Reviews

I fear to watch, yet I can't look away

In recent months, I've been developing a keen interest in bad movies. Since I subscribed to the Amazon UK rental service last September, I've seen such doozies as the remake of The Wicker Man starring Nicolas Cage, the Eddie Murphy shit-a-thon Norbit, Uwe Boll's meisterwerk House of the Dead, the made-for-TV Omen IV: The Awakening and, most recently, Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered. Most of these titles were "recommended" by my good friend Baron Scarpia, the bad film connoisseur to end all bad film connoisseurs. He has recently enjoyed Andrea Bianchi's The Zombie Dead and Claudio Fagrasso's Troll 2 (the latter being the only film I've ever heard of that is so awful that it had to be reviewed in two parts), and I believe he has Norbit in his rental queue lest he renege on his wager with me.

I, however, believe that I may have found the bad movie that puts all other bad movies to shame. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...

The Hottie and the Nottie.

Starring Paris Hilton.

Imagine it, people. Not only is Paris Hilton still permitted to appear in movies, someone actually allowed her to take the starring role in one, and then, sealing the deal, decided to release it in cinemas throughout the United States. That, surely, is irresponsible enough to serve as grounds for a lengthy stretch in prison, if not death by hanging. Keith Phipps over at The A.V. Club has written a warning to the faint-hearted not to go and see the film (this sort of thing is known in some circles as a "review"), but I doubt that he will dissuade me. I have survived Nicolas Cage and the killer bees. I escaped unscathed from rampaging zombies and their turn-table effects. Heck, I even made it through Tom Green masturbating an elephant without even throwing up. You think Paris Hilton's going to stand in my way? My only previous encounter with her was her guest appearance in an episode of Veronica Mars, where she proved that not only does she look like a deformed wax sculpture (I know, I know, looks aren't everything, but if you're starring in a film in which you are described as a "Hottie", it might help to be at least passably attractive), but also can't act her way out of a paper bag, so I can only hope that my immune system is high enough not to be struck down by such a prolonged exposure to her.

Some of the comments appended to the A.V. Club review are pretty funny in their own right. On the subject of the infamous Paris Hilton sex tape:

My freshman year of college one of my hallmates got that and had us all watch it. It was so long and slow that Tarkovsky could've directed it.

- KaneLynch

I love movies that tell you that being ugly doesn't matter as long as you turn out to actually be really hot.

- Tooncedale

I'm pretty sure Paris Hilton herself pitched this.

And by "pitched" I mean sucked cock.

And by "sucked cock" I mean let an executive shit on her chest.

And by "let an executive shit on her chest" I mean told Zach Braff that people like him.

- Elitist Trash

By all reasoning this movie is something that should make me absolutely furious but for some reason it doesnt. For one I think it is pretty awesome that even though they clearly tried to make "the nottie" as hideous as possible she still isnt really that much worse than Paris Hilton. And I am not saying that because Paris is a cum dumpster. If I was at a club/bar and saw these two together I would have to think for a few seconds which one was better.

- Fuzzy Cootie

Am I alone in thinking Daniel Day Lewis might actually be able to pull off a convincing portrayal of Paris Hilton?

- Johnny5000

I think Paris Hilton looks like Squidward.

- Middle Man of Time

I think I'd rather fuck Squidward than Paris Hilton.

- Persia

The estimated box office for this weekend is $23,000, opening on 111 screens. It made $76 a screen on Friday.

- Juggernaught_

Pfff! They don't know what they're missing.

PS. A rental copy of the Blu-ray release of Michael Bay's dog turd of a wartime epic, Pearl Harbor, landed on my desk today. I'm sure that, compared to The Hottie and the Nottie, it will seem like a masterpiece.

Sex and Death

I would expect a suicide note to be heartfelt and dramatic. Not this one, though. Wouldn't be very much in keeping with me, would it? I think someone may have forgotten to fit me with a heart. I can't even think of anything worth writing. I am summed up by three piece of paper: a birthday card from a father who never loved me, a Christmas card from a man who I foolishly thought did, and a visiting order from my brother. My family have to order me to visit them, and still I don't. What a hate-filled person I am.

It's not much of a legacy, is it? Maybe I can go down in history as author of the dullest suicide note ever.

I tried to be a good doctor. Really, I did. But it was too hard. It beat me, and I'm so ashamed. I never wanted anything else out of life, so there is no life. I am so sorry to the patients I caused suffering; to their families, my sincerest apologies. I don't belong here. (Casualty 22.25, "Sex and Death")

Casualty is now just over half way through its 22nd series, and now seems like as good an opportunity as any to examine its status, particularly given that last Saturday's episode, the 25th of the series, entitled Sex and Death (a nickname that would be quite appropriate for the programme as a whole throughout its "dark period" of Series 16 through 21), seems destined to go down in history as a real eye-opener.

I previously wrote about how much of a turnaround the two part season premiere constituted, only to be disappointed as so many of the promises of the first two episodes turned out to be empty. By and large, my observations remain the same as they were the last time I wrote about Casualty: the first two episodes were excellent, heralding a real return to form, but, while the standard has, on the whole, been higher than it has been for a very long time, the quality is just too uneven, with every decent episode being countered with a complete dud, and a general feeling that, for all the promises of a return to socio-political issues and medical drama, the most of the current writers (many of whom are more generally associated with soap operas like Doctors and EastEnders, or even, if rumours are to be believed, writing students submitting scripts as part of their annual assessment) just don't have sufficient skill or experience to cope with this style of writing.

The 24th episode, Before a Fall, brought to a head the ongoing storyline of Ruth Winters (Georgia Taylor), an F2 (a junior doctor in her second year out of medical school) and Lily Allen lookalike (seriously, the resemblance is uncanny - luckily, though, Ruth doesn't sing). She first appeared at the beginning of Series 22 and, from the start, she was established as cold, rude, arrogant and, for all her textbook knowledge, worryingly incompetent when it came to actual patient treatment. Her actions had already led to two near fatalities, plus the paralysis of another patient, the latter leading to her passing the buck on to the nurse who had been assisting in the patient's treatment, resulting in said nurse's resignation (although, given that the nurse in question was one of the worst characters ever to grace the show, I doubt that many people mourned her departure). In Before a Fall, however, Ruth's incorrect diagnosis led to a patient's death, which seemed to be the final nail in the coffin, leading to her returning to her halls of residence and hanging herself. The episode ended with the team desperately trying to resuscitate her. (The character is currently in a coma and will presumably make a full recovery, given that the actress has recently signed an 18-month contract.)

Sex and Death, meanwhile, picked up the story where it left off, and, in a radical departure for the normally formulaic Casualty, went back over the previous five months in flashback, filling in many of the events which occurred off-screen and led to Ruth's decision to attempt suicide. It really was an exceptionally well put together episode, both in terms of Ian Barnes' direction (the blue-tinged lighting and use of Arvo Pärt's composition Spiegel im Spiegel, in particular, were gut-wrenching) and Georgia Taylor's performance, while the script, by Mark Catley (who also wrote the two-part series opener), did the impossible and actually made me feel somewhat sorry for Ruth. Unfortunately, feeling sorry for a character is not the same thing as liking them or excusing their behaviour, which I suspect was the episode's key aim. Despite clearly establishing the character as a tragic figure (her father was abusive; her mother committed suicide; her brother is in prison; she was bullied at school; she was utterly exhausted from working long hours; the one colleague she allowed herself to open up to rejected her advances; a cancer patient whom she befriended ultimately died), none of this changes the fact that she was a callous bitch who endangered several lives, ruined one co-worker's career and repeatedly rejected others' offers of friendship and assistance.

Unfortunately, this seems to be par for the course in Casualty these days: introduce a character as completely unlikeable, and then, a few months later, do an about-turn and heap misery after misery upon them in an attempt to make the audience like them. (A similar technique was used, to an even greater degree, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer's sixth season.) The method demonstrated in this episode, using flashbacks to establish a sort of double life for Ruth, almost enters into retcon territory, effectively telling us that what was shown for the last six months was in fact been only half the story. I don't object to surprise revelations within reason, and, despite it being clear in retrospect that this must have been quite extensively planned from the start (at least judging by the manner in which seemingly innocuous scenes sampled from the previous 24 episodes suddenly took on a different meaning when mixed in with new material), it reminds me a lot of the sort of trick the writers of Angel used to pull all the time, suddenly announcing that an entire episode had actually been a hallucination, or that a character's behaviour was in fact nothing but a charade, despite the viewers not being given any clues with which to work this out for themselves. Had more hints been given towards Ruth's mental breakdown throughout the previous episodes, I would probably have looked on this episode more kindly, but as it is, it feels almost like rewriting a character with little or no foreshadowing whatsoever, and it's hard not to feel manipulated. The Series 12 episode Love Me Tender (my second favourite of all time) did a much better job of revealing the reason for a character's coldness in a genuinely heartbreaking manner while still having given the audience ample opportunity to work out what had happened beforehand.

