Reviews

A tragedy of a film

Yesterday, I received my review copy of Dark Sky Films’ long-delayed release of Riccardo Freda’s Tragic Ceremony. As many of you will know, this DVD was originally supposed to be released over a year ago, but was held back due to rights issues. These appear to have been resolved now, but I would urge those who want a copy of this film to get their orders… although, to be honest, given how weak the film is, I’m going to have a hard time recommending it. The best I can say about it is that it provides an interesting opportunity to see Camille Keaton, of What Have You Done to Solange? and I Spit on Your Grave fame, playing yet another ethereal and wide-eyed damsel. Really, I’m not surprised Freda reportedly disowned the end product (the director’s credit goes to “Robert Hampton”), as it’s actually worse than his limp giallo, The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire.

Presentation-wise, the transfer is really not all that satisfying. It’s anamorphic and progressively flagged, and looks passable once the opening credits are over, but lacks detail and has an overly contrasty look, with poor shadow detail and blown-out highlights. I initially assumed that this was simply what the film looked like, but the theatrical trailer included on the disc shows a much better tonal range, not to mention offering more detail (despite being non-anamorphic and not properly flagged for progressive scan):

Above: the film itself;
Below: the trailer
(click images to view them at their full size)

Oh, and the infamous Dark Sky cropping issue, pointed out to me by a regular reader of this site (thanks, Jeff), appears to be present here, at least in certain shots:

The image above is the most severe instance of overly tight framing that I could find. By and large, I didn’t find it to be bothersome on any other occasions, although this may be down to the fact that much of Freda’s camerawork is so haphazard anyway that, for the most part, framing is a non-issue. It wouldn’t surprise me if this film turned out to have an intended ratio of 1.66:1 and was over-matted to 1.85:1 for this DVD.

I should also say a few words on the issue of the sound. The only audio track provided here is an Italian one, although it’s clear, from the actors’ lip movements, that this one was shot in English (and post-dubbed, of course). In any event, the film is (laughably) supposed to take place somewhere in England, as evinced by several references to Scotland Yard, names like Lord Alexander, and a currency amusingly referred to as “sterling” (as in “You owe me fifty sterling”). Generally, with Italian films from this period, no “original” audio track exists, so I tend not to be too picky about which language is provided. On this occasion, however, the lack of English dubbing is rather problematic, although I do understand the reasoning behind it: apparently, the Italian cut of the film is dramatically different from the version exhibited in the US, so cobbling together a complete English dub would be impossible.

I really enjoyed the Camille Keaton interview, though - considerably more than the film itself, in fact. It was nice to see someone so obviously proud of her achievements and eager to talk about them.

Expect a full review at DVD Times in the near future.

It’s funny if it’s not you

For some reason, it seemed as if everybody had seen Juno except me. This offbeat, heart-warming tale about unwanted pregnancy and surrogate parenting appeared out of nowhere, catapulting its star, Ellen Page, and its first-time screenwriter, the intriguingly named Diablo Cody, to centre stage. Of course, it didn’t hurt that it bagged itself an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. So, today, I had the opportunity to see it for myself and find out whether the hype was justified.

The answer, in reality, is probably “no”. I wouldn’t call it the greatest film of the last year by any stretch of the imagination, but, at the same time, it’s hard to deny that I enjoyed it considerably. What I liked about this film is that, although superficially the plot is straight out of Movie of the Week territory, it does an admirable job of avoiding sentimentality or mawkishness.

Highlight below to reveal spoiler text:

I can’t say I was particularly enamoured by many of the characters, though. I found the script to be incredibly smug and, occasionally, verging on obnoxious, with the dialogue often sounding like an imitation of the sort of speech patterns that were to be found in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and yes, it’s true, everyone in this film more or less does speak with the same “voice”). The whole thing is a massive overdose of pop culture references and calculatedly “quirky” dialogue… oh, and I can only put Juno’s summation that Herschell Gordon Lewis’ The Wizard of Gore is a better film than Suspiria down to the assumption that being pregnant does strange things to your system. I’m still slightly amazed to hear the name of Dario Argento actually being spoken in a mainstream film, though.

I did enjoy it overall. I wouldn’t class it as a masterpiece, but it’s fun and at times quite amusing - one of the few feel-good films I can think of that doesn’t make me want to go and throw up afterwards.

