s biggest rival the title of Master of Suspense in the 40s and 50s, and this film is a great example of why. The film is set mostly at night, in appropriately dark and spooky fashion, , and Clouzot got fantastic performances out of all the leads, particularly from the terrified wife. There’s a lot of great little moments too, like when the students all get back from Christmas vacation and are delighted to see that the headmaster isn’t there to torment them, or when the wife goes to the morgue to try to identify a body that washed up in the Seine, and the morgue attendant appears to be actively screwing with her during the identification process. Most importantly though, it’s an amazingly tightly wound story, oozing tension from its pores, and is certainly overdue for a rediscovery by modern audiences.
Which brings us to Hitchcock’s film. Vertigo is arguably the most experimental and ambitious film of his entire career, and as such things tend to be, it was a complete critical and commercial failure when it was first released, not being properly appreciated until after his death decades later. Watching the film, one can easily understand how it might have upset audiences when it was first released. Jimmy Stewart stars as a former San Francisco detective who was forced into retirement after an ugly chase at the opening of the film left him with a crippling case of the title. Hired by an old friend to follow his wife (Kim Novak), who he suspects of being possessed by a ghost, Stewart tails her, rescues her from drowning in the Bay, and then they fall in love shortly before tragedy strikes and she dies when his vertigo keeps him from saving her. After spending a year wallowing in misery over his loss, he happens to stumble upon another woman that looks just like her. Is he going mad, or is there another explanation?
First, let’s go into the potential problems with the film. First and foremost, there is the issue of how none of the characters is particularly noble or likable. Even Stewart, who we should theoretically be rooting for, comes off as dangerously obsessed and cruel in the second half of the film when he feels he’s found another woman just like his last (show of hands, ladies: how flattering is it when your new boyfriend wants nothing more than for you to dress like his dead girlfriend?). At just over two hours, it’s also one of the longest films Hitchcock has ever made, and one in which the central mystery is solved with about a third of the film left to go (also, it‘s explained in a quick little exposition-filled note, as if Hitchcock himself felt the specifics of the plot didn‘t matter much, and he was right). It also flirts with a possession angle that, while perhaps not off-putting to modern audiences, would certainly seem out of character for Hitch, who had always to that point kept his films locked into the “real” world (the only real exception being The Birds, which came out five years later).
Still, despite its potential flaws (and I would argue that none of these is necessarily a flaw in itself), it remains one of the most fascinating films he’s ever done, and one that nowadays tends to be Hitchcock’s single biggest critical darling, presumably because it’s so different from the rest of his oeuvre. It created one of the single most overused camera tricks in film history (with the camera zooming out while pushing the camera forward to create the vertigo effect), the streets and countryside of San Francisco look like they belong in some Gothic horror movie with Vincent Price, and the strangely looping plot has an almost hypnotic appeal to it. With the exceptions of Stage Fright and the Trouble With Harry, most of Hitchcock’s films from the 50s and early 60s tend to be surprisingly dark and gloomy, and this film, with its own obsession with obsession, is one of the darkest. It’s certainly not going to be a film for everyone (indeed, if you’re going to be viewing Hitchcock for the first time, I’d recommend quite a few other films of his before getting into this one), but it’s well worth the experience.
Rating: Diabolique - **** / Vertigo - ****
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
The Trouble With Harry
When people refer to Hitchcock as the Master of Suspense, there’s generally not a specific assumption being made that he was bad at making anything that wasn’t suspense, but that did tend to be the case. For a fine example, we need look no further than this film, his very last effort at making a non thriller/horror movie.
While he had made a few non-thrillers early on in his career, including The Pleasure Garden, Waltzes From Vienna, and Easy Virtue, this had been his first since becoming a major name, and does its best to reinforce why he didn’t normally do these things. Given all the humor he tended to interject in his thrillers, it may seem natural for him to do a full comedy, but while the humor in a film like The Man Who Knew Too Much tended to come from a tense scene that’s turned so over the top it becomes silly (think of the brawl involving the swordfish), here the humor is so understated that it mostly just lays there dead, just like the title character.