It's an achievement for Casualty if for no reason other than for successfully jettisoning the formula in a way previously only matched by the non-linear continuity of Barbara Machin's two-parter last Christmas, but I remain undecided on how I actually feel about the end result. Certainly, it was all extremely well put together, and I suspect will remain one of the high points of the current series, but I think that, in resorting to such blatant manipulation and rewriting (or concealing) of facts, the writers have broken a certain unarticulated contract with the audience, which, in a sense, is really not playing fair.

Oh well. Right now, I'm most looking forward to the imminent departure of the pompous git known as Harry Harper (Simon MacCorkindale), whose tenure as the department's senior consultant has been like listening to nails scraping on a blackboard non-stop for the last six years, and the impending return of Charlie Fairhead (Derek Thompson), who has been on another of his sabbaticals since Christmas. Maybe he'll find a way to kick this sorry lot into order.

The Criterion mind game

Today, I received my copy of Criterion's recent re-release of Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. This new 2-disc edition, released in November 2007, replaces the old single-disc version from May 1998. As one of the first DVDs Criterion put out (both the original release and the new one are number 3 in the collection), it left rather a lot to be desired in the transfer department, taken from a composite source and filled with dot crawl.

I'm happy to report that the new transfer is a massive improvement, although it does suffer from an extremely irritating practice known as windowboxing, which Criterion have been applying to all their transfers for Academy ratio films for at least a couple of years. Essentially, the entire image is shrunk slightly and surrounded by a black border on all four edges. According to the booklet included inside the DVD case, this is done "to ensure that the maximum image is visible on all monitors". What they should have said is "to ensure that the maximum image is visible on improperly calibrated televisions". Overscan is an issue with most television displays, cropping off as much as 10% of the signal image. However, I don't think it would be unreasonable to suggest that those who are serious about film will do everything they can to minimise, if not eliminate, overscan, or buy a display that does not suffer from it in the first place (such as most projectors, as well as the majority of modern 1080p LCD or plasma displays).

Why, then, is Criterion, a company that caters specifically to cinephiles and prides itself on the highest possible quality standards (more on this later) effectively authoring discs, as one of my fellow netizens put it, "to look best on the worst equipment"? I can think of no other studio who routinely shrinks the image and therefore throws away valuable resolution. This is standard definition NTSC we're talking about, with a resolution of 720x480. Every line of resolution should be valued, not thrown away in order to prevent a small amount of the image being cropped on Joe Sixpack and Mary-Jane Rottencrotch's tube display. The windowboxing on this release is certainly not excessive, but it does mean that the image is approximately 12-13% smaller than it could have been, and as a result has 12-13% less detail than would overwise have been possible.

(Left: old version; Right: new version; click for full size images)

The long and short of it is that I am of the opinion that Criterion's reputation as being the absolute best of the best in the DVD field is largely a mind game propagated by a number of factors, ranging from their pioneering work in the LaserDisc days (it's unlikely that you would have audio commentaries or be able to expect an original aspect ratio presentation of a film as the rule rather than the exception if not for them) to their extremely high standard of publicity and design. Their packaging is always eye-catching and, even if they occasionally confuse plainness with minimalism (The Rock is a cover that only Criterion could get away with!), broadly speaking the sort of artwork they put out is clever, tasteful and light years ahead of anything the mainstream studios (or indeed the indie studios, most of whom seem to delight in making their wares look as schlocky as possible, as if it's some sort of badge of honour) are doing. Essentially, pick a Criterion DVD off the shelf and it looks like you're really getting something special. The old adage is "never judge a book by its cover", but all too many people do.

There's also the niche factor: broadly speaking, I doubt that your average moviegoer will have heard of, let alone seen, the bulk of the films Criterion have released. Intriguingly, this often seems to lead to a sense of reverence: "They've put out a film in a foreign language with a title that's hard to pronounce about nuns in S&M gear painting each other pink - they must be really dedicated!" I am of no doubt that the people at Criterion are absolutely devoted to their craft and truly love what they are doing. However, what I am trying to say it that I'm not convinced that their grand reputation is entirely justified. While their choice of films (barring the odd Armageddon), bonus materials and packaging are all very high-brow, their transfers are often not that much better, if indeed better at all, than the competition.

Surf to various review sites, and you'll find that Criterion's transfers are often held up as the benchmark to which all other companies should aspire. In reality, though, the majority of the Criterion transfers that I've seen are fairly average. The Rock and Naked Lunch are at the upper end of the spectrum and are truly great (if imperfect) pieces of work, but at the lower end you have the likes of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which in terms of its lack of detail is one of the worst DVD transfers I've ever seen that wasn't pulled off a VHS tape or LaserDisc master. Oddly enough, many people praised it as a welcome improvement on the earlier Universal DVD.

They are practically the same transfer, folks.

Don't believe me? The pictures speak for themselves. The same master has clearly been used, the level of detail is almost exactly the same, and the only significant (and I use the word loosely) difference between the two is minutely looser framing on the Universal disc. Hardly the stunning improvement that most would have you believe, and, given that the Universal disc was rightly criticised by a number of people at its time of release all these "5/5" and "10/10" reviews for the Criterion version look mightily suspect.

All this is not part of some deliberate attempt on my part to pour scorn on Criterion or turn people away from their products. They deserve a great deal of praise for putting out films that no other company would touch (even if most of them aren't to my tastes), their packaging is top notch, and I love the fact that they routinely include chunky booklets filled with reviews, analyses, interviews and artwork - something I've really come to appreciate since many of the majors have given up even including a chapter insert. However, I don't think Criterion's releases should be celebrated as the absolute best that the DVD format can look. Like just about every other company, they've put out a handful of great-looking titles, some absolute turds and a vast number that merely look quite good. "Quite good", it must be said, is an awful lot better than what an awful lot of the independents are putting out, but, when you routinely charge $40 for a single film and lay claim to "gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions that offer the highest technical quality", "quite good" isn't really enough.

DVD review: Halloween (remake)

Essentially a film of two halves, neither of which works on its own and which fail to gel together as a single cohesive whole, Zombie's version of Halloween falls somewhere between a crass, ass-backwards attempt to shoehorn the more superficial elements of his style into an origin story, and a soulless, slavish copy of the original.

I review Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween, presented here in its unrated form in a 2-disc set, and wonder how to get two hours of my life back.

The case for euthanising Tom Green

I will watch and review Norbit, a film I hoped never to see, if you watch and review Freddy Got Fingered, one of the only two films in the world that I actively hate. 'Tedious, mean-spirited, nasty, unfunny, noxious, loathsome, fucking tragic waste of celluloid'? Oh, Michael, you have no idea...

- Baron Scarpia, December 8th, 2007

It took me long enough, but I eventually got there. I have now watched Freddy Got Fingered. Given the 83 minutes of sheer agony that I have just suffered through, fulfilling the second half of the bargain should, in comparison, be a doddle.

As we sat down to watch the film, my brother said to me: "You know, I bet you anything you like that there will be one joke that absolutely kills us buried somewhere in all this." He was right. Just under twelve minutes into the film, we see an animation executive talking on his cellphone. Here is his dialogue:

Listen, you tell Hanna-Barbera to go fuck themselves, okay? I got twelve Korean teenagers in a tiger cage that can draw a fucking dog wearing a cape.

It's one of those little "it's funny because it's true" moments that should put a smile on the face of anyone who knows the mentality of the average animation executive. Unfortunately, this means that there are still more than 72 minutes of pain to follow. Freddy Got Fingered has three things working in its favour:

1. It's only 83 minutes long.
2. Of which 4½ are the closing credits.
3. I watched a PAL release, which is 4% faster than the NTSC versions. Had I found myself landed with an NTSC copy, it would have lasted 87 minutes. On balance, I consider myself to be extremely lucky.

Isn't this funny?

Unfortunately, from here on in, the positives will have to be restricted to the fact that the experience of sitting through this film did not actually prove to be fatal. Freddy Got Fingered stars Tom Green, not as Freddy (more about him later), but as Gord Brody, an aspiring cartoonist. Stop and think about this for a second. Tom Green. As a cartoonist. Broadly speaking, good cartoons require two things: they have to be funny, and they have to be drawn well. Tom Green is not, by any stretch of the imagination, funny. He isn't funny when he's performing someone else's material. When he's performing his own (he not only stars in, but also directed and co-wrote this film), he's fucking tragic. His cartoons, which I suspect Green himself didn't actually draw, are not particularly well drawn, but on balance are probably as good as or slightly better than 95% of the animated fare you'll see when you turn on your television.

And here's the problem: I'm not sure whether or not we're supposed to take Gord's aspirations seriously. Is he supposed to be a great cartoonist, or is the joke that he's a hopeless one? The quality of his output certainly doesn't give us any clues, since it's not god-awful, but it's not any good either. I'm not even sure whether or not we, the audience, are expected to like Gord, let alone his cartoons. On paper, he is as vile and loathsome an excuse for a human being as you could hope to find, but then again, given that he seems to be a stand-in for Green himself, one can only assume that either Green suffers from a serious case of self-hatred, or, more likely, he thinks he's a comic genius and that masturbating a horse, slitting open a dead deer and wearing its skin Ed Gein-style, and spinning a baby round and round by its umbilical cord are the height of entertainment.

You're supposed to laugh because she's disabled.