Oh yeah, and has anyone seen this video? I must confess it made me laugh more than the film itself. (“Oscar, I smell ya later!”)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Episode 11: A Beautiful Sunset

Written by Joss Whedon; Illustrated by Georges Jeanty

Hmph. Another month, another underwhelming episode of Buffy’s eighth season. I’m fast reaching the point where I’m considering cancelling my subscription. Yes, for the first few issues there was the novelty factor of seeing my favourite characters (well, some of them, at any rate) having new adventures that were given some degree of authenticity due to being sanctioned (and, much of the time, written) by their creator, but that appeal has long since dried up.

This week, Buffy finally encounters the season’s Big Bad, the muscular, masked Jason Voorhees lookalike who first appeared in Episode 9. Guess what? Buffy announces that he’s tougher than any opponent she’s ever faced before. Sort of like Caleb, and the First, and Dark Willow, and Glory, and Adam, and the Mayor, and… See what I’m getting at? Oh, and it looks as if we’re headed for another season of “I’m so alone” angst, to boot. Clearly, Joss Whedon still hasn’t learned that fans generally don’t enjoy seeing Buffy moping about as a manic depressive. Nor do I particularly enjoy having the gang at separate corners of the earth. I’d like to see them actually interacting properly, not briefly mentioning or phoning each other every now and then.

They’ve changed the cover art too. The new artist isn’t bad at all, but his work is not a patch on that of Jo Chen, which I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I called the best thing about these comics.

Next month, Drew Goddard comes in and starts his Tokyo arc. This four-parter will probably be the last chance I give the series… although, given that Goddard is probably the single most overrated writer in Buffydom (his greatest claim to fame is that he wrote one or two of the Season 7 episodes that weren’t complete garbage), I’m not holding out much hope.

Garbage baby garbage

Yesterday, I received a copy of the US Blu-ray release of Gone Baby Gone from DeepDiscount. I watched it tonight, and was less than impressed.

This film gained some level of notoriety in the UK when distributor Buena Vista cancelled its theatrical release, which was scheduled uncomfortably soon after the disappearance of British child Madeleine McCann, and I must confess that my interest in seeing it, while due primarily from the positive write-ups it received, did to some extent stem from the parallels drawn between the McCann case and the one portrayed in the film. (Perhaps Buena Vista’s marketing department should have made a donation to the Maddy fund for the free publicity?) And the parallels are quite striking. Not only does the missing child, Amanda McCready, bear a great deal of physical resemblance to Madeleine McCann, the circumstances surrounding her disappearance are similar: in both cases, a neglectful mother left her child alone in an apartment to get wasted (Kate McCann on alcohol, Helene McCready on cocaine) at a local bar, and later lied about the length of time for which she had abandoned the child. In both cases, a toy belonging to the missing child becomes a vital piece of iconography. And finally, in both, frustrated by the police’s lack of progress, the family of the missing child hires private investigators.

Unfortunately, the most significant similarity between the two cases is how annoying they both are. The media furore surrounding the McCann disappearance, and the manner in which her parents shamelessly and (I believe) insincerely manipulated the media, made me gag. The mawkishness and falseness of the front they adopted was irritating in the extreme, and, unfortunately, Gone Baby Gone is every bit as mawkish and false. This is a film which doesn’t just tug at the heartstrings - it claws desperately at them, using every cliché in the book in a desperate bid to make the audience care about what is, ultimately, a dull, confused and poorly plotted story.

More annoying than all of that, however, is Casey Affleck, who delivers all his dialogue (most of which seems to be about “respec’”) in the same deadpan mumble and is virtually incomprehensible half of the time. This film was co-written and directed by his older brother, Ben Affleck, and I can only assume that this proves that nepotism is alive and well in Hollywood. Similar criticisms are sometimes made of Dario Argento when he casts his daughter in his films, but Asia Argento seems to have a better grasp of English than Casey Affleck and is considerably less annoying to boot. Ed Harris, meanwhile, stumbles over his ridiculous dialogue as best he can, and Michelle Monaghan’s role is so pointless that I wouldn’t be surprised if it was written in minutes before shooting began because the producers realised, at the last minute, that it would look rather bad if all the women in the film were drug addicts and/or negligent parents. I like both of these actors, I really do, but there’s a limit to what they can do without a worthwhile script. The only actor to escape with any sense of self-respect is Morgan Freeman, who I tend to find elevates the perceived quality of just about any material he gets his hands on.