So on to the story. Out in the Vermont woods, an increasing number of people stumbles upon the corpse of Harry, and while nobody really seems even the least bit upset at his death (beyond some worries about being blamed and going to jail for it), they are confounded as to how to properly deal with him, requiring multiple burials (and swift diggings-up) as they muddle through how to solve this problem, and avoid the notice of the deputy sheriff (Royal Dano, doing his best Don Knotts impression). Also, most of the cast falls in love.
It plays like an old pastoral tale, full of quaint charm and lush views of Vermont scenery (apparently mostly faked on a stage, due to heavy rains), and with a sprightly score by Bernard Herrmann (in his first of seven collaborations with Hitchcock) that at times seems to evoke the cheerfulness of Peter & the Wolf. And to be fair, it’s a perfectly mild, pleasant, inoffensive effort. The only problem is that the film is so fluffy that there’s no real reason to watch it at all, aside from wanting to see all of Hitchcock’s films. Also, the ending is just terrible, featuring Shirley MacLaine (in her film debut) summarizing the entire film, and bringing what momentum there wasn’t to a screeching halt, much like the ending to Psycho.
According to IMDB, this was one of Hitch’s personal favorites among his films, which means that either he had screwy taste regarding his films, or I do. Still a better film than Disturbia.
Rating: * ½
Rear Window/Disturbia
So here we are again with one of Hitchcock’s greatest films, and a terrible movie based off of it. Rear Window is quite possibly Hitchcock’s most famous and enduring film (as I write this, it’s his highest ranked film on IMDB’s Top 250 at #22, just ahead of Psycho). It was so popular, in fact, that it got remade in the late 90s as a TV movie that I haven’t seen. Then Steven Spielberg decided that wasn’t enough: what the world really needed was for him to produce a tween version of it to cash in on the Twilight/High School Musical crowd, and so we got Disturbia.
First, let us discuss Hitch’s film. It’s so well-known that it’s almost beside the point to talk about the plot: Jimmy Stewart’s stuck in a wheelchair, starts spying on his neighbors, and suspects one neighbor of having killed his wife. It’s such a famous story that the Simpsons devoted an entire episode to it, and I can only assume Family Guy followed suit. In the sheer familiarity of the story, it can be easy to forget how it thoroughly deserves its legendary status (in much the way that each new generation brings an army of teens with chips on their shoulders ready to try to hate Citizen Kane), but pretty much no matter who you are this has to have some level of resonance with you.
One thing that modern audiences (not all, but the ones who see films like Transformers) may take issue with is in how it’s a definite slow build movie, with the murder not even occurring until around half an hour in (I didn’t time it, so I may be horribly off there), allowing us to focus in on all of the characters first. Not just Stewart and Grace Kelly, our leads, but all the various neighbors he’s spying on, including future Perry Mason Raymond Burr. Compare this to a modern thriller like Edge of Darkness, which hurtles through plot so fast that you never get an actual reason to give a damn about any of the characters in it. To those who dislike spending time building up your characters before building up the plot, try this film, and see if it doesn’t change your mind a bit.
In a similar vein, it’s a bit surprising in how it doesn’t go for the lavish set pieces Hitchcock is normally fond of, like the frenzied carousel in Strangers on a Train or the dream in Spellbound. Instead, we get an entire film with the camera planted in one apartment (though frequently aimed out the window at other apartments) for almost the film’s entire running time. It’s a claustrophobic effort that manages to add to the tension later on without requiring any wild chase scenes (which would have had difficulty working anyway when the main character is in a wheelchair). A bit of a gamble, but he clearly pulled it off.
As always with Hitchcock, the film is as much a technical achievement as it is a dramatic one. Not only was it his first film in widescreen, but it was at the time the largest studio set Paramount had yet built, with the entire apartment complex constructed from below the ground up (indeed, they actually had to remove the ground, placing the courtyard in the studio’s basement), and placing a whole lot of lights on the ceiling to simulate sunlight. It’s the kind of mad effort that a person can get away with when he’s one of the most popular filmmakers in the world.