This film also stars Rip Torn as Gord's vulgar father. When I first saw him, I thought for one awful minute that it was Jack Nicholson, but thankfully, not even he, who has recently starred in such classics as Anger Management, has delved that low yet. Eddie Kaye Thomas, who appeared in the American Pie comedies, plays Gord's younger brother, Freddy. In an absolutely "hilarious" scene, Gord accuses his father of molesting Freddy, hence the film's title. Freddy ends up in a home for abused children. Isn't that funny? Better yet, Green's wife at the time, Drew Barrymore, also shows up to embarrass herself in the minor role of a secretary at the animation studio. The fact that she divorced him less than a year after the film was released does a lot to redeem her in my eyes. Oh, and Marisa Coughlan, the only element of the film that even approaches pleasantness, plays Gord's girlfriend-to-be, a wheelchair-bound lady who enjoys sucking his cock and having her legs whacked with a bamboo stick. That we are spared seeing her actually putting Tom Green's penis in her mouth and performing fellatio on him can, I suspect, give us one reason to be thankful for the rating criteria of the Motion Picture Association of America and the fact that the mainstream studios generally won't put out anything with an NC-17 certificate.

I'm not even going to attempt to critique the film's plot (or lack thereof), cinematic technique (or lack thereof), performances (or lack thereof), or any of the other elements that one might expect to find in a movie. (I do, however, want to point out that, when I first head about this film, I assumed it was something that had been shot on a consumer grade camcorder or, at most, DV. Never in my life did I expect it to be shot on 35mm, which isn't cheap and actually requires some degree of technical know-how to shoot on.) I simply want to conclude by saying that, until now, I have never given anything a rating of "0/10". Previously, no matter how awful a film appeared to be, I always held off slapping it with a score that low because I was sure that there must be something in the world that was worse than it, and that I couldn't make use of this score until I could be sure I had seen something approximating the worst film ever made. That long search is now over. While I can conceive of there being other films that are as bad as Freddy Got Fingered, the notion of there being anything more awful is beyond my reasoning. I have gazed into the abyss, and it gazed back at me. And it wanked an elephant off.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Episode 10: Anywhere But Here

Written by Joss Whedon; Illustrated by Cliff Richards

Ugh. Kennedy's back. And the manner in which she is drawn conveys all the irritation of her "personality" without the added bonus of sound.

In this episode, Buffy and Willow go flying on what I can only assume is a voyage through a dream state to gain information from some sort of demonic beast with a television attached to its head. It's a bizarre image, but it works. What doesn't quite work is the whole "dream logic" thing, which Whedon pulled off with great aplomb in Restless (my personal favourite ever Buffy episode) but doesn't quite accomplish on the page. It might be that the compressed nature of this single-issue storyline (we only get 25 pages, several of which are given over to Dawn's ongoing non-storyline), but tonally is seems a lot more muddled than any of the dreams we saw in the original series. It doesn't help that Christian Bale and Daniel Craig both appear in the dream, something that wouldn't have been possible on the show - to me, it just seems like self-indulgent pop culture for pop culture's sake. Not that Buffy ever shied away from pop culture - on the contrary, it positively revelled in it - but here, it feels like poorly written fan fiction. Fan fiction written by the series' original creator.

At the crux of this issue appears to be a partial explanation of why Willow has been avoiding Buffy, and more to the point keeping Kennedy away from her. Apparently, by resurrecting Buffy back at the beginning of Season 6, Willow feels that she set in motion the events that eventually led to Tara's demise, in effect choosing Buffy over her girlfriend. Now, she's concerned that her current piece of ass (that's all I can dignify Kennedy as, since even in comic book form you can sense the complete lack of chemistry between the two of them) will meet a similar fate (if only), so she's intentionally keeping her out of Buffy's reach. Oooo-kay. Not only does this not make the blindest bit of sense, I'm still not getting why it's taken Willow until now to come to this conclusion. She didn't seem to have any problem hanging around Buffy throughout Season 7. (They throw in a rather trite explanation that she didn't realise how she felt until she saw Warren again, but this blatantly makes no sense at all, since she and Kennedy were hidden away long before he showed up again.)

On a side note, this issue was drawn by Cliff Richards, who is apparently something of a veteran of the Buffy comics. His style is similar to Georges Jeanty's, but with his own individual quirks. He captures Dawn's likeness much better, and does quite well with Willow as well, but his Buffy is inconsistent.

I don't know, I'm just not really feeling it. It's enjoyable enough to read, but once you actually stop to think about what's going on, it makes less and less sense. I find it hard to believe that Whedon's heart is in this any more - certainly no more than it was during Seasons 6 and 7 - and none of the character progressions strike me as believable. I'm going to continue to read this series, but more out of mild curiosity than because I actually consider it canonical... which I don't, even if it's supposed to be.

At this stage, I personally think that those looking for their Buffy fix would be better served by The Chosen, a fan-written continuation which adheres as closely as possible to the format of the original TV series, and has the added bonus of being free. It's currently just over half-way through Season 9 (where it has admittedly been stalled for some time, although the writers have given continual reassurances that their plan is to eventually take it all the way to the end of Season 10), and, while re-reading some of it recently, it struck me how much better it works than the official comic continuation. It takes a few episodes to find its feet, but once the writers perfect that Buffy "voice", it rarely becomes anything less than completely convincing and, 99% of the time, is vastly preferable to anything in Seasons 6 and 7. It even has a few episodes that I think compare to the best of the official series, with the writers taking great pains to right many of the wrongs committed during the final two seasons of the original show. In Season 9, for example, an episode set in an alternate reality gives Anya the closure she was denied in the final episode of the real show. Don't ask me to explain it, but it works, as a sort of bitter-sweet inversion of The Wish. The writers are also comfortable enough with writing the characters that, when they have someone do something radically unusual (such as Faith and Tara going off to get pissed in the woods in the most recent episode), it still seems natural rather than out of character.

I know a lot of people are some what suspicious of these fan-written continuations, and rightly so, because the vast majority of them are indeed poor, but this one proves to be the exception to the rule and is why, ironically enough, the official continuation of the series feels more like fan fiction than an actual example of fan fiction.

The Giallo Project #11: Death Walks at Midnight

Alternative titles: La Morte accarezza a mezzanotte; Director: Luciano Ercoli; Starring: Nieves Navarro, Simón Andreu, Peter Martell, Claudie Lange, Carlo Gentili, Luciano Rossi; Music: Gianni Ferrio; Italian theatrical release date: November 17th, 1972

Note: this review contains some spoilers.

Now comes the part where I get to revel in my own hypocrisy. Last time, I looked at Sergio Martino's The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and picked it apart for its narrative shortcomings and weak-willed heroine. This time, however, I'm going to talk about a film that I enjoy much better on the whole, although it's not one I can really defend. Luciano Ercoli's Death Walks at Midnight, the producer-turned-director's third and final giallo, suffers from some pretty significant problems, not least the leaden pacing in its second act, but, if a giallo is going to be kitschy rather than serious, it's a lot closer to the sort of kitsch I personally enjoy than that which is to be found in Mrs. Wardh.

The plot centres around Valentina (Nieves Navarro), a glamorous model who agrees to take an experimental new hallucinogenic called HDS for a story her journalist friend Gio (Simón Andreu) is writing. While under the influence, Valentina sees (or thinks she sees) a woman being bludgeoned to death by a man wielding a spiked glove in the apartment facing hers. With virtually everyone, including Gio, her boyfriend Stefano (Peter Martell) and the requisite cigar-chewing inspector (Carlo Gentili) passing her vision off as nothing more than the result of a drug-induced stupor, Valentina sets out to do her own detective work, particularly when the same killer she saw begins menacing her...

This is one of these films that you have to take at face value and accept for what it is. It is not, by any means, great art, and looks decidedly out of place when positioned alongside the better genre offerings by Argento, Fulci, Bava, Dallamano, Lado and the like. Essentially, it's just a light, gory, kitschy romp in which a beautiful woman is menaced by various unsavoury types, and as such it has a lot more in common with the Sergio Martino films that tend to leave me cold. For some reason, though, I really do enjoy Ercoli's gialli, and this is by far my favourite. A lot of it, I suspect, has to do with the way in which the heroine is portrayed. Ercoli, it would seem, attempted to establish his wife/leading lady Navarro (credited here, as in many of her films, as Susan Scott) as a rival to Edwige Fenech, without much success (she only played the lead in three gialli: this, the earlier Death Walks on High Heels and Maurizio Pradeaux's snorefest Death Carries a Cane). Part of this might be due to her arriving on the scene late: she was much older than Fenech when she made her first giallo, and, by the time Death Walks at Midnight, arguably her strongest outing, came along, 1972 was nearing its end and the giallo craze had entered its twilight. However, I suspect that another reason is her on-screen persona.

