Odds Against Tomorrow: Robert Wise

Odds Against Tomorrow is a rare heist film that works on two distinctly different levels.  One the surface, it is a hard-hitting crime caper.  Three desperate men are forced by circumstances outside of their control to participate in a bank heist.  David Burke, the leader, is an ex-police man who refused to take part in a state investigation.  Earl Slater is an ex-con who has fallen upon desperate times and is determined to support his wife.  Johnny Ingram is a nightclub performer with such crippling gambling debts that the mob has begun to threaten his family.  However, there's just one big problem: Johnny is black.  Here is where the second level of the film comes in: it is a powerful racial commentary.  Earl is a nearly sociopathic racist.  It isn't just the way he treats Johnny that betrays his crooked emotions.  Watch how he acts around the black elevator operator at the start of the film and the black bank guard at the end.  It's subtle, yet extremely powerful.  Like most crime noir, their plot is doomed to fail.  But it is how their plan fails and the result of its failing that makes Odds Against Tomorrow such a great film.  Most of the time, when a film noir tries to do too much in terms of story and commentary, the results are lopsided and miscalculated.  Odds Against Tomorrow strikes just the right balance.

7/10

Human Desire: Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang's Human Desire is based off the novel La Bête humaine by Émile Zola.  However, it is frequently overshadowed by Jean Renoir's adaption of the same name.  That film starred Jean Gabin as a railway worker who witnesses a co-worker force his unfaithful wife to kill the man that she cheated with.  The woman in turn falls in love with Gabin and tries to convince him to murder her abusive and controlling husband.  The film is considered a classic of French cinema.  And yet, I like Fritz Lang's version more.  While Renoir set his version in the realms of reality with naturalistic performances, Lang sets his film squarely in the world of film noir.  Lang's film is a dark, sinister work that bares the inner motivations and vices of its characters.  It elevates this human story into the realm of high drama.

8/10

The Bad and the Beautiful: Vincente Minnelli

It's around 10:30 on August 28, 2011.  I am writing this a few hours before leaving for graduate school at NYU - Tisch.  I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't terrified.  Thankfully, I have just finished Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful.  Films like these remind me why I wanted to get into film in the first place.  They energize, motivate, and provide me with some small sense of reassurance that maybe, just maybe, I can make it out there in the film industry.  Like many great films, The Bad and the Beautiful is about the film industry itself.  Kirk Douglas plays Jonathan Shield, the son of a notorious Hollywood film-maker who was so hated that mourners had to be hired for his funeral.  Jonathon is determined to make the Shield name famous again.  So he becomes a big name Hollywood producer.  He climbs the Hollywood ladder through his associations with three people: screenwriter James Lee Bartlow, movie star Georgia Lorrison , and director Fred Amiel.  He gives them all great careers, but he betrays them all in the name of his own ambition.  His pride gets the best of him when he fires the director of his most recent film and creates a clunker that bankrupts him.  Now, adrift in Paris, he desperately calls the three of his lost friends, begging them for another chance.  The Bad and the Beautiful is one of the most intelligent movies about Hollywood that I have ever seen, ranking up there with Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve.  It stares directly into Hollywood's vices, problems, and triumphs.  It is both a celebration and condemnation of the film industry.  It is a story of hope, challenge, and eventual redemption.  It is just the film that a scared young film student like myself needed to see the night before leaving for graduate school.

10/10

The Wolves: Hideo Gosha

There are many great Japanese directors who are widely known and praised in the West: Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, Oshima, Imamara...But one director who never really got his due outside of Japan was Hideo Gosha.  For decades, he created an impressive body of work that is highly regarded in Japan, particularly for his dark samurai films like Sword of the Beast and Hitokiri.  One of his greatest films is virtually unheard of in the West: The Wolves.  The film is an ninkyo eiga, or chivalry film.  Ninkyo eiga were about yakuza who followed old fashioned honor codes being forced to confront the changing world of modern day Japan.   Frequently, the heroes would encounter the disintegration of traditional yakuza morals and traditions in the face of modernization.  In The Wolves, Seiji Iwahashi is a gangster who is released from prison after a general pardon is issued at the inauguration of the Showa Emperor.  Seiji was in prison for killing a rival yakuza boss during an altercation involving a railroad being constructed through their territories.  When he leaves prison, he finds that his gang was absorbed by the rival gang after its leader died suddenly.  Seiji is conflicted by this dilemma: should he continue to swear fealty to a rival yakuza boss?  Also, he finds that his old boss may have been murdered.  Throw in the fact that his friend who was engaged to a woman now pledged to a rival gangster has disappeared after being released from prison, and you have the makings of a great ninkyo eiga.  The film may be a bit too long for its own good, however.  But that is because Gosha made the film more of a character study than most other ninkyo eiga.  He takes his time to develop his characters...trouble is that he may have taken too much time.  Still, The Wolves is an admirable film.  Hopefully, one day both it, and its director, will get its due in the West.