Of course, Disturbia takes pretty much every good decision Hitchcock made with his film and straight up ignores it. Stewart’s character was a mostly good, decent man? Shia LaBeouf is a violent psychopath with an ankle bracelet on after he assaulted his Spanish teacher. Stewart was trapped in his apartment and had a mostly good relationship with the police? LaBeouf runs all over the block, just so that the cops can repeatedly show up and scream at him while pointing their guns everywhere. Rear Window mostly avoided sentimental schmaltz? The opening fishing scene in Disturbia is so saccharine that it belonged in Patch Adams. Grace Kelly was classy and smart? Let’s have Sarah Roemer spend half the movie in a bikini! The original villain tried to cleverly dispose of the body all throughout the city pretty much immediately? Let’s have this villain leave the corpse in his closet, because that won’t smell after a day! The villain keeps the shades drawn in his wife’s bedroom, so Stewart can’t be completely sure there even was a murder? Here LaBeouf has his video camera recording the girl trying to run away from the guy while screaming and him assaulting her (and for some reason, he never once thinks to show this video to the police). About the only good part of this remake is that David Morse does a pretty good job as the villain, as one would frankly expect from a veteran of the industry like him. There is literally nothing else the movie gets right.
I don’t normally dislike LaBeouf when I see him in movies. His utter lack of personality in Transformers was aggressively inoffensive, and I actually liked him in his full greaser mode in Indiana Jones 4. But why it was decided to make him pretty much a complete asshole and then expect us to root for him anyway because he was in Holes. I’d say it’s the worst remake ever of a Hitchcock film, but then I won’t be watching the Psycho remake for the first time until next week.
Rating: Rear Window - **** / Disturbia - *
Monday, July 19, 2010
Strangers on a Train/Throw Momma From the Train
As I clearly have too much time on my hands, I am now going back to the occasional joint reviews for Hitchcock Month, and where better to begin than right here, with my favorite Hitchcock film, and a comedy whose entire plot was based around my favorite Hitchcock film? It seems a natural pairing to me, at least.
The plot is pretty simple and delicious: two strangers (Farley Granger and Robert Walker) meet up on a train, and one rather pushily mentions an idea he had, wherein two strangers that both needed someone removed from their lives would trade murders so as to remove motive. That way, say, Granger’s troublesome wife and Walker’s cruel father would be gone, and the two could live much happier lives. Of course, the system breaks down somewhat when Granger assumed Walker was just kidding, only to find that Walker has quickly moved on to strangling Granger’s wife, and is now becoming very impatient for Granger to return the favor.
It’s a surprisingly dark, nasty piece of noir for Hitchcock, leavened only by some occasional gallows humor (much like in Rope, it tends to revolve around a murderer debating proper methods of murder at a party) to ease the tension. It’s got quite a few great bits to it, such as Granger’s wife’s glasses falling to the ground, so we can watch her murder via a reflection in a lens (and frankly, it’s a murder dark and terrible enough that it deserves to be ranked up there with the shower scene in Psycho), and culminates in a completely out of control ending on an out-of-control carousel in which I can only assume roughly as many innocent bystanders were killed as were on the bus in Sabotage.
There’s also two slightly different version of the film, known as the Hollywood and British versions. There’s not really much difference between the two, there’s just an extra two minutes on the British version playing up Walker’s flamboyance and homosexual attraction to Granger, though it’s never explicitly stated in either version, so it doesn’t particularly matter which version you watch. Either way, this is the best film Hitch has ever made, and you owe it to yourself to see it if you haven’t.
I wish something similar could be said about Danny DeVito’s directorial debut, but Throw Momma From the Train really isn’t nearly as good. Despite the plot being based around DeVito’s character watching Strangers on a Train and deciding this is a great plan for him and Billy Crystal, the humor just isn’t nearly as vicious as in DeVito’s later efforts like War of the Roses or Death to Smooch (yes, to hell with all of you, Death to Smoochy is great). To be sure, there are some good lines, like when DeVito defends the motivation of the murderer in the story he wrote (“Guy in a hat killed the other guy in a hat”), and Anne Ramsey delivered a typically great performance (and one that justifiably earned her a Best Supporting Actress nomination), but in the end it seems like it simply went through too many re-writes and too much of its bite left it. I’m not a very big Crystal fan, so that may be coloring my perceptions of the film a bit as well, but even factoring that in a bit it’s just not worth your while.