To put it bluntly, "victim" is really not in Navarro's repertoire. She literally exudes sexuality, her self-assured "I'm gorgeous and I know it" pout a far cry from the sort of innocent damsels who tended to be the leading ladies in most gialli. Passivity seems to be an alien concept to her, and she controls virtually every scene in which she appears (and I can think of only a handful in which she is absent), continually giving as good as she gets and, unusually for a giallo heroine, absolutely refusing to give up. (It's also kind of interesting that, although she is a model by profession, unlike Fenech in Mrs. Wardh, she never takes her clothes off and is, on the whole, much more modestly dressed. That's not a criticism or a compliment, just an observation.) True, she gets slapped around a bit, but those who decide to take her on tend to get far worse from her in return, and, while the various men in her life all seem to treat her as a bit of a joke, you get the impression that she has the last laugh.

Valentina is, ultimately, an example of an extremely rare breed in a giallo territory: a confident, self-sufficient woman who takes shit from no-one: Julie Wardh she is not. A complete and utter narcissist (a giant blow-up photograph of herself hangs over her bed), you get the impression that she is in love with no-one but herself, despite having a boyfriend who has his own key to her apartment, and something of a love-hate relationship with Gio, the specifics of which are never made clear (personally, I suspect they probably had a relationship in the past). There is also a strong dose of comedy both in Navarro's performance and in her interactions with her co-stars, showing that she is not afraid to take the piss out of herself, flopping about on a bed with her arms flailing and wittering on about purple ice cream, red priests and murderers. While we might speculate that the injection of comedic elements implies that the filmmakers are uncomfortable with the notion of a tough, independent woman, we tend to laugh with Valentina rather than at her. All the men she meets either treat her as an attention-seeking child or like crap (or both), but, ultimately, she's right and they're wrong: she did see a murder, and there was a man after her, trying to kill her. Most of the laughs come from her eye-rolling as Gio attempts to worm his way into her favour, or from the number of people she slaps, punches or knees in the balls.

Perhaps the strongest possible indication of the difference between Valentina and Julie Wardh comes in a scene in which Valentina and Gio are sitting in an outdoor restaurant. Only half-listening to what Gio is saying, Valentina allows her mind to wander and suddenly spots the killer standing in a crowd nearby, watching her. Realising he has been spotted, he turns tail and runs, while Valentina immediately gives chase, berating a reluctant Gio into tagging along. Julie would probably either have fainted or collapsed into George Hilton's arms, begging him to take her back to the safety of his bachelor pad (no doubt for a bout of reassuring sex on the sofa), but giving up is the last thing on Valentina's mind. Throughout the film, she is the driving force in getting to the bottom of the mystery, and all the amateur sleuthing is carried out by her. I'm not trying to suggest that this is anything approaching a feminist tract, but in comparison with Mrs. Wardh, it seems positively radical.

I think Valentina's relationship with the world of men is perfectly summed up in the scene where, attempting to exit the asylum she has been visiting, she has to fend off a room full of crazed inmates, who crowd around her, pawing at her or acting up to get her attention. She seems ultimately to be the lone woman and voice of reason in a world dominated by mad or immature men, some of whom with to do harm to her (e.g. Stefano and the assassins who come after her), while others simply don't realise they're getting in her way and are too preoccupied by their own concerns to see her point of view (e.g. Gio, Inspector Seripa). Even random individuals seem to want to do her harm: a driver whom she flags down for a lift back into town ends up trying to rape her (and finds her foot connecting with his groin for his troubles). When we finally meet another female character - the pale, frightened Verushka (Claudie Lange), obviously a "kept woman" - the difference between her and Valentina is striking.

As I said at the beginning, I can't make too many excuses for Death Walks at Midnight or claim it to be a lost masterpiece. It is, in places, a whole lot of fun, and has some very nicely-directed scenes (in particular, the opening hallucination and the rooftop fight which rounds things off), not to mention a great, charismatic heroine, but it really falls off the rails in the middle, giving way to a seemingly pointless subplot involving Stefano and two Japanese children who he is looking after (I'm assuming the point of this is to reveal some sort of latent longing for a conventional domestic life in Valentina, but it is buried before it has a chance to be explored). Still, for all its faults, it's an agreeable, breezy giallo with a nice sense of self-deprecation and a lead who doesn't make me want to tear my hair out. I don't know about you, but I'd rather hang out with Valentina than with Julie Wardh. Provided she didn't start thumping me.

I'm not sure which film I'll be looking at next time, but hopefully you won't have to wait too long for it.

The DVNR bandits strike again

The other day, I ordered a copy of the soon-to-be-OOP US HD DVD release of Pan's Labyrinth from New Line. I did this fully aware of the controversy surrounding the noise reduction that had been applied to the transfer, sucking out much of the grain and fine detail. My reasoning behind this was that the UK release, which I reviewed late last year, also showed signs of noise reduction, so I figured that both would feature the same decent but flawed transfer, with the US release having the added benefits of lossless 7.1 audio, picture-in-picture and other additional extras.

Unfortunately, it looks as if I was wrong. Screen captures have surfaced at the AV Science Forum showing, in their full 1920x1080 resolution, the same frame from both releases (as well as the French HD DVD and EU H.264 broadcast versions), and to say that the US release makes the UK version look stellar would be an understatement. This is probably the worst example of grain-sucking I've seen on an HD release this side of Cat People or American Psycho, and while many people are predictably praising the US release for looking "smooth" and "clean" (words which always put the fear of Pazuzu in me when used in reference to material shot on film), the more informed among us are justifiably outraged.

I'm now really sorry I ordered this release, and at this rate I won't even be bothering to unwrap the cellophane. It also makes me slightly suspicious of the rave reviews that New Line's other HD releases have been receiving, and I have a feeling I'll need to pick up one or two of them to get to the truth of the matter. The problem is that none of the titles they've put out so far appeal to me, least of all Rush Hour 3.

The Giallo Project #10: The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh

Alternative titles: Lo Strano vizio della Signora Wardh; Next!; Blade of the Ripper; Director: Sergio Martino; Starring: George Hilton, Edwige Fenech, Conchita Airoldi, Ivan Rassimov, Alberto de Mendoza; Music: Nora Orlandi; Italian theatrical release date: January 15th, 1971

Note: this review contains a number of major spoilers.

No, you haven't gone crazy. I have indeed just skipped over several films, leaping from 1969's The Frightened Woman all the way to 1971's The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, leaving out a whole lot of interesting title along the way (not least The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, arguably the single most crucial film in the giallo movement after Blood and Black Lace). I fully intend to go back and cover these films at a later date, but since, at the moment, I'm writing (or trying to write) a piece comparing the portrayal and treatment of the heroines in The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and Luciano Ercoli's Death Walks at Midnight, I thought it made sense to treat you to my thought process as I went through these two films. (Ergo, the next Giallo Project will cover Death Walks at Midnight.)

Mrs. Wardh is a film that I think people tend to overrate... although, of course, that's just my opinion, and I suspect many people will feel that I underrate it. In historical terms, it's noteworthy for being the first giallo to be directed by the prolific Sergio Martino (although he only actually directed four further gialli) and to star Edwige Fenech, considered by many to be to the giallo what Jamie Lee Curtis is to the American slasher. It's very much a giallo in the "harangued woman" format that we might say got its kick-start with The Sweet Body of Deborah (covered here), on which many of Mrs. Wardh's key players on both sides of the camera worked. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your taste in gialli), this means that the voluptuous Ms. Fenech spends the duration of the film running from one man to another, often fainting into their arms or begging them to protect her. For some viewers, this is part and parcel of what makes gialli so enjoyable; personally, I prefer my heroines to have a bit more pluck - think Nora in The Girl Who Knew Too Much or Valentina in Death Walks at Midnight. Barring the pansexual seductress she played in Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, Fenech's giallo roles tend to be comprised exclusively of complete drips who wouldn't seem entirely out of place in a Victorian romance novel.

The amusing part is that this appears at least partly to be intentional. The rest of the women in the film are considerably less highly strung, and, while most of them meet a bloody end screaming their lungs out, they seem to have noticed that the year is 1971, not 1871, and that women are no longer the property of men. While Julie Wardh (Fenech) is married to her dry-faced dolt of a husband, Neil (Alberto de Mendoza), her best friend Carol (Conchita Airoldi) enjoys living it up, espousing a motto of "When it's good, I enjoy it. When it's bad, I don't think about it." A bit of an airhead, yes, but she's considerably better company than the humourless Julie, even if her notion of being liberated doesn't extend much beyond having lots of sex with lots of men, and seems to be in the fortunate position of having ample money at her disposal despite not appearing to have a job or anyone else to provide for her. La dolce vita indeed!