In short, I don’t rate Ben Affleck as an actor, and, based on this, he isn’t much better as a director or writer (bearing in mind that I haven’t seen Good Will Hunting). It’s definitely one of the weakest films I’ve picked up in high definition since its inception, and definitely not worth the $27 I paid for it. Oh, well - you win some, you lose some.

The Giallo Project #12: The Fifth Cord

Alternative titles: Giorna nera per l’ariete; Evil Fingers; Director: Luigi Bazzoni; Starring: Franco Nero, Silvia Monti, Wolfang Preiss, Ira von Fürstenberg, Edmund Purdom, Rossella Falk, Renato Romano, Pamela Tiffin; Music: Ennio Morricone; Italian theatrical release date: August 28th, 1971

Note: this review contains significant spoilers.

In his excellent essay Playing with Genre, Gary Needham descibes Luigi Bazzoni’s giallo The Fifth Cord as an example of the more progressive side of the movement. The first time I watched the film, I really wasn’t sure what he meant, but, after mulling the issue over in my mind for a while, I’m beginning to see where he was coming from. I’m going to do something a little different with this instalment of the Giallo Project, in that, instead of doing a general overview of the film, I will focus in depth on a handful of scenes which specifically refer to the subject on which I am currently interested: namely, the character of Andrea Bild (Franco Nero) and his relationship with the two women in his life, his ex-girlfriend Helene (Silvia Monti) and his current catch, Lou (Pamela Tiffin). This is part of the work I am currently doing for my PhD, a piece which I am hoping to use to explore the wide variety of ways in which women are portrayed in gialli, and as such, a lot of the material below was written with an eye to being incorporated into an academic essay.

Above: Andrea Bild: the image of the stereotypical hard-drinking macho man turned on its head

Andrea embodies the hard-drinking, virile, macho male stripped of all the qualities normally found in giallo portrayals of such characters. Rather than the suave George Hilton type, he is an unkempt, pathetic drunk, engaged in an affair with Lou, a student several years younger than him, but clearly still dependent on his ex-girlfriend, Helene, a firm, sensible, working single mother fighting a divorce (at one point, she says that, until the proceedings go through, she will not be able to “live [her] own life”). In this film, it’s not so much the plot or the basic character archetypes that are unique (on the contrary, they are actually somewhat generic), but the manner in which what we are supposed to infer from them is reversed. In the average giallo, the J&B Whisky bottle is an ubiquitous simple of sophistication and finesse (Koven, 2006, pp. 49-50); here, the first time we see a J&B bottle is when Andrea, drunk and unshaven, swigs from it while driving home from a party after being snubbed by Helene, who has already commented with disdain on his drunkenness. What’s particularly interesting about this is that it is a clear reimagining of the persona Franco Nero portrayed in the spaghetti westerns of the 1960s and would go on to play in the action and crime thrillers of the mid to late 1970s. In these, the gristled, tough-talking antihero who takes the law into his own hands was romanticised; here, he’s practically a joke. Just watch his first speaking role, where he drunkenly tries to woo Helene, gazing pleadingly at her, only for it to be made clear that she finds his state of intoxication pathetic. As someone who finds macho culture intensely irritating, this pleases me no end.

Above: J&B: the classy gentleman’s drink

In the scene above, Helene returns to her car to find him sitting in the passenger seat, dishevelled and slurring his speech. It is made clear from the start that he is encroaching on her territory (in this case, her car) and that she holds the power. Throughout their conversation, he gazes at her pleadingly, which she refuses to even dignify him with eye contact. When he begins to caress her hair, she firmly and calming removes her hand, responding to his statement that drinking “makes life much easier” with the statement that she, on the other hand, has not been drinking, the implication being that she would have to be drunk herself in order to entertain any prospect of anything happening between them. She controls the scene from its beginning to its end, when she orders him out of the car with the simple statement “Goodnight. Goodbye, Andrea”, and turning on the car’s ignition, all the while refusing to look at him. Bazzoni, meanwhile, underscores the lack of connection between the two of them by filming the entire scene as a single medium shot in which each character occupies either side of the frame, the camera adopting a detached distance rather than priveleging either character’s point of view with subjective shots.