7/10

The People Under the Stairs: Wes Craven

Wes Craven's The People Under the Stairs is a nearly flawless film: intelligent in design, terrifying in execution.  It is at once both a startling social critique of greed, urban decay, and parent absenteeism.  Young Poindexter, known as "Fool" by everyone due to a tarot card reading, agrees to help break into his landlord's house to steal a legendary deposit of gold coins.  The young boy is accompanied by two men who are promptly murdered by "Mom" and "Dad," the rulers of their decrepit suburban home, when they try and break in.  Fool discovers that not only had they been ripping off their tenants in the ghetto, but they had been stealing children and raising them as their own.  The children were submitted to great abuse and usually mutilated for being bad and thrown into the cellar.  They are fed the bodies of people unfortunate enough to come to their house.  The young Alice helps protect Fool from their psychotic attacks.  One of the children who literally live under the stairs, Roach, managed to escape and lives in a labyrinthine system of passages behind their walls.  The film is a cat-and-mouse game for survival as Fool tries to escape from this house from Hell.  Wes Craven isn't called one of the Masters of Horror for nothing.  The film is full of shock scares, but it also contains a startling amount of atmosphere that is largely due to his exploitation of the claustrophobic sets.  The People Under the Stairs is a movie that will shock, repulse, and fascinate you from start to finish. 

9/10

Behind Locked Doors: Budd Boetticher

Here's an interesting little film.  Budd Boetticher's Behind Locked Doors was one of his earliest films and comes in at 63 minutes.  It is based off an incident from the 1940s where an investigator infiltrated an insane asylum by posing as one of its patients.  This story was also adapted in Samuel Fuller's magnificent Shock Corridor.  Boetticher's take isn't as good or memorable as Fuller's film, but it still has its own merits.  It features some good performances, including an uncredited appearance by Ed Wood darling Tor Johnson as "The Champ," a psychotically violent inmate who attacks anyone he comes in contact with.  The film is a charming little B-movie: fast-paced, well shot with moody cinematography, and ending on a saccharine happy note.  It's a little too short for its own good, though.  An extra 10-15 minutes would have helped it by adding some more depth.  But as it stands, Behind Locked Doors is a fine way to spend an hour of extra time.

6/10

Silverado: Lawrence Kasdan

Has anyone noticed that Westerns are almost never any fun anymore?  The few Westerns that have been released in the past 20 or so years have almost all been bleak, Revisionist affairs.  People have forgotten how much fun the Old West used to be.  Yes, the Old West is a superficial myth.  But as John Ford once said, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."  Silverado is a film that not only embraces the legend, but becomes a part of it.  It is a classic story of good vs. evil out on the prairie.  Ethan McKendrick is a rancher who murders local landowners so his cattle can graze in an open pasture.  He keeps the local town of Silverado wrapped around his finger by keeping Sheriff Cobb on his payroll.  But he is challenged by four men from vastly different backgrounds who band together to fight his tyranny.  This is a film full of exciting shoot-outs and action.  Notice that I didn't say that it was full of violence.  Violence and action are two very different things.  But the real star is Bruce Broughton's Academy Award nominated original score.  Reminiscent of the old Western anthems from the days of The Magnificent Seven and The Searchers, it is triumphant and awe-inspiring.  Yes, this film is cliche in several parts.  But Silverado isn't reliant on them.  When they use a cliche, it is out of love and admiration, not out of necessity.  Westerns like Silverado may not be popular anymore, but it proves that they will never go out of style.

8/10

Tattooed Life: Seijun Suzuki

It's widely forgotten that Seijun Suzuki, the much beloved (and despised) cinematic anarchist of Japanese cinema, was not only capable of creating cohesive, straightforward films, but excelled at it.  A few years before descending fully into creative madness with Tokyo Drifter, Fighting Elegy, and Branded to Kill, he directed Tattooed Life.  The film follows two brothers on the run from the yakuza who take up construction jobs working in a tunnel after they are unable to escape to Manchuria.  Tetsu, the eldest, was a yakuza hitman who was betrayed by his boss.  Kenji, the youngest, was scheduled to start art school.  However, Kenji rescued his brother during the attempted hit on his life.  The two find solace, camaraderie, and love among the tunnel workers.  Much time is spent detailing their communal celebrations and brotherly antics.  However, they are soon discovered and it isn't long before Tetsu's old yakuza associates come for blood.  This is a film about relationships and how individuals fit inside larger communities.  Yes, there is an epic and bloody showdown at the end.  But it almost seems out of place in such a sedate film.  But nevertheless, this is a terrific entry into the filmography of one of Japan's most fascinating, and polarizing, directors.

7/10

Rusty Knife: Toshio Masuda

Full Disclosure: Due to a programming error, I was forced to watch eleven minutes of this film without subtitles.

The bread and butter of the noir genre are characters who try to escape their past but are forced to confront them.  Films like Out of the Past, Crime Wave, and In a Lonely Place are prime examples of this central noir dynamic.  In Toshio Masuda's Rusty Knife, we hear one of the most popular variations on this theme: the reformed criminal being pulled back into the underworld.  Yukihiko Tachibana is a bar owner who is trying to go straight after finishing a prison sentence for killing a man over a woman.  He was once hired by the yakuza as a body guard where he witnessed a brutal assassination and was paid to keep quiet.  However, he soon learns that the old gang is bumping off the other men hired that same night as guards.  In addition, he discovers that his girlfriend was gang-raped and driven to suicide at the hands of the very men who hired him.  So Yukihiko dives back into the world of crime to discover who killed his girlfriend and who is trying to shut him up permanently.  It's a fine plot with some competent performances, particularly from Yujiro Ishihara as Yukihiko.  But it lacks the energy and stylistic wit of its Nikkatsu contemporaries.  Several times, the movie will come to a complete halt as the characters engage in 10+ minute scenes of expository dialogue.  It doesn't have the same enthusiasm and spirit that distinguished other Japanese crime films of the late 50s and early 60s.  Much like Yukihiko's trusty knife, this film is covered in rust when it should be sharp and deadly.