Julie, too, has far too much free time on her hands, but she spends it fretting and running into the arms of one man after another, hoping they'll protect her. I said before that there's a common theme in the "harangued woman" gialli, of the heroine (a term I'm using very loosely here) hoping the Good Man will protect her from the Bad Men, with the former invariably turning out to be the latter. Here, all three men in Julie's life - Neil, the thuggish Jean (Ivan Rassimov), the roguish George (George Hilton) - are involved in a plot to do poor Julie in and collect the proceeds of her life insurance, so in a sense you can't really blame her for running around like a headless chicken practicing her wide-eyed look of horror at every opportunity. The three conspirators' scheme has to rank as one of the most nonsensical in any giallo (and that's saying something), but I'll get on to that later. In the meantime, it's quite fascinating to see the three archetypes so clearly established: the boring, safe (who is of course anything but) older man who seems to be something of a surrogate father; the dangerous, sinister rascal who enjoys leering at the heroine and subjecting her to various forms of sexualised torture; the rakish playboy whose happy-go-lucky nature really can't be anything but an act. That all three are planning to do Julie in is further evidence of how misanthropic these films tend to be: Julie may be a complete and utter nervous wreck, but if the entire world appears to be populated by bastards, can you really blame her? Actually, I think you probably can: in Death Walks at Midnight, Valentina's response to an attempted sex attack is to knee the perpretrator in the balls; Julie tends to to swoon and let them get on with it. Okay, so I'm not expecting every giallo heroine to be a gung-ho action woman, but it's kind of disheartening to watch one who is such a pushover.

As for the aforementioned plot devised by the three men, it's one of those traditional giallo schemes that superficially seems to make sense - having three killers, after all, means that you avoid any unfortunate problems of having someone be in two places at once - but, once you start to pick it apart, promptly falls to pieces. Now, you might say, if I'm paying too much attention to the plot, I'm not really getting into the spirit of things, but I like my pizza to have some dough in it rather than just a mountain of toppings, and the same goes for my gialli: the photography, sex and violence is all very well, but if there isn't a plot holding it together, I find it harder to care. Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Massimo Dallamano and Aldo Lado (probably my favourite four) all seemed to understand this, and were able to ground their stylistic set-pieces within interesting plots; here, the killers' motives and their actions seem almost to have been an afterthought.

Essentially, the plan is that, if Julie dies, Neil will inherit a substantial amount of money. Now, he could bump her off himself, but he needs an alibi, so he enlists his associate, George, who would like Neil to do him a favour and do away with his cousin Carol, so he can come into some money of his own. All well and good, and the fact that a maniac is currently terrorising Neil and Julie's native Vienna, slicing and dicing young women with a razor, gives the pair the perfect opportunity to make it look like the demises of Julie and Carol are the work of this individual. Killing Carol is straightforward enough - they lure her to a deserted park on the pretext of meeting someone who is blackmailing Julie (though how they could be sure Carol would go in Julie's place is anyone's guess). With Julie, however, they complicate things by, for seemingly no reason, involving her old flame Jean, and then going on a gratuitous trip to Spain, where they chloroform her, turn on the gas and attempt to pass her death off as suicide. All well and good, but why bother going to Spain to do it? Why not just do this in Vienna, or better let keep things simple and stick a knife in her in a dark alley? The most obvious answer is that this was a Spanish co-production, and the script needed to include an excuse to do some filming in that country. Another theory, of course, is that writer Ernesto Gastaldi was making it up as he went along, which is one of the reasons why I've always found his assertion that Dario Argento's scripts are nonsensical quite bizarre.

Is this enough to make or break the film? Not really, but, for me, it does introduce one distraction too many in a film that was already struggling to hold my attention. While a couple of the set-pieces are quite effective (the best being the death of Carol, which anticipates a similar park murder in Argento's later Four Flies on Grey Velvet), Emilio Foriscot's photography is flatly lit and overly contrasty, while, as already mentioned, Julie is a completely insipid protagonist. As far as Martino's work goes, I find myself drawn more to All the Colours of the Dark, which features nearly all the same flaws but makes up for them by being completely crazy and off the wall. Mrs. Wardh is... well, it's not a dead loss by any means, and I do quite like the atmosphere of casual decadence that Martino creates, but it's one of those films that I always have to force myself to go back to, and never enjoy as much as everyone else seems to.

Next time, I'll be looking at Luciano Ercoli's Death Walks at Midnight, one of my guilty pleasures.

DVD review: The Plague Dogs

The Plague Dogs is a film that I can honestly say I don't ever want to watch again, and I mean that in the best possible way.

I've reviewed Optimum Home Entertainment's recent release of The Plague Dogs, Martin Rosen's second and final animated feature and a spiritual successor to the earlier Watership Down. Optimum's DVD includes both the shorter theatrical cut and the much longer director's edition.
 

I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart...

Apologies for the lack of updates yesterday. So far this year, I've done a pretty good job of posting at least one new item every day, but last night, I wasn't feeling jolly enough to turn my mind to the wonders of the interweb. The reason for that is that I'd just watched Optimum's recent DVD release of The Plague Dogs, a check disc for which I'd received on Tuesday for review at DVD Times. I'd never seen the film before, but I had seen director Martin Rosen's previous animated feature, Watership Down, so I knew I shouldn't expect a laugh riot. I also knew how the film would end, but despite this, the final scene hit me like a punch in the gut and left me emotionally drained in a way that I can't remember a film having done to me in over a decade.

I'm currently in the process of putting the finishing touches to my review, and late last night, while sitting in front of my computer writing about the final scene, I did something I've never done before: I sat there and bawled my eyes out. It's not a perfect film, and in fact along the way there is some frankly boring and meandering material, but it's worth sitting through for the ending, provided you don't have a problem with feeling like shit for some time afterwards.

The review should go up at midday (GMT) today, and I must say I'll be relieved to get this over with, because I don't particularly want to think about the film again for a long time, much less rewatch it.

The Giallo Project #9: The Frightened Woman

Alternative titles: Femina ridens; The Laughing Woman; Director: Piero Schivazappa; Starring: Philippe Leroy, Dagmar Lassander; Music: Stelvio Cipriani; Italian theatrical release date: August 24th, 1969

Note: this review contains a number of major spoilers.

"From an aesthetic point of view, your position is perfect. You form a long, supple, curving line against a series of upright lines. You're feminine like that!" - Dr. Sayer

Well, nearly five months after my last entry, I finally decided to stop prolonging the inevitable and get this project started again. A can only apologise for the extended delay, and hopefully future updates will be a lot more frequent than they have been so far.

Initially, I wasn't sure whether or not to include this film in the Giallo Project, given that its affiliation with the form can only really be described as loose. However, I think that it does share many elements with the "woman in peril" domestic thrillers that Lucio Fulci, Sergio Martino and Umberto Lenzi were known for during the early days of the movement, so in a sense it would be wrong to ignore it just because it doesn't fit the template of the typical giallo. The plot essentially concerns Maria (Dagmar Lassander), a reporter, who accepts an invitation from the enigmatic Dr. Sayer (Philippe Leroy) to visit his apartment on the pretext of giving her some files for a paper she is writing. Maria discovers too late that Sayer is in fact a lunatic who believes that women will take over the world and render men redundant unless something is done to curb their emancipation.

One of the elements that continues to fascinate me with films such as these, and indeed was one of the driving forces in my decision to undertake a PhD on the subject, its their strange air of ambivalence towards violence, modernity and sexuality, to name but a few. After 87 minutes of Dr. Sayer berating women for their desire to be "socially and sexually self-sufficient" and lamenting the possibility of a future in which such a state should come to pass, I'm still not sure where writer/director Piero Schivazappa stands on the issue. The film came along at the height of the women's liberation movement, and as such it's tempting to see this as the knee-jerk reaction of a filmmaker who, like many men in the 60s and 70s, was growing increasingly paranoid as a result of women's burgeoning independence. Obviously, Dr. Sayer is completely insane and unstable, but it wouldn't be the first time a director used a lunatic to convey his message. The matter is also muddied considerably by a plot twist in the final act which turns the tables, presenting Sayer as the victim of an entrapment scheme cooked up by Maria and another woman. Still, it does conclude with what seems to be a completely sincere call to arms for women not to take any crap from men, so frankly I have no idea!

Whatever Schivazappa intended, the film is clearly an exploration of control. The majority of gialli that feature a female protagonist can be broken down into simple stories of a helpless woman falling into the arms of her handsome rescuer: it's the ultimate male fantasy of the Good Man saving the damsel in distress from the Bad Man. The difference, here, is that there is no Good Man, only one man and one woman, with the roles of victim and aggressor becoming increasingly blurred as the film progresses. At one point, Maria asks Sayer why he is holding her against her will when he could have all the women he wants. The answer is that he isn't interested in a woman who is with him by her own choosing: he has to break her will, to give her no choice. This is why Sayer reacts with such horror to Maria's suicide attempt: his desire for control over her is so strong that he can't bear the thought of her dying on her terms rather than his. In the shifting power dynamic between the two characters, meanwhile, there seems to be an implication that man wants to enslave woman but is ultimately utterly dependent on her. Sayer is obsessed with his own virility, continually exercising, checking for grey hairs, and so on. Of course, the ageing process is something that can't be stopped, so perhaps Schivazappa is saying that any attempt to resist the tide of change is ultimately futile. I don't know, and that's part of why I find this film so interesting.

Above: Woman's path curves while man's is straight and regimented?