Rating: Strangers - **** / Throw Momma - **
Friday, July 16, 2010
Stage Fright
This was one of Hitchcock’s more famous misfires, enraging audiences almost as much as Sabotage had back in the 30s. Unfortunately, I can’t say how without revealing a major plot element, so for this teaser let us just say that he provides yet another new twist on the Wrong Man motif.
* SPOILER ALERT *
So anyway, a lot of audiences at the time felt cheated by Hitchcock because of the following: the film opens with one of the main characters telling a second main character about a murder a third character had committed, complete with flashback showing the murder. It’s not until the end of the film that we then find out that the first character was the actual murderer, and he had just been straight up lying, something audiences felt was at best dishonest on Hitchcock’s part when he outright showed that character’s version of the murder in flashback. Since this film came out, quite a few more movies have been made with dishonest flashbacks, so it’s not as much of an issue now, but I suppose audiences back in 1950 weren’t really huge fans of such things.
* END SPOILERS *
Of course, if that were the only issue one had with this film, that wouldn’t be just cause for a negative review. Unfortunately, my problems with the film run a bit deeper than that, ranging from the story to the acting to the pacing to the music. Like in a great many Hitchcock films, the acting is not as good as it should be. The leads all remain mostly as bland as possible, with only supporting characters Marlene Dietrich and Alistair Sims being allowed to have anything approaching an actual personality. The music is oddly cheerful throughout, as though Hitch wanted the film to be considered a piece of light-hearted fluff rather than anything serious (and indeed, after making mostly darker fare over the past decade, that may be exactly what he intended), which just leaves this feeling tonally awkward . For anyone that doesn’t think music really plays that important a role in a film, just watch this one and feel the airy music suck all tension out of the film.
The plot and pacing are both the biggest problems, though, as so many twists and turns are thrown at us that the film starts to become a bloated, shapeless mess. Compare this to Rope, which was a half hour shorter and had a great deal more tension to it because it was so tightly wound. Now, like I said, it’s very possible that Hitch was just getting a little tired of making thriller after thriller and wanted to try something different, but the something different here was simply not a good film. For that matter, if he really wanted to try something different, why end it with a big chase at the end?
This film is mostly ignored by Hitchcock fans, and with good reason. The 1950s (and early 60s) were when he made most of the movies that people first think of when they remember him, and this does not fit in with the likes of Rear Window or Vertigo one bit. It’s a surprisingly clumsy effort from him, and regardless of the complaints about whether he didn’t play fair with his audience, this wouldn’t have been worthwhile either way. You can happily avoid this one.
Rating: * ½
Monday, July 5, 2010
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 & 1956)/The Man Who Knew Too Little
For our next installment of Hitchcock Month, I felt it would be fun to check out both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much, the only film he ever made and then decided to remake later in his career. As an additional bonus, I’ve also included the 1997 Bill Murray film The Man Who Knew Too Little. I briefly considered also including the classic Mario Bava film The Girl Who Knew Too Much, but that would have just been excessive.
The plot is pretty similar in both of Hitchcock’s films. A couple vacationing abroad (a British couple in Switzerland in the original, and an American couple in Casablanca in the remake) befriends a French traveler who winds up getting killed, but not before imparting info about a pending assassination to the couple. To keep the couple quiet, the assassins kidnap their child, inadvertently ensuring the couple gets much more involved in stopping the conspirators.
The original, in my opinion, is Hitchcock’s first film that I could unreservedly recommend to even the most casual fans of his. It’s the first one where we get the proper blend of humor and suspense that he was even then becoming famous for (in fairness, I’ve heard very good things about two of his silent films, The Ring and The Lodger, neither of which I’ve seen), along with his usual clever camerawork and twisted plotting. It’s also famous as being Peter Lorre’s first English language film, making this one of the earliest films to benefit from the mass exodus of the German film industry due to the rise of the Nazi party.