6/10

The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Philip Kaufman

My biggest problem with Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being is probably something that didn't bother most critics or audiences.   It simply is this: the film feels like a composite of two very different, very incompatible films.  On the one hand, you have a powerful love story between womanizer Tomas and his two women, the bohemian artist Sabina, and the emotionally reliant waitress Tereza.  On the other, the film is a gripping re-enactment of the Soviet and Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 and the ensuing government clampdown and censorship.  The two plots are technically combined as they force the threesome apart into different countries where they pursue different lovers and lives.  But the two parts of the film are so drastically different in tone that it is jarring.  You can't take the love affair drama seriously due to the political subtext and you can't take the invasion by Communists seriously because its seen as an afterthought to the aforementioned love affairs.  Still, the film boasts some tremendous performances and stunning cinematography by the legendary Sven Nykvist.  It just seems so...unnecessary.

7/10

I Am Waiting: Koreyoshi Kurahara

I really hate it when movies disappoint me.  Koreyoshi Kurahara's I Am Waiting should have been a masterpiece.  The first 45 minutes are so compelling, so beautiful, and so tragic that if it had been an American film, it would have been remembered as one of the great film noir.  It opens with Jôji, an ex-boxer, who saves Saeko, a young hostess from committing suicide.  She is on the run from the mob who had hired her as a nightclub singer but apparently tried to force her to work as a prostitute.  Together, they work in Jôji's restaurant, a home for wayward souls, and begin to heal each others' broken lives.  But, of course, the mob finds Saeko and forces her to come back to them.  But then the film does a curious about face and changes from a moody romance noir into a crime drama.  Apparently, Jôji's brother was murdered by the same gangsters who hired Saeko.  He had been on his way to Brazil to buy some farmland so he and Jôji could start a new life.  But the mob picked him out as an easy target, took his money, and killed him.  So for the last half of the film, it becomes almost solely focused on Jôji's quest for revenge against the gangsters who ruined his chance for a new life.  Saeko becomes less than an ancillary character.  It just seems so dishonest, so disingenuous that it makes me almost resent the film.  This should have been a film about two lost people finding each other and trying to escape from the mob.  Oh well...I can dream...

7/10

The Misfits: John Huston

John Huston's The Misfits is one of the most intelligent Westerns that I have ever seen.  Perhaps that is largely because it isn't necessarily a Western, but a powerful drama that involves cowboys.  Armed with a powerful story and screenplay by Arthur Miller, The Misfits is a penetrating examination of the death of the Old West.  Marilyn Monroe plays Roslyn, a recent divorced young woman who is drifting through life.  She meets a group of ex-cowboys and rodeo riders who make extra money capturing wild horses and selling them to dog food plants.  They are alienated and unhappy as they are now living parodies of what they once represented.  Roslyn comes into their lives as a soothing balm and a strict conscience that forces them to reevaluate who they are.  The film is a three pronged attack: the directing, writing, and acting are all superb.  John Huston proves once again that he is one of America's greatest unsung directors by focusing the raw power of Arthur Miller's screenplay and the mighty performances given by his actors.  The Misfits has some of the greatest casting that I have ever encountered in a Western.  The ex-cowboys are played by Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, and Eli Wallach.  The three were well past their prime at the time of the film's production.  Therefore, their dialogue and acting carries a naturalistic weight borne through real life experience.  But the true star of the film is Marilyn Monroe as Roslyn.  I would argue that she gives her career's greatest performance in The Misfits.  Why?  Because she unlike many of her biggest and most important roles, she wasn't playing the character of Marilyn Monroe under a different name.  She was genuinely acting and not coasting through the power of her cult of personality.  And what a performance it was.  It is one of the many reasons that The Misfits is one of the unsung classics of the Western genre.

9/10

The Black Cat: Lucio Fulci

After a while, all of Lucio Fulci's films begin to blend together into an incoherent mush.  They all have the same elements: extended gore and sex sequences, slow scenes of painful expository dialogue, poorly defined characters, and a vague, metaphysical malaise that settles on top of the whole mess.  In The Black Cat we have a film supposedly based on a story of the same name by Edgar Allen Poe.  I say "supposedly" because I don't think that Poe ever wrote something this ridiculous.  In this film, a small village is beset by a chain of violent murders which are carried out by none other than regular black housecats.  Of course, they're not just housecats...they have been possessed by a local psychic to do his bidding.  Why is he doing this?  What is the source of his power?  How are these villagers so laughably kill-able?  These questions are never answered.  Amazingly, I can't recall the name of a single character in this film.  It's all just a long chain of murders, talking, and close-ups of black cats.  I doubt very seriously that this movie was what Poe had in mind when he first wrote The Black Cat.

5/10

Cruel Gun Story: Takumi Furukawa

The life of a gangster is a hard one.  Nobody knows this more than Togawa, a Japanese criminal hired to pull off a daring (and slightly suicidal) job of robbing a race track's proceeds.  He had the perfect plan: when the money was being transported, lure the armored truck onto a detour, take the guards out, and abscond with the loot.  Of course, he didn't plan on two important details.  First, he didn't expect for the truck driver and guard to not leave the truck and hide behind their bulletproof windows after their escort was shot down.  Second, he didn't expect one of his crew to betray him.  It must be frustrating to Togawa, especially considering that he was planning to use the money to give his crippled sister an operation.  Yes, yes...we've heard this story a million times.  Even the detail concerning the crippled sister seems contrived.  But guided by the hands of director Takumi Furukawa, this generic plot remains compelling enough to keep the audience's interest.  All that's left is to watch Togawa's world tragically collapse in on him.  Yes...the life of a gangster is a hard one...