Whether all this theorising and analysis interests you is beside the point, because there is plenty of visual aural and eye candy to satisfy even the most ardent theoryphobe (did I just coin a new term there?). It's beautifully shot - that much is clear even on the horribly faded and blurred copy I watched, where every shade of colour seemed to be a muddy brown - and incredibly late 60s in its styling. The characters seem to live inside a surrealist painting, one populated with art deco architecture and furniture, and even a fascinating vagina dentata contraption, one large enough for a man to step inside and be swallowed by. There is a fascinating contrast between the classical paintings that adorn Sayer's workplace and the anarchic, tripped-out world of his bachelor pad. Likewise, I'm intrigued by the manner in which Sayer is continually associated with rigid, straight lines while Maria is shown in the context of smooth, flowing curves. Intriguingly, this aesthetic is also used to highlight the shifting balance of power. At the start, while Maria is Sayer's prisoner, she is frequently framed within or partially blocked by horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines, whereas later, as the nature of the captor/captive relationship is altered, the framing and architecture become more freeform.

I'm ultimately not entirely sure how I feel about The Frightened Woman. It's a visually arresting and often thematically interesting piece of work, but it does strike a few bum notes, among them Maria's readiness to forgive Sayer for locking her up and abusing her mentally and physically when she discovers that this is the first time he has ever done this to a woman (although even this is muddied by the late revelation that she was actually the one who set out to ensnare him). Likewise, after the reconciliation between the two characters, there is a lengthy stretch in which the film more or less collapses until the final climactic twist is unveiled. Still, it's an interesting, unique piece of work, and Lassander and Leroy do well to carry it across the finishing line between them. This is probably one for repeat viewings, and is definitely worth a look if you haven't seen it before.

Next time, I'll be looking at another fringe case, Elio Petri's Oscar-winning Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.

A $75 million turkey

My first two optical discs of 2008 arrived this morning, and I'm sorry to say that neither one turned out to be particularly impressive, albeit for different reasons. The first, The Simpsons Movie on Blu-ray, I'll discuss in a minute, but for the moment, I want to take a moment to discuss Cat People on HD DVD (the Paul Schrader remake, not the Val Lewton original), which features, hands down, the worst high definition transfer I've ever paid money to see. Okay, so Traffic and Spartacus (both also from Universal, as it happens) both look worse, but I didn't pay to see these.

From start to finish Cat People has been attacked, and I mean attacked, with the edge enhancement and noise reduction filters, to the extent that every high contrast edge is surrounded by a large white outline, and every time the camera moves the screen turns to mush, while every texture, from skin to fabric to hair, looks like wax. Even more infuriatingly, the clips that play behind the main menu look nothing like this. They are alive with unmolested film grain and, beyond the still-visible edge enhancement, generally look pretty tolerable. Now don't get me wrong: I suspect that the master used was less than stellar to start with, as is true of many catalogue titles from Universal and other studios. However, I also suspect that, had the image simply been left alone, it would have looked no worse than the likes of Enternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Lost in Translation, which fall way below my standards of acceptability but are at least watchable. Cat People is just... ugh.

Now, on to the main point of this post (no, I'm not done ranting): The Simpsons Movie. I'll probably be doing a full review for this at some point, so I'll withhold my comments about the transfer until then, save to say that the ringing that some people have pointed out is indeed present from beginning to end, and you'll no doubt be able to see the evidence on my brother's site when he does his own post on the subject very soon. (Incidentally, it really sticks in my craw when people don't themselves see problems that have been identified with transfers, and illustrated through solid evidence, and have the audacity to claim that those who do see them either have faulty equipment or have somehow got "a bad copy" of the disc in question. If you have even the slightest comprehension of how digital replication works, then you'll know how ridiculous the latter is.)

No, my blithering will primarily be restricted to the film itself and what a tragic waste of time it is.

I like The Simpsons, I really do. The first five seasons are almost consistently hilarious, and, for all their bland animation and shoddy timing, they are pretty hard to fault. However, I think it's fair to say that the show has not been at its prime for some time now, and the only thing worse than a has-been show is one that is unceremoniously hauled on to the big screen, where the flaws become even more readily apparent.

I saw The Simpsons Movie late last summer and was thoroughly underwhelmed by it. Foolishly, I thought that a second viewing might improve my appreciation of it, so I decided to pick up a copy of the Blu-ray release. Besides, we're somewhat starved for high definition traditional animation, so, as the saying goes, beggars can't be choosers. Unfortunately, I now find myself wishing I hadn't bothered. The simple reason for this is that, second time round, I already knew the story, so there was nothing, and I mean nothing, left to engage me. Had this, the result of the toiling of fifteen writers, god knows how many animators and a gaggle of overpaid actors who sound like they've never taken voice direction in their lives (that's $75 million to you and me), been broadcast as part of the regular series, it would have been the worst episode of The Simpsons I've ever seen (bearing in mind that I stopped watching regularly at around Season 11). As it stands, it's three times longer than the worst episode of The Simpsons I've ever seen, which means that it's actually three times worse than the worst episode of The Simpsons I've ever seen. And I've seen the one where Homer gets raped by a panda.

I don't often say "Can I have an hour and a half of my life back?" after watching a film, no matter how bad, but I'm going to say it this time. I honestly can't understand how anyone could have a positive word to say about it. The sad part is that it isn't even awful. It's just empty, bland, insincere and ultimately pointless. It's not even funny - I laughed at it perhaps three times: once at Bart's "doodle", once at the gag where Bart defaces the Wanted picture of his family (itself a retread of a gag used at least twice before in the show), and then at the one genuinely funny line in the entire film: "You just bought another load of crap from the world's fattest fertiliser salesman!" Which, oddly enough, is exactly how I felt when I remembered I'd given 20th Century Fox my money for this film.

So can I have an hour and a half of my life back, please?

Update, January 3rd, 2008 09:52 PM: Lyris' post, with pictures, can now be found here.

The Year in Review, 2007

Well, another year has been and gone. We're all a year older, but probably not much wiser. As usual, I'm going to do a brief run-down of various events and issues that I've touched on in my news posts over the year. It's generally not my style to comment on current affairs, so I won't be saying anything about the murder of Benazir Bhutto, Tony Blair's departure from office or anything like that. This year, I've decided to split things into several sections.

 
Life Itself

Life™ was somewhat different for me this year. The biggest change was, fairly obviously, that, at the end of March, I landed myself a full-time job, working for the NHS on their Smoking Cessation programme. I spent four and a half months working thirty-seven and a half hours a week in an office, entering data and phoning people to ask them whether they had managed to successfully stop smoking, and, while I'm not about to claim that this was the most unpleasant way anyone could ever spend four and a half months, I won't deny that I was extremely relieved to see the back of the place in August, at which point I went into a part-time Library Assistant position at the Gallery of Modern Art. To say that I find this job vastly preferable to my previous one would be the understatement of the year, and that's not just because I work fewer hours.

On a not entirely unrelated note, my application for funding for my PhD was unsuccessful, but my four and a half months of back-breaking (I kid) labour with the NHS was enough to pay for my first year of part-time study, and more besides. I started the PhD, on portrayals of gender in the giallo (following on from my MLitt dissertation on the same area), at the end of September and, while illness in November prevented me from making as much headway as I would have liked, the work that I've done so far has certainly gone a long way towards getting me back into the swing of things, academically speaking, and I look forward to properly delving into my subject of choice over the next twelve months.

 
Zeros and Ones

The big technological issue of 2007 was the ongoing battle between the two rival high definition home video formats, HD DVD and Blu-ray, and the perpetual game of teeter-totter in which each format continued to vie for supremacy, engaging in a conflict of words as much as sales. A war in which what your opposition doesn't have is every bit as important as what you do have, the biggest surprise was undoubtedly Paramount's shock decision, in August, to ditch Blu-ray entirely and concentrate on HD DVD. With no end to the format war in sight any time soon, 2008 looks set to be another interesting year.

For me, my most significant purchase was that of a Japanese Playstation 3, reneging on my single format stance and embracing neutrality. Personally speaking, the balance continues to lie firmly in favour of HD DVD in terms of exclusive titles (a fact only compounded by the aforementioned Paramount decision), but I can't deny that it's nice to be able to own and watch high definition copies of Casino Royale, The Descent and Ratatouille.

I also bought three additional pieces of hardware: a new desktop PC in May, an Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive in July (to replace my clunky and oversized stand-alone HD-A1 player), and a Blu-ray enabled laptop in October. In the case of the latter, my original intention was to use it primarily for PhD work, although, in reality, I've got just as much, if not more, use out of it as a convenient means of taking screen captures from Blu-ray discs.

 
At the Pictures

Perhaps largely due to my period of full-time employment, I watched somewhat fewer films this year than in the previous two years. By my calculation, I watched a total of 164 films, 77 of which were ones that I hadn't seen before, down from 216 (99 new) in 2006. Still, I did manage to see several significant films, including the great - 2001: A Space Odyssey, Babel, Black Book, Black Sabbath, the Final Cut of Blade Runner, Blood Diamond, Children of Men, Full Metal Jacket, Grindhouse, Hot Fuzz, Inside Man, Life of Brian, The Lives of Others, Pan's Labyrinth, Ratatouille, Sicko, This Film is Not Yet Rated, Zodiac - the reasonably good - 1408, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Brokeback Mountain, Brotherhood of the Wolf, The Bourne Ultimatum, Chicago, Crank, The Game, Hard Candy, Idiocracy, Mission Impossible, Mission Impossible III, Mother of Tears, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Red Road, Syriana, Tideland, Transformers - and the guff - Aeon Flux, Fantastic Four, The Fountain, Futurama: Bender's Big Score!, Hostel, House of the Dead, The Matrix Revolutions, Mission Impossible II, Norbit, Paprika, A Scanner Darkly, The Simpsons Movie and the remakes of Poseidon and The Wicker Man.