As Hitchcock himself felt, despite the quality of the original, the remake is clearly the superior film, though not without its flaws. For one, the assassination plot is much better fleshed out in the remake (this is probably in part due to the differences in length -- the original is a lean 75 minutes, while the remake is two hours), giving us more involved reasons for why they’re doing what they’re doing. Additionally, the locale change is a definite improvement. As nice as Switzerland may normally look for tourists, it’s somewhat less impressive when it’s constructed on a studio set, while Morocco looked frankly gorgeous. The big climax at Albert Hall was also improved, as he had more time to devote to making it as lavish and over the top as possible.
Which is not to say that the remake is an improvement in every way. First off, there’s the casting. While I have nothing bad to say about Jimmy Stewart or Doris Day, there’s a bit of a problem in how not a one of the remake’s villains had the overall charisma of Lorre, and the film absolutely suffers from it. There’s also a major problem that plagued quite a lot of Hollywood films from the 40s through the 60s, where little children weren’t allowed to act even vaguely like children from our planet, but must be some bizarre aliens that specialize in awful Precociousness, the end result of which means that every time their horrid little son was on screen (or on phone) I just wanted to grab him by the ankles and swing him into a wall a bunch of times. Seriously, there are stretches of the remake that I felt like giving the movie a full four stars for, but that brat kept popping back in and ruining all he touched.
While years of watching older movies has given me a pretty thick skin to racial insensitivity, I feel I should also note that Hitchcock spares no expense in mocking Arab culture during the first act. He has them flip out when the goddamn child accidentally rips off a lady’s veil, he has an extended dinner scene that seems to be 10% introducing them to the villains and 90% laughing at the way people in other countries eat dinner, and he even has a white character disguise himself as an Arab by putting on a turban and some face paint. This does stop about a third of the way in when they fly over to England and there aren’t any more non-whites to laugh at, but he does lay it on a bit strong at the beginning.
Then there’s the trouble with The Man Who Knew Too Little, which I hadn’t yet seen before, but which is a bit of a misfire, to put it nicely. It stars Bill Murray, ramping up his cluelessness as he goes to England to visit his brother and becomes embroiled in a vaguely Hitchcockian plot that he thinks is all staged for him to jump start his acting career. While I would have thought this would be an easy effort for Murray, it winds up being almost painfully unfunny at times, rushing through plot point after plot point, seemingly forgetting that its main intention is to make us laugh and not to wonder about the spy intrigue. Murray does get off some nice one-liners here and there, and there were plenty of moments where I had a pleasant smile on my face, but the laughs are very few and far between, and I’m now really wondering why I thought this would be good to include here, as its title seems to be almost all of its connection to Hitchcock. Director Jon Amiel, to his credit, makes sure to include a scene where a character watches his previous film Copycat on TV. Sadly this movie wasn’t a bit more recent, or we might have been treated to a character watching his film The Core instead.
Rating: 1934 -- ***/ 1956 -- *** ½/ The Man Who Knew Too Little -- * ½
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Eyes Without a Face (a.k.a. Les Yeux sans Visage)
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this on the blog before, but no matter how much I may enjoy gorefests and the over-the-top bloodiness of the best slasher movies, I will happily take a horror movie that emphasizes creepiness over blood any day of the week. That’s not to say that Eyes Without a Face has no gory moments (indeed, a couple shots are pretty extreme for a movie from 1959), but it does mostly focus on being one of the most unsettling and weird horror movies of its day.
The film is about a famous surgeon in the French countryside whose daughter’s face has been hopelessly ruined in a car crash, and so he becomes obsessed with kidnapping other young women and trying to surgically graft their faces onto his daughter. Clearly a man ahead of his time, as just recently have we had the world’s first successful face transplant. While he uses his first victim as a means of faking his daughter’s death, the police do eventually start noticing the disappearances of several young women in the area, all of whom seem to have recently been at the doctor’s clinic (way to keep attention away from yourself there, buddy). Additionally, he also finds he has to contend with his daughter, who is increasingly horrified at what is being done to all the young women, as well as to herself.