7/10

Thunder Bay: Anthony Mann

I'm sure that in 1953, Anthony Mann's Thunder Bay must have seemed like a great idea for a film.  However, the story of two oilmen who fight off the ignorance and malice of local shrimpers to put in place an offshore drilling platform off the coast of Louisiana doesn't quite seem so adventurous and glorious anymore.  Maybe it was the 4.9 million barrels of crude oil dumped into the gulf last year due to corrupt business practices by greedy oilmen.  I'm just saying that such a gung-ho film over drilling for oil in Louisiana can't help but be subjected to ire and cynicism by today's society.  But ignoring its uncomfortable subtext, how does the film itself stand up?  Well, the main problem is that drilling for oil has never been a very exciting thing to watch.  Sure, it was captivating in There Will Be Blood, but that was largely due to the characters who were overseeing the drilling.  While he puts in a great performance as one of the oilmen, Jimmy Stewart is no Daniel Plainview.  There is some interesting back-and-forth between the oilmen and the townsfolk, but after the first thirty minutes it is largely ignored until the very end.  Thunder Bay isn't a flawed film.  It just isn't a very captivating one.  And, through no fault of its own, it can't escape the modern day context that it finds itself invoking.

6/10

Martin: George A. Romero

The following is reprinted from my Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear review.
http://forgottenclassicsofyesteryear.blogspot.com/2011/08/martin.html

There’s something strange about that new boy in town.  Nobody can quite put their finger on it...but something about that young man just seems...off.  Armed with a bag full of narcotics, razors, and needles, he can be seen milling around town and loitering.  Every now and then he stops to stare at people, young women, in particular.  But he always shoves off whenever someone approaches him.  It can’t help that he’s living with Tada Cuda, a local Lithuanian Catholic who seems to forget that he isn’t living in the 14th century.  The old man seems convinced that Demons exist and are plaguing his home of Braddock, Pennsylvania.  He can always be heard by neighbors yelling at the young man, even at strange hours of the night.  But that’s just Tada Cuda.  No...it’s that new young man who seems out of place.  His name, we learn, is Martin Mathias.  And he is a vampire.

At least...he thinks he is a vampire.  He can walk under sunlight, eat normal food, and even go to Mass.  But every few nights, he hits the town with his bag of goodies to feed.  Mercifully, he sedates his victims with his tools before fatally slashing them and drinking their blood.  The opening scene depicts Martin’s surgical precision in locating a target, preparing his needles, sneaking into her room, and moving in for the kill.  But as I said, there’s something...off...about this young man.  Before feeding, he strips naked and removes her clothes as well.  He slices her arm open, suckles at the cut, and then kisses her lips.  He even cuddles up to her naked form, almost crying at their macabre and bloody consummation.  Then, he cleans up the blood, wipes away all of the evidence of his intrusion, and positions her body so that it looks like a suicide, not a murder.  If Martin is a vampire, then he hates himself for being one.

This inner turmoil is the heart of George A. Romero’s Martin.  After reinventing the horror genre with the classic Night of the Living Dead (1968), he directed this introspective character study.  The film is undeniably a lost gem from the career of the man most remembered for turning the stomachs of millions with his graphic zombie movies.  In fact, knowing that Romero directed this film can be downright disorienting.  It doesn’t feel like many of his other works.  While most of his films are intense assaults on the senses of the audience, Martin takes its patient time, fully exploring and developing its characters.  It creates doubt and inspires skepticism.  Is Martin really a vampire?  Is he nothing more than a disturbed serial killer?  If he isn’t a vampire, why does he think of himself as one?

While the film doesn’t give any definitive answers, it does leave important clues.  While feeding, he is barraged with black and white visions of vampiric seductions of virginal beauties.  In another, Martin, dressed in clothes from the 19th century, is chased and assaulted by a group of puritans and townsfolk.  Are these memories of past encounters that haunt him during his bloody work?  Or could they possibly be fantasies spurred on by his animal-like thirst?  Could it be both?  Whatever they are, they haunt Martin in his darkest moments.

But most curious of all is Martin’s steadfast denial of magic and the supernatural.  This becomes evident during his interactions with Tada Cuda who is convinced that he is an Old World vampire.  He never refers to Martin by name, instead calling him “Nosferatu.”  He sets up garlic bulbs and crucifixes around the house to repel him.  Martin angrily rips the garlic off the wall in one scene, runs into Tada Cuda’s room, takes a bite, and screams that there is no such thing as magic.  His cousin Christina seems fascinated by Martin and tries to uncover his secrets.  He bitterly rebukes her time and again with, “There’s no real magic...ever.”  What causes his repulsion of the supernatural?  Perhaps his parents were like Tada Cuda and raised him in an environment of hatred and suspicion.  That would explain why he hates the supernatural.  In addition, it also explains why he would hate his identity as a vampire.