Best new film I saw in the year? Either Black Book or Children of Men. Worst? Without a shadow of a doubt, Norbit.

I bought or otherwise received 118 films on disc, 42 of which were HD DVDs, 31 Blu-ray discs and 45 standard definition DVDs. I wrote 44 reviews for DVD Times, down from last year's 66. Of these, 16 were for HD DVDs, 12 for Blu-ray discs and 16 for standard definition DVDs.

 
Bibliothèque

I read the following books: Legion by William Peter Blatty, The Naked Drinking Club by Rhona Cameron, Casino Royale by Ian Fleming, The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File by Frederick Forsythe, Carrie by Stephen King, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, The Red Dahlia by Lynda La Plante, Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin, Almost Blue by Carlo Lucarelli, The Dead Hour by Denise Mina, The Mephisto Waltz by Fred Mustard Stewart, Odette by Jerrard Tickell, Mercy Alexander by George Tiffin, and The Devil Rides Out, Gateway to Hell, Strange Conflict and To the Devil - a Daughter by Dennis Wheatley. Which, now that I think about it, is a heck of a lot more than I'd expected.

 
Song and Dance

I snagged the following CDs: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Ennio Morricone), Blood Diamond (James Newton Howard), Cars (Randy Newman), The Descent (David Julyan), Grindhouse: Planet Terror (Robert Rodriguez/John Debney/Graeme Revell), The Iron Giant (Michael Kamen), Kingdom of Heaven (Harry Gregson-Williams), Mother of Tears (Claudio Simonetti), The Professional (Eric Serra), The Secret of NIMH (Jerry Goldsmith), Serenity (David Newman), This is the Life (Amy MacDonald), V for Vendetta (Dario Marianelli), Veronica Guerin (Harry Gregson-Williams), Why Bother? (Peter Cook and Chris Morris).

 
Well, all in all, I think that's it for another year. Look back on it, it reads a bit like a shopping list with the occasional personal titbit, but I suppose that's the way of things in our evil capitalist society. Anyway, here's to a great 2008 and yet more wanton spending.

Ave Satani indeed...

Omen IV: The Awakening is my first film of the new year. Unfortunately, I can't say we're off to a great start...

The Omen is one of my all-time favourite films. Its script may not be a masterpiece, but its tight execution by Richard Donner, stellar cast, including Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, Billie Whitelaw and David Warner, not to mention masterful score by Jerry Goldsmith, conspire to make it a first-rate exercise in horror. Its two sequels, Damien: Omen II and The Final Conflict, demonstrate the law of diminishing returns and, barring a handful of set-piece sequences, are generally not worth bothering with. Still, their flaws pale in comparison to this third sequel, one of the worst and unintentionally funniest films I have ever had the (dis)honour of seeing.

Omen IV: The Awakening eventually made its debut on television in 1991. However, I suspect that it was originally intended for a big screen release, a theory compounded by the fact that the DVD comes with a theatrical trailer, not to mention that the film itself is in a ratio of 1.85:1, which would have been unheard of for American TV in the early 90s. Presumably, the powers that be at 20th Century Fox actually realised that they had, in all likelihood, commissioned a train wreck and opted to let it rot on the small screen rather than risk the end of Western civilisation by subjecting it to moviegoers around the world. And these are the people that deemed Glitter to be releasable.

Can you guess the plot? A married couple (Faye Grant and Michael Woods) adopt an orphaned child from a convent, only for it to emerge fairly quickly that the hapless couple have in fact been lumbered with the spawn of Satan (literally). The child, this time round, is not Damien but Delia (Asia Vieira), but, barring this change of gender, it's business as usual.

Things begin to go horribly wrong right from the start. "Wait till you see her," declares a beaming nun, talking on the phone to Delia's parents-to-be. "She's a tiny miracle." Jump cut to a shot of storm clouds accompanied by a thunderclap, then back to the ladies of the cloth, while Mother Superior intones dramatically that "Clouds sweep away the colour. Leaves everything like a black and white photograph." I don't know about you, but I'm getting the heebie-jeebies already.

Scene after ridiculous scene unfolds before us. During Delia's baptism, the child begins to scream and bawl, prompting looks of horror from all and sundry. (I'm not sure why they find this so strange: every baptism I've attended has resulted in the victim howling his or her head off. And naturally, for the crime of attempting to indoctrinate the child, Satan strikes the guilty priest down with the sudden onset of a heart attack.) Later, a nanny is pursued by a Rottweiler and then falls backwards through an upper storey window in slow motion. A crowd of carol singers in bad goth make-up lip sync to the "Jesus Christus, Ave Satani" lyrics of the soundtrack. We even have a fervent get-together for born again Christians, in which one of the aforementioned nuns, now welcomed into the bosom of this cult and inexplicably, out of nowhere saddled with a strident Southern accent, hands out snakes to members of the congregation (no, I'm not kidding) and tells them they've "got the joy". Eventually, she predictably ends up being bitten when the snakes turn on her, although the prosthetics work is so bad that it looks as if they are attacking a doll's legs.

Aaargh! Not the choirboys!

These are actually the high points of the film. The rest of it is so risible that I actually found myself missing The Final Conflict's hapless assassin priests and their Keystone Kops antics. The absolute worst moment comes about a third of the way in, when Delia gets her revenge on a school bully. In the original film, Damien drove his nanny to suicide with a mere glance. Here, Delia's ultimate punishment is to cause her tormenter to piss his pants, complete with a tasteful close-up of the urine seeping through his trousers. For a very strange moment, I thought that Delia had somehow wandered on to the set of Problem Child. And I'm not even going to give away the twist ending, which, even though I knew it was coming, had me howling with laughter. Special attention must be given to the phenomenally hammy acting, with Faye Grant taking the prize in the role of the harangued mother. Asia Vieira, meanwhile, has only one tone of delivery - bratty - leaving us convinced that, if she really is the child of the Devil, then Satan really needs to work on his parenting skills and exercise a little discipline.

Of course, given that this is a 90s film, the writer has to throw in nods to non-mainstream "spirituality" in case anyone was feeling a little left out (there's nothing for the atheists among us, though, I hasten to note). And here's my problem with this approach: if you're going to tell a story that presents religion and the supernatural as real, then please do so consistently instead of throwing in this wishy-washy "everyone is spiritual" nonsense. The Omen films ostensibly present Christian doctrine as reality, so why, pray tell, would Delia react with such horror to a "healing crystal" worn around her nanny's neck, and why would a gaggle of New Age mystics and assorted crackpots, upon seeing her, collectively go wide-eyed and begin opening and closing their mouths like fish out of water? (Incidentally, the healing crystal leads to one of the most hilariously awful moments in the entire film: the nanny reacts in horror as she discovers that the crystal around her neck has turned black, and, hurrying to the bedroom drawer in which she keeps various other trinkets, all of which have turned the same colour. Just in case we don't understand what has happened, the filmmakers treat us to her exclaiming in voiceover: "They're all black!" You couldn't make this stuff up. Still, this is nothing compared to a mystic declaring that Delia's aura is like "mud and molasses and swirls of red paint".)

What's worse, this is effectively little more than a remake of the original film. Barring a handful of minor deviations, the plot is virtually identical, right down to the details. In The Omen, various zoo animals went wild when confronted with Damien; here, Delia drives a crowd of horses to madness. In both films, the mother character ends up pregnant and becomes convinced that Damien/Delia will do everything in his/her power to prevent the child's birth. We even get photographs of doom, a kooky nanny and a phenomenally badly staged repeat of the iconic decapitation accident. Even the film's one good element is pilfered: Jonathan Sheffer's insipid music is augmented by the liberal borrowing of Jerry Goldsmith's scores for The Omen and The Final Conflict. And, of course, at the end, we're effectively back where we started, with another Antichrist in the world and the potential for any number of sequels. Thankfully, the decision-makers opted to nip this in the bud rather than let things continue.

I suspect there's a reason this film was omitted from the initial UK Omen box set, and that's that, even in comparison with the first two sequels, it's tragically awful. It is, however, very funny (unintentionally, of course), considerably more entertaining than that dire 2006 remake of the original film, so, oddly enough, I find myself in the position of giving a stronger recommendation to what is, technically, the worse of the two.

It's an Argento kind of Christmas

Mother of Tears (or La Terza Madre, or The Third Mother) is, as most of you probably know by now, the third entry in Dario Argento's loose "Three Mothers" trilogy, the first two instalments of which, Suspiria in 1977 and Inferno in 1980, constitute two of the finest horror films ever made. Arriving in 2007, Mother of Tears shows up a good 25 years later than most of us would have liked, but the question is, has the wait been worth it? Argento, after all, has famously stated on numerous occasions that the reason for the extended delay was that he didn't feel ready to tackle the final part. Therefore, either the end result is something he really believed in, or he simply got tired of putting off the inevitable.