It’s always interesting to me how the French countryside can look so beautiful in so many movies, and yet look so grim and ghoulish whenever a horror movie is set there (Calvaire is another one where all of France seems to be a grim post-apocalyptic wasteland). Add to that the unsettling carnival music, and the constant sound of the doctor’s pack of dogs barking, and you’ve got a place that seems a wee bit less pleasant to live than, say, Manon des Sources.
I also enjoyed how plausible most of the film was – not only is there nothing at all supernatural about the plot, but it bears mentioning that quite a few of our major medical breakthroughs have indeed come from using people as complete guinea pigs. Sure, most of the time there wasn’t any outright kidnapping going on, but there hasn’t been any shortage of tests done on minorities or prisoners of war (or, in the case of the Japanese Imperial Army, all of China) – in short, any time someone was able to pretend someone else wasn’t a real person. This was a pretty dark subject matter for the 50s – or even today – and even if it doesn’t fully deal with the questions it raises, it still makes it one of the best horror movies out there, and one that it’s a shame almost nobody my age has seen.
Rating: *** ½
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Sawdust & Tinsel
If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from years of watching Bergman films, it’s that I never want to go to Sweden. You hear interest groups complain all the time about the poor treatment Arabs or blacks get in the cinema, but you never hear anyone talk about the decades of negative portrayals the Swedes have gotten at the hands of their resident pessimist Ingmar. All that I know of Swedish people is from these movies, and they are all filled with miserable, negative people that go around actively engaged in the pursuit of making themselves and everyone around them more miserable. That level of psychic damage can irreparably harm a nation, and if you don’t believe me, just ask the Germans what the psychic trauma of knowing they were the bad guys in two successive world wars did to their appreciation of pornography.
While Bergman had made some decent movies before this, it was here, with his (appropriately enough) thirteenth film, where he really came into his own. His familiar themes of depression and humiliation come to the fore here, as he follows a circus troupe that seems to be on its last legs as it arrives at a new town in search of the money it desperately needs to continue. Along their way, they find adversity in the form of pretty much everyone they encounter, up to and including each other. The ringleader of the show, Albert, and his wife Anne make up the main part of the film, as the two are constantly fighting for one-upsmanship in their relationship, which I think you’ll agree is always the sign of a happy couple.
The best, and certainly most easily quotable, example of their humiliation comes when Albert and his wife visit the town’s lecherous theater director hoping to borrow some of his costumes for their show that night. The director openly despises them for being the bottom rung of the entertainer ladder, and has no problem telling them so, in a searing speech in which he explains that he insults them because they let him, and that “you only risk your lives. We risk our pride,” before letting them go. This may all seem a tad harsh, but when you see how abysmal their show actually is, you’ll begin to understand.
I can’t honestly say this ranks up there with Bergman’s best works. It lacks the gravitas of such masterpieces as The Seventh Seal or Persona, as its main insight into the human condition is that we’re all a bunch of creeps, wading through the miasma of pain that is life. Frankly, I could have gotten that from almost every other film of his. For what it is, though, it is very good. This film will only appeal to a pretty select group of people, and if you’ve read this far, you probably already know if you’re part of that select group.
Rating: ***
Saturday, November 3, 2007
A Christmas Carol
This is probably the most famous version of Dickens’ classic story, due mainly (and justifiably) to the performance of its lead Alistair Sim. This is the first time I’ve ever seen Sim at work, and I am eager to see him again. He is the lynchpin that holds an otherwise somewhat shaky film together.
Part of the appeal is certainly that, being both the title character (the film was originally titled “Scrooge”) and being a generally miserable, crotchety old man, he gets all the really good lines. A large part of it, though, is certainly his face. To say he has an unconventional look to him would be most charitable. To say that he looks as though he had been shot in the face at some point in his youth would be a bit closer to the truth. It’s one of the most distinctive faces I’ve seen in the cinema, and it suits his character perfectly.
I like to imagine that most people would already be familiar with the story, but in case there are any holdouts among my readers that are willing to read inane movie reviews but not classic literature, the story is that of a miserly old banker who has no friends and no love in his life other than money, who is visited on Christmas Eve by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, showing him how he needs to change his life to avoid being damned. He awakens Christmas morning a new, and somewhat mad-looking, man, and rushes out to embrace everyone he had previously kept at arm’s length, and uses his long-accumulated wealth to become one of the city’s great philanthropists, God bless us everyone.