But let’s pretend for a moment that Martin isn’t a vampire.  Why does he identify himself as one?  Perhaps he is desperate for the intimacy and physical contact that his annual feedings bring.  Martin reveals to a local housewife who seduces him that he is a virgin.  So maybe his feedings answer some forbidden or misguided lust.  The Japanese film Ichi the Killer (2001) features a character who was raised to believe that sexual arousal was really a form of homicidal lust that could only be quenched by killing people.  Could something similar have happened to Martin?  Might he be confusing his own sexual frustration with a supposed need to kill and drink blood?  In one scene, he breaks into a house at night intending to feed on a young housewife.  He discovers her having an affair with a young man.  Enraged, he knocks the woman out with narcotics and proceeds to brutally murder the young man and drink his blood.  Why did he kill the young man?  He could have just knocked him out, too.  Was he jealous of what the man had in his relationship with the housewife?  Was it an act borne of confused sexual jealousy?

Or perhaps it is a cry for attention.  Martin develops a habit of calling up a local radio station and recounting his exploits as a vampire.  He becomes a big hit, even being affectionately dubbed “The Count” by the DJ.  Even though the attention is superficial (and exploitative) he seems to thrive off it.  Indeed, the radio seems to be the only time that he can confess his inner feelings and describe the forces that torture him.  The radio becomes a companion and confessor, as he recalls his feedings and crimes to thousands over the air waves.  The radio fills a void in Martin’s life that should have been filled by friends and family, yet has been cruelly denied him. 

Martin is a powerful, albeit curious film that proves that George A. Romero could direct films with genuine substance.  You might have noticed that I have asked quite a few questions during this review.  That is because the film itself gives rise to so many, yet answers so few.  Is Martin a vampire?  Does it matter?  He is clearly a disturbed young man.  Did his environment give rise to his need to drink blood, or vice versa?  Regardless, Martin is a penetrating look into the tortured mind of a tortured young man.

8/10

A Colt is My Passport: Takashi Nomura

Takashi Nomura's A Colt is My Passport is indicative of the crime noir films that were made in the 60s by the Nikkatsu Japanese film studio.  These crime films were designed to compete with the American and French films that were taking the country by storm at the time.  They were sleek, stylish, and devilishly entertaining.  A Colt is My Passport follows two professional yakuza hitmen, one of whom is played by Nikkatsu superstar Joe Shishido, who are hired to assassinate a rival mob boss who has been elbowing in on other gang's territory.  After successfully pulling off the hit, they are unable to flee the country and are forced to hide in a local truckers' hotel.  They are captured after they try to flee the country on a ship.  They discover, to their horror, that their boss has betrayed them, agreeing to have them killed in exchange for merging with the son of the man that they killed at the start of the film.  So, they find themselves in a classical conundrum: honor or money?  The film builds to a satisfying climatic shootout where everyone wins and everyone loses.  It's a fine film, even though Joe Shishido's cheeks are so distracting that they should have gotten second billing.

7/10

Sabata 3: Return of Sabata: Gianfranco Parolini

While it isn't as good as the first film is the trilogy, Return of Sabata is certainly a return to form after the painfully mediocre Adios, Sabata.  You could argue that this is due largely in part to the return of Lee Van Cleef as the titular character.  But it's more than that.  The film remembers what the second film forgot: that Sabata is a gunslinger who uses his brain and trickery to overcome his foes.  In Return of Sabata, the main character comes across a town being extorted by its government.  Under the pretext of using the tax money for town improvements, the town leaders use the money as the basis of a counterfeit ring.  Sabata learns about the ring and decides that the best course of action would be to extort the counterfeiters instead of turning them in.  He does this with ANOTHER drunk, overweight Mexican, ANOTHER pair of high-jumping acrobats, and ANOTHER blonde haired, bright faced gunslinger.  I guess that Gianfranco Parlini decided that it was such a good formula that he would use it in all three films.  I wasn't kidding when I said that this film was a return to form for the trilogy.  Sabata uses his trademark array of trick guns and weapons to outsmart and out-shoot his competition.  Not to mention that the plot is significantly more advanced than Sabata and his gang going after a Big Bad.  Still, the film is missing the same sense of unabashed joy and pathos that made the first so addictive.  It's not perfect, but it'll do.

7/10

Sabata 2: Adiós, Sabata: Gianfranco Parolini

What happened here?  The first Sabata film was so fun, so over-the-top, so entertaining that there has never been a Spaghetti Western like it before or since.  Here, in Adiós, Sabata, we have a watered down version of the first film, essentially stripped of all of the charm and joy that made the first film work so well.  The first Sabata film was about a gunman who fought corrupt men and killers using his brain and clever tactics.  In Adiós, Sabata, it's all about sheer gunpower and who can fire their weapon the fastest.  Oh, sure, there are elements from the first film which make reappearances.  Carrincha and Alley Cat are replaced by nearly identical characters.  There are clever gadgets like a spring-loaded ship model which are used to dispatch hapless victims.  But everything just feels ripped off from the first film.  Yul Brynner, who plays Sabata, is a fine actor.  But he doesn't capture the charisma of Lee Van Cleef.  In this film, an almost uncomfortably stoic Sabata helps a group of revolutionaries steal gold from the Austrian Army currently occupying Mexico.  But as I mentioned before, Sabata uses his brawn, not his brain, to defeat and overcome to odds.  It's a real shame, too.  Sabata was a fresh take on a tired genre.  Adiós, Sabata is nothing more than a shallow rip-off of the first film that subsequently falls into tedious mediocrity.