The answer to the question, if what you're looking for is a natural conclusion to what was begun with the previous two films is "No." Mother of Tears is a very different beast - unsurprisingly, given the 27-year gap between this and Inferno. If you view it as a standalone film, or at least a different twist on the same material, it starts to look a bit better, but, even so, Argento makes a number of decisions that are questionable at best, downright baffling at worst.

The plot involves student Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento), an intern at the Museum of Antique Art in Rome. She and co-worker Giselle (Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni) find themselves in the possession of a coffin containing various artefacts: an ancient dagger, various demon statues and a shroud imprinted with strange symbols. A drop of blood and an ill-advised incantation unleashes the demons and a screeching monkey on the unwitting Giselle, who meets a particularly bloody end. Sarah elopes but finds the police incredulous, while, below the streets of Rome, the Mother of Tears (Moran Atias), awakened after hundreds of years of slumber, unleashes a campaign of madness and destruction.

It's pretty clear from the outset that Mother of Tears doesn't exist in the same fairytale world as its predecessors. Gone is the lush primary colour scheme, as is the strange, indescribable sense of otherworldliness with which every frame of these films was infused. This third outing takes place very much in our own world, continuing that same realistic look that Argento has continued to explore since the 90s. Frederic Fasano's cinematography reminds me very much of Benoit Debie's work on The Card Player crossed with the blander look created by Ronnie Taylor for Sleepless. It's strange that Argento claimed this film to have the style of his 70s outings, because nothing could be further from the truth. The colours do begin to creep in, in a decidedly subdued form, during the climax, but they are generally restricted to a handful of brief shots.

At least the film has the Italian flair that was sorely missed in Argento's Masters of Horror episodes, his most recent directorial projects prior to this. Lush architecture and classy ladies abound... although that most definitely does not apply to the gaggle of witches who fly into Rome aboard a jet liner and look more like a group of goth posers on their way to a late night rave than evil incarnate. The scenes in which they menace various fellow passengers really do rank among the most risible that Argento has ever directed, and that includes anything in The Phantom of the Opera, Jenifer and Pelts. What's worse, though, is the utter banality of Mater Lacrimarum, who is talked up as an ancient evil but turns out to basically be a Page 3 girl with too much make-up. In Inferno, Mark Elliot encountered her in a lecture theatre as an alluring, mysterious presence who whispered silent words to him, causing his perception of time and reality to be altered. Here, she's a plastic-breasted, cackling joke with bad hair who struts around in the nude with her shaved pubic region on display while her followers enjoy a rampant orgy.

I wonder perhaps if what hurts the film most is the budget. The mystical shroud worn by Mater Lacrimarum (when she's wearing anything at all) is basically a red T-shirt with glitter writing on it, while the various vignettes showing Rome's inhabitants going crazy, committing rape, murder, vandalism and the like, are on too small a scale for us to really believe that the whole city is in chaos. That, too, might explain the overly conventional colour palette, although I find it hard to believe that some of the look of Suspiria and Inferno couldn't have been achieved digitally. Speaking of computer effects, there is some really bad CGI on display, the worst being a demon that suddenly appears in the lens of a photographer's camera in the opening scene, accompanied by an obvious musical stinger. And the last said about the film's final shot, the better...

Ignoring all that, though, there's plenty to appreciate provided you can get over the overwhelming sense of disappointment that this really isn't a patch on its predecessors. Asia Argento turns in a good performance and makes for an engaging and reasonably resourceful protagonist, while Valeria Cavalli is sympathetic as the white witch who helps Sarah realise her inner potential. I also have no problem admitting that the reappearance of Varelli's book on the Three Mothers and its familiar opening narration (complete with Emereson-esque music) sent a chill down my spine and evoked a wonderful sense of nostalgia in me. Most of all, there's a certain sense of infectious glee to the film's complete lack of restraint. Unfortunately, there's a feeling of leering sadism to the death scenes (case in point: a lesbian character dies by having a spear rammed into her nether regions and out through her mouth) that I just didn't get from Suspiria or Inferno, which had a far more artistic bent to their killings, while the lingering on Sergio Stivaletti's not entirely convincing prosthetic effects is dangerously close to latter day Fulci. Still, if you like over the top gore, there's much to appreciate, with an opening murder in which a character is strangled by her own intestines particularly standing out. There are fewer great set-pieces than in most of Argento's films, but an extended sequence in which Sarah has to evade both the police and the aforementioned goth witches, hopping from train to train, is definitely memorable.

Compared to its predecessors, Mother of Tears is crude and in many respects sloppy. I suspect it was always a foregone conclusion that it would fail to live up to the grandeur of Suspiria and Inferno, but even so I think it could have been better than it is. It's fun while it lasts, but it doesn't really stick with you. Essentially, it's more of a thrill ride in the vein of the Final Destination films (now there's something I never thought I'd say) than the mesmerising experience of the first two films, but I had fun and I can't say it bored me for a second.

FedEx flies

That's right, it's Four Flies on Grey Velvet. This particular order actually came from Xploited Cinema, not D&T. I ordered a second copy for two reasons. First of all, my impatient side got the better of me and I decided that I wanted to order from a supplier that had a courier shipping option, to ensure that it reached me before Christmas. Secondly, there was at one point a rumour doing the rounds that D&T had already sold their entire allocated stock and wouldn't be getting any more, so I decided to hedge my bets and order from a supplier which had already stated that it would be getting a decent number of copies. As it turns out, my D&T order shipped only slightly after the Xploited one, but all that this means is that I'll have an extra copy to pass on to a lucky duck... for a price, of course.

You're probably looking for my opinion on the quality of this release, and I'll start out by categorically stating what it is not. It is not, by any means, a bells and whistles, zim-zam, whizz-bang, no holds barred restoration of the film. The materials used, an English language print (presumably theatrical), show no small amount of wear and tear, with speckles, scratches and tramlines visible for the duration of its running time. The colours and black level are also inconsistent, with several scenes looking overly pink and the overall saturation level seeming too high most of the time. Additionally, given that the English language print is a few minutes shorter than its Italian counterpart, some material has been spliced in from a VHS source, and at these points the quality is much poorer than the rest of the film (although still, by my estimation, an improvement on the two bootlegs I own). A handful of other minor flaws, including the title card being misplaced (it appears at the very start of the film here, rather than in its proper place after Michael Brandon, Mimsy Farmer and Jean-Pierre Marielle's names have been displayed), and the occasional instance of the entire frame floating slightly too high or low, resulting in the top or bottom of the next frame being visible, show that this is release is very much rough around the edges.

With all that on board, let's move on to the positives, and luckily, there are many. Although the detail is far from spectacular, I'll be absolutely honest and say that it compares favourably to many giallo releases I've seen from Blue Underground and NoShame in terms of overall sharpness, and it exhibits none of the obvious edge enhancement that the former go in for. Provided you lower your explanations slightly and don't expect a flawless, crystal clear image, I can't imagine you being disappointed by this release, which is by far the best the film has ever looked outside of an actual cinema. The sound is not bad either - noticeably strained, but once again a lot better than my previous copies. You can actually see and hear what is going on throughout, particularly in the second half of the film, which, in many copies, was virtually incomprehensible due to it being so dark and fuzzy.

I'll be doing an in-depth comparison between this and the two other releases I own before too long, in addition to a fully-fledged review (this, The Five Days of Milan, Jenifer and Mother of Tears are the only Argento films about which I have yet to write in depth), but for the time being, feast your eyes on these screen captures:

Bourne again

My review copy of the HD DVD release of The Bourne Ultimatum arrived yesterday. My brother had actually bought the UK version about a week earlier, so we'd already watched the film, but will be doing so before I write my final review, for two reasons. First of all, I haven't seen this film on the projector yet, and the experience is always better when the image fills your entire field of vision. Secondly, it features a different encode: the transfer for the UK version comes without any burned-in location type or subtitles (for non-English dialogue) to facilitate international distribution. These are then generated by the player in your language of choice. As a result, the two discs feature different encodes, so it could be that the US release has flaws not apparent in the UK one (the UK transfer scored a perfect 10/10, as it happens). Either way, I vastly prefer the "burned-in" location type and subtitles: it's more authentic, and the UK version ends up looking rather stupid due to a few minor timing errors and the fact that the "typing in" sound effect accompanying the location type is still present, despite the text itself merely flashing on to the middle of the screen, subtitle-style. It's a shoddy practice that happens all too often with European DVD (and now, it would seem HD) releases, and it just cheapens the whole package. There will be a review soon, hopefully before Christmas.

We watched the first film in the trilogy, The Bourne Identity, tonight, and I was once again reminded of the fact that it is, in my opinion, by far the best instalment in the series. Much of this comes from Franka Potente's character, who gives the audience a point of identification that it just doesn't have in the stone-faced Matt Damon, but a lot of it also has to do with the photography and editing. I'm not a fan of Paul Greengrass' trademark "shakycam" and rapid cutting, which is all over The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, and, watching Identity, I found myself wishing that Doug Liman's comparatively restrained touch had been extended to the entire trilogy.

Shame on you, Rob Zombie