The first scene to feature Andrea’s young girlfriend, Lou, taking place the morning after his encounter with Helene, shows him to be even more dishevelled and pathetic than the night before. He wakes up in bed, groggy and half-dressed, to the sound of the telephone ringing, and it is revealed, through dialogue, that he has slept through two previous calls after returning home in such a state that Lou had to undress him and put him to bed.

Andrea: You always liked undressing me.
Lou: Not when you’re drunk.

Above: The modern man: emblematic of suavity and dignity

Here, drinking is once again held in contempt, the impression being given that, far from making him the virile ‘ladies’ man’ that most male giallo protagonists seem to embody, drink is a turn-off (rather than a turn-on) for women and makes him unable to function sexually. Alcohol, therefore, is here used to diminish masculinity rather than embody it.

Lou, however, is a considerably different character from Helene. Content to allow Andrea to be unfaithful to her (a courtesy which he does not extend to her in return - see the scene in which he slaps her about after suspecting that she has been seeing another man) and to dote on him (Helene refused to give him the time of day; Lou, on the other hand, took care of him when he came home too drunk to even undress himself), she is instantly portrayed as a more submissive character. What is unusual, though, is that, while the Italian gothic horror films of the 1960s generally portrayed assertive women as dangerous and a threat to (patriarchal) society and weak, submissive women as embodying the ‘proper’ characteristics of femininity (see Günsberg, 2005, Chapter 4), this film does not appear to make any judgement calls about either of the two women in Andrea’s life. Indeed, if anything, she is the most positively portrayed character in the film. (Other examples of positive portrayals of independent professional women in gialli include Vittoria Stori in What Have They Done to Your Daughters? and Gianna Brezzi in Deep Red. These are, I must confess, about the only ones I can think of.) On the contrary, we see the level of respect Andrea has for Helene when he is sober, heading round to her house to apologise for his inappropriate behaviour the previous night when he discovers that Lou has gone away for the weekend. (In a note she has left for him, Lou tells him that, if he wants to “get laid”, he is free to go ahead, but this clearly is not his intention when he pays his visit to Helene.)

Above: Helene, a woman in control of her own life

Is with their previous encounter, Bazzoni once again emphasises Andrea’s futile attempts to make eye contact with Helene and her refusal to look at him. It is only when he makes a disparaging remark about her lack of a sex life, telling her that “it’s bad for [her] not to make love”, that she finally grants him more than a brief glance, and only then to once again refer to his drunkenness and to tell him to get to the point of his visit. His purpose, incidentally, is to ask her for information about a case he is investigating, in effect priveleging her with information which he does not possess and even going so far as to imply that he needs her to succeed at his job (whereas she is self-sufficient). Throughout the scene in which she provides him with the information that she needs, her authority is accentuated by low angle shots in which the camera looks up at her, while the scene’s first shot shows her standing on the balcony at the top of a flight of stairs, looking down at Andrea. Throughout the scene, she moves freely around the house, pouring herself a drink and monologuing without directly looking at Andrea, until towards the end, when she sits down and faces him, maintaining a clear distance from him.

Andrea: I didn’t notice anything.
Helene: I’m not surprised. You were drunk.

Above: Are you getting all this down, Laura Mulvey?

The difference between the portrayal of Helene and Lou is once again accentuated when Andrea, after believing Lou to be having an affair with another man, returns home to confront her. Whereas Helene, in the scene previously discussed, was dressed modestly in a black pullover and trousers, Lou is completely naked, lying on Andrea’s bed as she waits for him to return. Even more significantly, she is introduced via a subjective shot, the camera adopting Andrea’s point of view as he enters the bedroom. This time, it is Andrea who moves freely around, putting his groceries away while talking at Lou rather than to her. It is tempting to view Lou, who tells Andrea that she was “dying to see [him]”, as his attempt to make up for his failure with Helene. One gets the impression that Helene’s independence frustrates him, and that he entertains Lou simply for the convenience of someone who can alternately dote on and be dependent on him.

Andrea: What kind of dump do you come from? Your mother doesn’t take care of you, your father’s gathering mould in a state home for the aged, and you play tramp in one sports car after the other.”
Lou: Was it a red sports car?
Andrea: That’s right.
Lou: Well, that car just happens to belong to my brother Walter, you idiot! You know, ever since you’ve been playing detective, you just can’t get anything right. You really had me a laugh!
[Brief pause]
Andrea: You’re pathetic.