6/10

Sabata: Gianfranco Parolini

Among hardcore Spaghetti Western aficionados, the Sabata trilogy is recognized as one of the greatest examples of the genre.  But unlike other mainstays of the genre, the Sabata trilogy makes no attempt at being bone-chillingly bleak and heart-breaking.  In the first film of the trilogy, simply entitled Sabata, we are introduced to killer acrobats, spring-heeled Indians, banjo playing assassins, and none other than Lee Van Cleef as a gunman with almost supernatural marksmanship.  After foiling a bank robbery orchestrated by the local town leaders, Cleef gleefully blackmails them.  The corrupt leaders, led by a foppish, yet deadly, man of letters who hides a rifle in his walking cane, dispatch assassin after assassin to try and kill Cleef.  Yet Cleef remains one step ahead of them all, killing them with ingenious methods such as spring-loading a pistol in a satchel of money.  Indeed, Sabata does not even feel like it was directed by the same Italians who ruled the Spaghetti Western.  Instead, it seems to mimic Chinese chopsocky films by the Shaw Brothers in its effortless creativity and inventiveness.  If Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy embraces the myth and grit of the Old West, then Gianfranco Parolini's Sabata embraces the absurdity and pathos of a society where outlaws could nail targets over 600 yards away with a four-barreled derringer.

8/10

Deranged: Jeff Gillen, Alan Ormsby

Don't let the fact that this film has a "professional" narrator convince you that this is anything other than an exploitation film.  Deranged, a retelling of the crimes of infamous serial killer Ed Gein, takes a gleeful joy in exploring his warped psyche and recreating many of the crimes which he unleashed on an unsuspecting populace.  Gein, who is referred to in this film as Ezra Cobb, is actually portrayed as a very sympathetic character.  Early in the film, he is shown spoon-feeding his dying mother and crying over her corpse.  Alas...his mother's twisted religious beliefs convinced Gein that women were evil.  Soon, he started to believe that his mother was crying out to him from the grave.  So he exhumed her corpse and began to use other cadavers to replace her rotting body.  Soon, he is spurred on to murder.  Amazingly, Cobb confesses his crimes several times to people.  However, they blow him off, thinking that it is part of some sick joke.  Cobb is depicted as being driven by inner demons who refuse to give him a moment's rest.  But, as I said, this is an exploitation film.  Special effects wizard Tom Savini created some of the most gruesome make-up and gore effects imaginable.  But, to give directors Jeff Gillen and Alan Ormsby credit, they do everything in their power to make Cobb and three-dimensional character and not just a mindless sociopath.

7/10

Zombi 3: Lucio Fulci, Bruno Mattei

This is one of those rare films that is so silly, so stupid, so inane that it turns back around and becomes AWESOME.  It's another zombie apocalypse movie that takes place on an isolated island.  The theft of a biological sample from a top secret military compound unleashes a zombie virus onto the surrounding populace.  Then, the film tracks a series of increasingly unlucky survivors as they try to escape the hoards of flesh-eaters and the military troops ordered to kill anything moving on sight.  This film was started by Lucio Fulci but finished by Bruno Mattei after he left production due to illness.  Mattei, otherwise known as the Italian Ed Wood, shot filler so as to stretch out Fulci's footage to feature length.  The result is an incredibly disjointed, yet undeniably entertaining cavalcade of gore, dismemberments, and carnage.  Unlike many Italian exploitation films, it never really starts to drag as Fulci and Mattei keep it moving at a steady pace with plenty of zombies and kills.  It's a ridiculous, ludicrous affair...but at least it's entertaining.

6/10 (Regular Scale)
7/10 (So Bad It's Good Scale) 

City of the Living Dead: Lucio Fulci

The biggest problem with Lucio Fulci's zombie movies is that you never get a feeling that there truly is a zombie apocalypse going on.  Take his Gates of Hell trilogy.  The trilogy is made of three films (City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, The House by the Cemetery) that all in some way have to do with the end of society at the hands of zombie or otherworldly invaders.  Yet none of the films operates on a large enough scale to really convince the viewer that there are more than just a handful of zombies attacking a small group of people.  Perhaps that is why The House by the Cemetery is the best film of the trilogy: it is about the trials of a single family dealing with a portal to hell under their house.  City of the Living Dead, the first film of the trilogy, deals with a (surprise, surprise) portal to hell being opened in Dunwich, New England, the town built over the ruins of Salem, Massachusetts, after a local priest commits suicide.  A small group of people realize that they must close the portal to hell before All Saints Day or else the dead will conquer the earth.  The film contains some of Fulci's most provocative and disturbing imagery, much of which doesn't actually have to do with decapitations or kills.  One scene in a bar where windows break and walls crack open is particularly effective.  But again, Fulci tries to convince us that the zombies are taking over the world.  We only see enough zombies and victims to populate a Main Street.  Still, the film isn't a total loss.  Among Fulci's oeuvre, City of the Living Dead is one of his more rewarding pictures for those who want a little story with their gore.