Okay, the ending is incredibly schmaltzy, as old Christmas films tend to be (this is as opposed to present day Christmas movies, where the heavy hand of irony forces us to avoid any schmaltz in favor of lots of bad slapstick humor), and there’s my Precocious Child alarm was tripped when Tiny Tim first showed up, but in general the good of this film does outweigh the bad. Sim alone is probably worth seeing the movie for, and let’s face it, even if this isn’t one of Dickens’ best works, it is still Dickens, and that carries a good deal of weight.
Rating: ***
Friday, October 19, 2007
The Revenge of Frankenstein
Yes, you’re getting a Peter Cushing two-fer. Sit there and enjoy it, bucko. This, by the way, was his second turn as Baron Frankenstein for Hammer Films, and while he doesn’t quite have the role perfectly nailed down like he would in later films, he’s got the main bits down pat, and brings his usual charm to all the proceedings.
Set right after the first film, it opens with the Baron facing the guillotine for the murders committed by his creation. He manages to escape, and makes his getaway to another small town elsewhere in Germany. For those not big on European history, I should point out that Germany was not actually a unified nation until the middle of the 1800s, and spent most of its history existing as a collective of city states. This lack of unity provided an ideal living situation for any mad scientists living at the time, who found it much easier to pack up all their things and find a new home elsewhere than their modern day equivalents do. Really, fleeing to a new town within a hundred miles or so is a good deal better than having to travel all the way to Argentina, don’t you think?
Naturally, once he arrives (under the clever pseudonym Dr. Stein), his experiments continue, though he’s been able to refine things quite a bit. Outside of a few scars, he’s now able to make his new attempt look perfectly normal, unlike the ghoulish monster played by Christopher Lee in the first film. In a nice twist, he even has a living, willing subject ready to provide a brain, as his assistant suffers from partial paralysis and wants the new body so he can function like a normal person. It all seems to be coming together a bit too well, so you just know it’s going to end in a good deal of tragedy. Exactly what form this tragedy takes I will not reveal, but it simply wouldn’t be a Frankenstein movie without at least one angry mob of villagers forming at the end ready to carry him off, and this film does not disappoint in that regard.
This is not Hammer’s best Frankenstein movie by any means, but I haven’t really seen them doing an actual bad one. They managed to change up each of these films enough to keep them fresh right up until the company folded close to two decades after this one, which is something they didn’t always manage to do with some of their other franchises like Dracula. This probably shouldn’t be the first one you check out, but you’ll enjoy it all the same.
Rating: ** ½
Sunday, September 30, 2007
House of Wax
To help wash the bad taste out of my mouth that Witchfinder General left, I decided to rewatch this film for the first time since I was in high school, in the hopes that it would hold up at least as well as I had remembered it being. Fortunately, while it’s not a total knockout film by any means, it is a typically fun and ghoulish Vincent Price vehicle, the likes of which one would generally expect from him.
Price stars in this as the creator of a small house of wax, and his refusal to pander to audiences by making a house of horrors section to the museum causes his backer to set fire to the building in an effort to make his money back from insurance fraud. Price naturally survives the fire, but is now hideously deformed in both body and mind, and begins rebuilding his treasured house of wax, this time by taking newly dead bodies and dipping them in wax to be his new attractions. All of this is done with Price hamming it up to the hilt, and just showing off how much better an actor he is than anyone else in the film (as with most Price movies, the film noticeably weakens whenever he’s not onscreen, particularly the moments made for 3D gimmickry, like when a showman fires a paddleball at the screen while openly talking to the audience). He’s particularly good when he opens up his new museum and its house of horrors, adding his grim one liners when describing each new attraction for the crowd. The big reveal near the end when his face is torn off is also quite effective, though lessened a bit by how we’d already seen it in shadow by then.