In a sense, Lou is pathetic. Immediately afterwards, she eagerly tries to please Andrea by providing him with further information for his investigation, before pleadingly asking where he is going when he head out without a word. (Later, she seems to forgive him completely, indulging in a giggling play-fight with him before having sex.) Andrea, however, the drunk who seems to take his frustration regarding his ex out on his current girlfriend, is nothing if not a hypocrite. This is not, of course, the only giallo in which a male protagonist treats his girlfriend badly, whether by treating her with contempt or physically assaulting her, but it is one of the few in which the filmmakers seem to condemn this behaviour. Often, George Hilton (or one of his counterparts) will slap a female character whom they believe to be in a state of ‘hysteria’ (the impression given that the filmmakers believe such violence to be justified in order to calm down an unhelpfully ‘hysterical’ woman); here, however, Andrea’s assault of Lou is that of a scruffy alcoholic hitting a woman in complete control of her senses on the basis of a false assumption. Andrea is not ‘punished’ as such for this; rather, it is simply yet another in a long line of cases of bad behaviour. (When she reappears once more, towards the end of the film, to tell him that she is leaving him and getting married, it’s tempting to view this as Andrea getting a taste of his own medicine.)

Above: And it looks really nice, too

Of course, the characterisations are far from inclusive. For all her strengths, Helene does, rather regrettably, submit to a brief passionate snog with Andrea after her turns up at her house, wanting her to comfort him after a particularly unpleasant encounter with his boss. (To her credit, however, she does call a halt to it, opting to head back indoors to take care of her son rather than allowing herself to be used by Andrea as a cheap lay to make himself feel better.) And let’s not forget that the killer’s motivation, seemingly plucked out of nowhere at the last minute, is that old reactionary staple, that of the homosexual turned down by a straight man going mad and deciding to kill a bunch of people. Still, I can see exactly what Gary Needham means when he calls this a progressive giallo which “play[s] with the conventions of detection and investigation procedures in order to explore issues of masculinity and identity”.

Get thee behind me, Toshiba

Well, on Tuesday, the courier came to pick up my HD-EP30 and return it to Amazon. I’m sorry, but I just don’t feel happy about the idea of paying for 1080p hardware which doesn’t correctly resolve 1080p. Luckily, the returns process was pretty straightforward - Amazon are generally good when it comes to that sort of thing - and, in any event, my brother’s bricked Xbox 360 has now been repaired and should be back aboard the HMS Whimsy before too long, so we’re not facing an indefinite future without HD DVD playback.

By the way, I’ve yet to find any conclusive information as to whether or not all the HD DVD players advertised as being “1080p Full HD” (a blatant falsification) suffer from this problem, given that I’ve yet to find a single review that actually picked up on it, but I have my suspicions. In that case, there’s something quite laughable about the fact that the best pieces of hardware for the two competing formats were both games consoles… and one of them a cheap add-on drive for an existing console, at that.

HD DVD review: The Bourne Ultimatum

Jason Bourne’s third and no doubt final outing on the HD DVD format is a resounding success in terms of audio-visual quality. While the bonus materials are a bit of a mixed bag, it’s the presentation of the film itself that matters, and in that regard, this release is among the best available on either format.

Courtesy of DVD Pacific, I’ve reviewed the HD DVD release of The Bourne Ultimatum. How does the third and supposedly final instalment in the spy franchise stack up in high definition?

Putting the “tosh” in Toshiba

Well, I got home today from work (and from visiting my granny, who is seriously ill) to find that my Toshiba HD-EP30 had arrived from Amazon.co.uk. After extracting the two free HD DVDs (300 and The Bourne Supremacy), I hooked the thing up and decided to give it a whirl.

Physically speaking at any rate, it’s an improvement on my first HD DVD player, the venerable HD-A1. It’s about half the height, and weighs significantly less. Also, from a standpoint of pure convenience, because this is a European model, it doesn’t require a step-down transformer. (Good old HD DVD and its lack of region coding!) That’s about where the differences end, though, as the Windows CE-based interface is virtually identical, and it takes almost as long as its predecessor to power up and load discs. The Xbox 360 add-on, in comparison, was positively sprightly.