6/10

The Harder They Come: Perry Henzell

Some critics like Roger Ebert dismissed The Harder They Come when it was first released for being unfocused and confused about its own identity.  Is it a slice-of-life drama about living in the Jamaican slums?  Is it a crime film?  Is it blaxploitation?  I don't even think Perry Henzell, the director, even knew.  The story is a slapdash of seemingly random plot elements.  Ivanhoe Martin is a poor Jamaican who can't find work after his mother dies.  At first, he falls in love with a devout Christian who sets him on the right path.  But soon he strays after he fails to find a job.  So he moves to singing reggae.  However, a corrupt record exec cuts him out of making any money off his hit single.  So he moves to selling marijuana.  Then he becomes a gangster.  The ending, depending on whether or not you watched the subtitled version, implies that he is shot dead.  This left me confused.  What is this movie? A warning tale?  An examination of the hopelessness of poverty and the easy accessibility of crime?  I'm not sure.  But perhaps it is best understood as a biography of a legendary Jamaican bad man named Rhyging.  After all, the film does end with Martin's death being jeered on by a movie audience...one similar to the movie audience that cheered at a screening of a gory spaghetti Western earlier in the film.  Perhaps it is about the birth of a legend.  Who knows.  But, hey, at least it has a kicking reggae soundtrack.

6/10

Zombi 2: Lucio Fulci

Before any of you ask, no...there is NOT a Zombi 1.  Zombi 2 is an unofficial Italian sequel to George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, which was released in Italy as Zombi.  The Italians, who have never been afraid to directly copy or plagiarize American genre films (as the filmographies of Jess Franco and Bruno Mattei testify), decided to cash in on the film by releasing this unofficial follow-up.  And you know what?  It's not a bad film.  In fact, it's one of the more decent foreign zombie films that I've ever seen.  The plot is of no consequence: a group of tourists go to a taboo island in the middle of nowhere to locate a missing doctor.  Really, the set-up just exists to get as many hapless victims as possible onto the island.  When they arrive, zombies start to appear.  There is no real explanation for why the zombies arise...voodoo is mentioned but never confirmed as the source.  But where Zombi 2 really shines is in its execution.  In this day and age of sprinting rage-zombies, this film is a great reminder about why slow moving zombies are more often than not the superior version: they fill the victims with a feeling of dread that they cannot escape their ever-encroaching fate.  It's fascinating to watch the survivors band together and invent new ways to stave off the undead hordes.  Of course, this being a Lucio Fulci film, it has its fair share of insane exploitation: women are quick to scuba-dive topless, an underwater zombie gets into a fist-fight with a shark, and in a classic Fulci trademark moment, a woman gets her eye gouged out with a shard of wood.  It doesn't have the same rich background and subtext as the superior Romero zombie films.  But Fulci delivers a surprisingly effective gorefest in this underground classic.

7/10

Thelma & Louise: Ridley Scott

It's a good thing that Thelma & Louise was directed by Ridley Scott, otherwise I would have hated it.  He brings a grace and natural beauty to a story that I find ridiculous and infuriating.  The film is named after its two main leads, Thelma and Louise, who skip town and their oppressive spouses for a getaway weekend.  They stop at a bar wherein Thelma is sexually assaulted.  Louise shoots and kills her attacker with a stolen gun and the two go on the lam.  This sounds like a decent set-up for a film.  However, the two make the most asinine and ridiculous decisions that they could make given their circumstances.  After the police start investigating them for murder, they repeatedly blow them off even when they repeatedly offer to help them and not charge them for the crime.  In one scene, Louise' boyfriend catches up with her, offers to forgive her, and proposes.  Louise, of course, blows him off and discovers that Thelma has lost all of their money.  How, you might ask.  She left the money sitting on a counter in plain sight after an admitted bank robber that she had a one-night stand with takes a shower in her bathroom.  Afterwards, they rob a store, assault a policeman, and blow up a 16 wheeler.  Why?  We are given no explanation.  These are NOT the actions of sane, smart women.  There is even a police officer who takes it upon himself to give them a fair trial whom they blow off several times.  Like I said, thank goodness that Ridley Scott filled the film with stunning cinematography, gripping chase scenes, and a killer soundtrack.  Scott's direction was all that kept me from throwing a chair into my television screen at these idiotic characters.

6/10

The Sons of Katie Elder: Henry Hathaway

Four years before John Wayne and Henry Hathaway made history with the legendary Western True Grit, they collaborated on another great Western that not many people have heard of these days.  The film is entitled The Sons of Katie Elder.  A story of loss and revenge, the film finds four separated brothers reunited by their long-suffering mother's funeral.  The four brothers, two of which are played by John Wayne and Dean Martin, never quite lived up to their mother's expectations.  One is a gunfighter, another a rancher, another a gambler wanted for murder, and the last, also the youngest, became a college student when falsely accused of stealing a horse.  Now the four brothers decide that they want to atone for abandoning their mother by finding who murdered their father and stole their land from them.  Since the Western genre has been so explored and meditated on by countless filmmakers, most Westerns have to be judged by the strength of their story and how it holds up against the rest of its kind.  But The Sons of Katie Elder does one better.  Not only does it contain an original and compelling storyline, it has genuine chemistry between the four leads.  There is an honesty to their performances and emotions that really sells the film.  The Sons of Katie Elder would later be remade twice in 2005 and 2007.  But neither remake lives up to the power and conviction of the original.

