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(*) Land of the Dead ***½
USA/Canada: George A. Romero, 2005
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(*) The Little Mermaid ****
USA: John Musker/Ron Clements, 1989
(Watched with commentary by John Musker, Ron Clements, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman)
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The Omen *½
USA: John Moore, 2006
A review copy of the 2006 remake of The Omen (R2 UK) arrived this morning. I can't exactly claim that I had high hopes for this latest Hollywood cash-in (a movie made entirely because of the marketing possibilities of a 6/6/06 release date, it would seem), but jeez Louise! Even I wasn't expecting it to be as bad as it turned out. I mean, it uses almost exactly the same script as the original (a writer called Dan McDermott was brought in to "update" it, but the changes he made were so minor that the Writers' Guild of America didn't even give him credit), and the original is one of my favourite films of all time. I figured that it would at least be competent, if unremarkable. Sadly, I was wrong. The new Omen is not merely bad, it's a shit film.
I'll have a full review up before too long (probably October 16th, when reviews of the new UK releases of the first four Omen films will also be going up at DVD Times), so I'll be brief. Crap acting, crap music, crap "scares", crap direction (seriously, this is the one horror remake I've seen that actually looks less slick than the original), and Jesus Christ, the kid playing Damien is the worst of the lot. Scowling at the camera and wearing pasty make-up does not a scary child make, people. A couple of intriguing dream sequences nonewithstanding, this film is a worthless waste of celluloid. I didn't think it was possible to take a classic film and screw it up this badly, but sadly I was mistaken.
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(*) The Little Mermaid ****
USA: John Musker/Ron Clements, 1989
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(*) Sex and Lucía *****
Original title: Lucía y el Sexo
Spain: Julio Medem, 2001 IMDB reference
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Satan's Slave ***½
UK: Norman J. Warren, 1976
After a less than auspicious start, consisting of the generic murder of a generic victim, Satan's Slave pleasantly surprised me. It's not masterpiece, to be sure, but it's a competently-made supernatural horror film with an impressively spooky atmosphere. The plot deals with a young woman, Catherine (Candace Glendenning), who, on the cusp of turning 20, witnesses the fiery death by exploding car (!) of her parents, on the very doorstep of the house of her uncle Alexander (Michael Gough). Kindly Uncle Al takes the bizarelly untraumatised Catherine into the fold, but it soon turns out that he, his wacky son Stephen (Martin Potter) and his secretary Frances (Barbara Kellerman) have a sinister ulterior motive in adopting her as their own.
It's all a bit uneven: the script makes a major bungle by revealing the malicious nature of Alexander and Stephen within the opening ten minutes, and a lot of the dialogue is of a risible standard. The performances are also rather hit and miss, although Candace Glendenning, who seems to have all but disappeared after making this film, makes an appealing and at times resourceful heroine, with her wide eyes and raven hair, while the inimitable Michael Gough makes the most of his distinctive and powerful voice in the role of her malevolent uncle.
The film also benefits from some truly impressive cinematography (a grand total of five cameramen are credited, of whom Les Young seems to have been the chief), which makes the English countryside seem like a genuinely haunted place, while John Scott's score is pleasantly ominous, if a tad hokey. Unfortunately, some of the gore effects are more than a little cringe-worthy: it's clear that Warren doesn't know when to hold back, leering over the effects in extreme close-up and revealing just how fake-looking they truly are. This is especially true of the rubbery-looking flesh used for brandings and slicings, while an otherwise well-directed suicide features a lumps of pink-looking putty, presumably signifying the victim's innards, bulging out of various orifices.
Still, I enjoyed Satan's Slave. I've always had a thing for supernatural horror, especially of the demonic possession variety, and this one is well-executed. It's rather predictable, and the budgetary constraints are at times all too visible, but it's a good, solid effort with a palpable sense of dread - which, in a horror film, is almost always the most important feature.
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Eugenie ***
Spain/West Germany: Jess Franco, 1970
Back in 2003, I happened to see a film by a Spanish director by the name of Jesus "Jess" Franco. The film in question was Justine, and I'm sorry to say I thought it was so bad that I didn't make it beyond the opening half-hour. This was when my Euro-cult craze was still in its infancy (the only such films I'd seen were around a third of Dario Argento's catalogue), and I realise that Franco has a rather formidable following among such circles. Therefore, recently, when I was doing a little borrowing and trading with other Euro-cult fanatics, I decided to give Franco another go, with his 1970 film Eugenie.
It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that Eugenie and Justine are pretty similar films. In addition to sharing a director, a writer/producer (Harry Alan Towers) and a composer (Bruno Nicolai, he of so many gialli), they are both based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade and have a similar narrative theme of an innocent young woman embarking on a series of sexual adventures, many of them sadomasochistic. As such, Eugenie is somewhere between a character drama and an exploitation/porn hybrid, although the fact that it takes itself seriously and places no small amount of emphasis on the narrative means that, as one reviewer put it, it's as far from a Skinemax flick as you can possibly get.
Be of no doubt, though, that this is far from a classic. Not much of note really happens, and the whole thing seems to come to an abrupt end long before it should. Franco's attempts to blend fantasy with reality are also not particularly successful, and, to be honest, there's only so much canoodling and breast-fondling I can take before I start looking for something more substantial. And yet, Eugenie's technical qualities set it apart from most films of this sort. Franco had a decent (at least by his standards) budget with this film, and you can tell that every penny ended up on the screen. Shot in anamorphic Technovision, it consistently looks sumptuous, making excellent use of the picturesque island location and, in the more hallucinatory sequences, various dye filters. And the final moments, which show the naked, degraded Eugenie stumbling through sand dunes and along deserted country roads, are haunting in their sheer beauty. Unfortunately, a number of scenes are sullied by being so out of focus that I'm amazed Franco never re-shot them.