Of far greater concern than the speed, however, is the issue of image quality. When I switched the machine on, my first port of call was the picture menu to change the output mode from 1080i to 1080p. As soon as I popped in my first disc (The Bourne Ultimatum, which I hope to finally get reviewed by the beginning of next week), I knew something was up. The Bourne Ultimatum is one of the best-looking discs released on either format - an extremely detailed encode with no sign of artificial sharpening or detail reduction, and yet, on the HD-EP30, there was ringing in abundance, and a distinct lack of fine detail. A couple more high quality HD DVDs later, and I ruled out any possibility of the discs themselves being at fault.

Lyris suggested that the problem might be the 1080p output. Rather predictably, he was right: setting the output to 1080i immediately resolved the ringing problem and returned the detail to its rightful place. All well and good - but I paid for a device with 1080p output, and 1080p24 output at that. Why should I have to limit myself to 1080i60 just because Microsoft and Toshiba couldn’t get their acts together? Lyris’ projector correctly resolves 1080i film mode, but it means we’re still stuck with 60 Hz output rather than pure 24p, resulting in the infamous 3:2 pull-down judder that many viewers raised on a lifetime of PAL material find extremely difficult to ignore when watching NTSC content.

So, what do I do now? Do I attempt to return the player and attempt to explain to Amazon that I don’t want it because its 1080p output introduces ringing? (Somehow, I don’t think there’s an option that quite fits that description on their returns form.) Is there even any point? For all I know, all Toshiba’s standalone players could exhibit this problem. I’ve spent the last half-hour on Google and have yet to come across a single review or report that mentions the bug, so I have no realistic way of knowing whether I’d be any better off with one of the other 1080p-capable models.

Urgh! This just makes me respect Sony’s Playstation 3 all the more.

Update, February 25th, 2007 09:01 PM: I updated the firmware to version 2.0 at the recommendation of others. Alas, the image quality is still as rotten as ever. See photographic evidence of the disgrace at Lyris Lite.

Day After Day

There’s something of a sense of predictability to Day After Day, a giallo novel by Carlo Lucarelli, better known to some as the co-writer of Dario Argento’s Sleepless. As the second book to focus on the character of Inspector Grazia Negro, the first being Almost Blue (itself turned into a film by Alex Infascelli), it continually evokes its predecessor in terms of plot points and overall style. Once again, the scenario is that of a serial killer who proves to be a master of disguise, and once again, the key to catching him seems to lie in the lap of a socially maladjusted young man with an affinity with technology, who stumbles upon the killer by pure chance.

Like Almost Blue, the novel is a brisk and pacey affair, and once again I suspect that the translation, by Oonagh Stransky, has a lot to do with its effectiveness, given the rhythmic quality of the language. Lucarelli has quite a flair for getting inside the heads of his characters, particularly the villains, describing what they see and what they are thinking in such a way as to make the mundane seem interesting. In the case of the killer, Vittorio (that’s not a spoiler - his identity is revealed to us from the outset), we get to see what goes through his head as he observes the public, storing nuggets of information about their appearances and mannerisms that may or may not be useful in the future for one of his disguises. It’s all quite fascinating and well observed.

Something else that I like about Lucarelli’s writing is his ability to use description to give the impression that the reader is watching a film. There is a scene in which Grazia is in her office, listening to a tape recording of the interrogation of a suspect. The dialogue between the suspect and the investigating officer is intercut with descriptions of the office and the various items inside it - post-its on the notice board, photographs and so on - gradually unveiled in such a way as to suggest that a camera is snaking its way around the room, moving from one object to the next. I’d be very interested to see this adapted as a film, although I do wonder to what extent the characters’ inner thoughts, so important to the novel, would have to be jettisoned along the way.

The stand-out scene, meanwhile, is one in which the aforementioned social outcast, Alex, flees injured through a busy street in broad daylight as Vittorio, having killed all of his work colleagues, calmly follows him. It reminded me of the scene in Tenebre in which Bullmer is murdered on a sun-drenched plaza in full view of several people: this idea that that something terrible can be happening in a public place, and no-one notices. As if to hammer home the similarity, Alex later describes the experience as reminding him of when he watched Profondo Rosso on television.

It is, however, largely business as usual. The plot is such a retread of Almost Blue that there’s really nothing new to be gleaned. The book’s strengths lie largely in the telling rather than the story itself, and, while I would certainly read any future instalments in this series (the book’s open-ended nature suggests that there will be a sequel somewhere down the line), I would hope that Lucarelli would be able to come up with something less of a retread.

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.