While the film itself is good light fun, the DVD is well worth getting just for a great bonus feature. Included on the flipside of the DVD is the original Mystery of the Wax Museum, which Price’s film was a remake of. I have to say, the original plays like nothing so much as a rough draft for which the remake was a final product. I guess that feeling is in large part due to the early attempt at Technicolor used on the film, giving only a two color palette rather than the three colors used in films today (apparently green hadn’t been discovered yet), making the film look like it’s been so ill-kept that its colors have all gotten washed out and faded. The lack of Vincent Price also hurts the original, as the guy they have in his slot here just doesn’t match up. Still, it’s certainly one of the better horror movies of the thirties, if not really one of the best, and for a DVD that’s as bargain priced as this is, it’s a great addition to sweeten the pot. If you’re looking for a fun pair of older movies to watch while on a budget, you could certainly do a lot worse than these.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
El Ataud del Vampiro
A couple changes to the blog beginning with this review. First, you’ll notice that I’ve learned how to copy and paste code off of other sites in order to hide the bulk of the blog from view short of clicking on a link. This is to keep a proper level of order to the proceedings, and to keep the main page from looking so damned thickly-choked with text. Additionally, from now on each review will be followed by a link for you to buy the movie on Amazon, so you can all share in my enjoyment or lack thereof. Happy now? Great, then let’s get on with the review.
This film is the sequel to yesterday’s El Vampiro, which you may have guessed, and they came as a two-fer from Casanegra. While the original had its fair share of flaws, which you may recall from my review in which I cheerfully listed them, it did manage to build up a solid mood with a keen visual sense, and when it began to get a little silly, as vampire movies generally tend to, the filmmakers were unafraid to just go completely over the top ridiculous with it, and I can rather admire that. Its sequel, which assembles most of the cast from the original film, including the villainous count, back from the dead after a foolish doctor decides to steal his corpse to perform experiments on, only to have a thief accidentally remove the stake from his heart, freeing him to theoretically wreak havoc on those who had opposed him.
There are two main problems with all this, and they are the complete absence of the two things I liked about the original. There’s no creepy, moody visuals; most of the film’s set in a generic looking hospital set, leaving me with nothing to work with. It also never really manages, or even attempts, to go over the top with anything, making sure the whole film is very paint by numbers. I can’t even get worked up about it being bad, it’s just generic and lifeless. Now, having said that, feel free to use the link below and buy five copies of it and its predecessor. Help feed my movie addiction, people!
Monday, September 10, 2007
El Vampiro
This film had a pretty big legacy to live up to. It’s a DVD release by Casanegra, the same company that released such other classic Mexican horror movies as The Black Pit of Dr. M, Curse of the Crying Woman, and the Witch’s Mirror, all of which kicked so much ass that one viewing will literally cause your ass to explode. Needless to say, El Vampiro had its work cut out for it. It also had an additional hurdle to overcome, in that I generally dislike vampire movies. Filmmakers usually do not get this when it comes to vampire films, but I want my movie monsters to be scary rather than sexy. This film gets it half right: while the two vampires featured in this movie are in no way scary, they are at the very least unsexy, and I can get behind that.
The film does have its fair share of troubles beyond that, though, such as the amazingly clumsy and distracting visual effects. While most of the film’s visuals manage to convey a genuinely creepy mood, the teleporting nature of the vampires, accomplished by literally just stopping the camera and starting it up again once one of the vampires is in front of the camera, is so awkward that it dragged me out of the film each time. The vampires themselves are also rather goofy in the end. I don’t know how I was really expecting the film’s big climactic struggle between the courageous doctor and the villainous count to play out, but I was certainly not expecting the vampire to panic at the sight of the doctor and decide to sword fight him. Nor was I expecting the way the other vampire was dealt with, which shan’t be revealed here except to say that it was about as silly a way of stopping a vampire as a person could conceivably think of. No, sillier than that.
That said, there are some things I could recommend about this. Outside of the frankly sad attempt at special effects, the overall visual feel of the film is very effective, and I just can’t find it in my heart to dislike a movie that has people discovering secret passageways. Overall, though, it’s definitely the weakest of the Casanegra films that I’ve seen thus far, and you should only check it out if you’re really big on atmospheric horror movies.