The film also has an interesting cast, headed by Marie Liljedahl as the young Eugenie who, while not exactly a first-class thespian, is game for anything and handles the character's innocence well. Her transition from innocent wallflower to sullied damsel never really convinced me, though, as she does little to show any sort of change in her character. The sultry Maria Rohm is also on fine form, and the sheer shock of seeing Christopher Lee in such a dirty picture is well worth the price of admission. (Apparently, he had no idea what sort of film he was appearing in until he saw the final cut, but, looking at the scenes in which he appears, I'm not entirely convinced by this claim.)
In the final analysis, therefore, Franco is a better filmmaker than I previously assumed him to be. The subject matter isn't really to my liking, but here he clearly demonstrates a decent ability behind the camera if given an appropriate budget. For all its faults, I'm not sorry to have watched it, and I'll be less hasty to avoid this director's output in the future.
IMDB reference
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Satan's Blood **½
Original title: Escalofrío
Spain: Carlos Puerto, 1977 IMDB reference
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(*) The Cursed Medallion ****
Original title: Il Medaglione Insanguinato
Italy/UK: Massimo Dallamano, 1975 IMDB reference
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Black Sunday ***
Original title: La Maschera del Demonio
Italy: Mario Bava, 1960 IMDB reference
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One on Top of the Other ****
Original title: Una Sull'Altra
Italy/Spain/France: Lucio Fulci, 1969 Of all Fulci's gialli, the one most crying out for a release is arguably One on Top of the Other. While his others have all been released somewhere in the world in editions of varying quality, this, his first, is the only one that has yet to see an official DVD. I had the good fortune of watching a VHS copy this morning, and, having now seen all of Fulci's gialli, I must now join the ranks of people clamouring for a legitimate digital release. Susan Dumurrier (Marisa Mell), the invalid wife of the eminent Dr. George Dumurrier (Jean Sorel), dies as a result of suffocation during a violent asthma attack, with her husband inheriting a sum of $2 million in insurance. An anonymous tip-off leads George to a nightclub, where he is entranced by a dancer, Monica Weston, who is a dead ringer for his wife. The two strike up an affair, but when the insurance company's investigations lead to the assumption that Susan and Monica are one in the same, the police begin a full-blown investigation into what seems to be a case of insurance fraud on a grand scale. There is, of course, more to all this than meets the eye, although the actual explanation is fairly predictable. The allusions to Vertigo are umissable. the San Francisco setting, the blonde doppelganger of a dead woman, the truth about her identity - all of them recall Hitchcock's acclaimed thriller, but Fulci is more interested in sex and the sordid details of his characters' corrupt lives than on the psychological breakdown of his protagonist. Not that this is in itself a problem - the film is well-plotted and the revelations suitably engaging - but we never really get inside George's head, nor is he likeable enough for us to care about his fate. So much could be made of his state of mind - this is, after all, a man who instigates a relationship with a woman who looks just like his dead wife, a subject surely ripe for psychoanalysis - but in the end Fulci chooses to keep us in the dark. Likewise, those expecting a post-Bird with the Crystal Plumage style giallo will be disappointed, as this film, made a full year before Argento's daring debut, is, as Stephen Thrower says, "a melodrama first and a murder thriller [...] second". The closest points of comparison, therefore, would probably be the domestic paranoia gialli of the late 60s, such as Umberto Lenzi's Orgasmo and Luciano Ercoli's The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion. Provided you can accept that not all gialli are about black-gloved serial killers, therefore, One on Top of the Other should be a rewarding experience. Jean Sorel, in the lead role, is a bit wooden, but the leggy Marisa Mell gives a stand-out performance as his dead wife's striptease doppelganger, and Fulci captures perfectly the air of middle class decadence he seems to have been going for. These characters seem to inhabit a world in which no-one cares very much about anyone else, and partnerships are entered into only to do harm to others. Likewise, the power games people play with each other as fascinating, especially Monica's relationship with George, who, when he enters her life, is demoted to the status of a "whore's manservant", mirroring the manner in which he previously dominated Susan (again, the credit for this observation goes to Stephen Thrower). The film unfolds slowly, conducting itself at a leisurely pace even when, by conventional logic, the tension should be rising (especially in the case of the race to save George from the gas chamber in the final act). Still, Fulci knows exactly what he's doing, and his directing is assured. We get the impression that these characters are playing god with each others' lives, and even when George is being led to his death, no-one, not even him, seems to be in any great hurry to do anything about it. IMDB reference
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Shallow Hal *
USA/Germany: Bobby Farrelly/Peter Farrelly, 2001 IMDB reference
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(*) Home Alone 2: Lost in New York ***
USA: Chris Columbus, 1992 IMDB reference
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Colt 38 Special Squad ***
Original title: Quelli della Calibro 38
Italy: Massimo Dallamano, 1976 IMDB reference
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Movies
Welcome to the movie checklist!
This section is an archive listing every movie I've seen from January 1 2005 onwards. Films I have already seen are included and will be marked with a (*), but probably won't be reviewed except under special circumstances. I will be including a rating for each film (in stars, out of 5), and hope to be able to include a brief 1-2 paragraph review of each film, although due to time constraints that won't always be possible.
Archives
Films Viewed This Month
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