8/10

Moulin Rouge!: Baz Luhrmann

In an interview, when director Baz Luhrmann was asked about his inspiration for Moulin Rouge! he responded that it was from an time when he went to India and saw a four hour Bollywood film.  He remarked that it blew him away with how over-the-top and dramatic it was and that he was inspired to make a Western film in the same vein.  Having seen Moulin Rouge! I can't help but imagine that he succeeded.  Moulin Rouge! is by far one of the most energetic, impassioned, and frantic films that I have ever seen.  Even more, it takes itself deathly seriously, taking the Bohemian cry "Truth, beauty, freedom, and love" like a Biblical maxim.  The film takes a simple story, a young writer falls in love with a prostitute, and blows it up to the most unimaginable extremes possible with an array of fantastical characters, frenetic editing, and bombastic songs.  A jukebox musical, Moulin Rouge! subsists on popular songs from the 20th century instead of writing any new material.  But, hey, if Singin' in the Rain can pull it off, then I can give this film a pass.  I have to give Luhrmann some credit for the ending.  In an age of forced happy endings, it's nice to see a film that has the balls to pull out the stops and go for high tragedy.

7/10

Reign of Terror: Anthony Mann

With Reign of Terror, also known as The Black Book, Anthony Mann has done something which I had previously thought impossible: he made a short, concise, and gripping thriller about the politics behind the French Revolution.  Mann frames the story as a battle between the corrupt Maximilien Robespierre and the virtuous members of the French Revolution who oppose his bloody reign.  The central plot device is a black book which holds the names of people that Robespierre is planning to execute.  If the names get out, then the other leaders of the French Revolution will turn on Robespierre and send him to the guillotine.  The film is surprisingly well-scripted and shot and contains some scenes of remarkable tension.  One sequence where Robespierre tracks down a couple who have stolen the black book to a countryside farm is stunning in its execution.  Some of the suspense is worthy of Hitchcock.  But the film's ultimate triumph is how it condensed one of the most complicated events of the 18th century into such comprehensive terms.  Mann understood that at the core of the French Revolution were a circle of fiery egos and megalomaniacs.  He was wise to make the film about them.  Very wise, indeed.

8/10

The House by the Cemetery: Lucio Fulci

It starts off as just another clone of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining: a family of three moves into a mysterious house with a bloody secret that slowly drives them insane.  But it gradually morphs into a film with its own bleak and tragic identity.  Of course, this being a Lucio Fulci film, it is full of all of the gore, violence, and dismemberment that fans of his work have come to expect.  But here's where The House by the Cemetery stands apart from the vast majority of Fulci's work: the plot is the vehicle for the violence, not the other way around.  While many Fulci films dwell on sex and/or violence that is completely nonsensical and irrelevant to the plot, in this film every stroke of the knife helps develop the mystery behind the house.  The characters soon realize that the house is inhabited by a twisted doctor who has survived for 150 years by somehow using cut up victims to regenerate his blood cells.  This is a silly twist, to be sure.  But somehow, Fulci pulls it off.  This is in no small part due to the ending which, reminiscent of his film The Beyond, hints that the survivors are doomed to wander in a netherworld of lost souls.  The House by the Cemetery is one of Fulci's most accessible works.  It is heavy in the gore department, but thankfully has enough of a story to back it up and keep less easily impressed viewers interested.

7/10

Santa Fe Trail: Michael Curtiz

Here's an interesting little Western.  Santa Fe Trail follows the exploits of a young J.E.B. Stuart and George Armstrong Custer as they are assigned positions in Kansas shortly after graduating from West Point.  Once there, they battle a clearly psychotic John Brown at Harpers Ferry who believes that splitting the Union will be the best way to end slavery.  The curious part of this film is how the characters and events within are portrayed.  The Southerns, including Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, are depicted as righteous men who understand that they are on the wrong side of a bitter conflict, yet believe that the South should be left alone to solve its own problems.  Soldiers who would one day be separated and forced to fight against each other in the Civil War literally laugh at the idea that they would come to blows over such an issue.  The true villain is John Brown.  In a sense, John Brown is presented as a scapegoat for the start of the Civil War, thereby implying that the South had nothing to do with its initiation.  All of this was due to the time that the film was released.  The film premiered in 1940 after World War Two had already begun to ravage Europe and the Pacific.  The filmmakers didn't want to create a film that would polarize viewers in the North and the South.  So, in Santa Fe Trail, both the North and the South are depicted as friendly rivals who are forced into battle due to the actions of a crazed prophet.  It's a fascinating historical anachronism committed to celluloid.  It may not be accurate, but it's still an experience that both Yanks and Rebs can enjoy.

7/10

Raw Deal: Anthony Mann

Most great film noir have a dame.  Raw Deal ups the ante by having not one, but two of them to contend with its dark, brooding hero.  The hero in this case is Joe Sullivan, a crook who is doing a stint in prison for taking the heat for his pal Rick.  The first woman is Pat, his main squeeze.  She helps bust him out of prison in an escape orchestrated by Rick.  The second woman is Ann, a social worker who tried to reform Joe while he was in prison.  The three go on the run from the law and the mob.  It turns out the Rick set up the escape so that Joe would get killed.  Now that Joe is free, he does everything in his power to take him down.  This is standard noir stuff, from the doomed love affair (or triangle, in this case) right down to the moody inner narratives spoken over the sound of a theremin.  Cinematographer John Alton comes out swinging, providing some of the best work of his career.  But it can't elevate the bare bones story to greatness.  As it stands, Raw Deal is standard, yet still enjoyable, pulp fare.

6/10

The New York Ripper: Lucio Fulci

This movie doesn't play fair.  It lures you in with the promise of an interesting story with an effective, albeit slightly cliched, opening scene where an old man discovers a severed hand while playing fetch with his dog.  A competent police procedural starts to unfold before our eyes.  But then, at the first on-screen murder, all of this is thrown away when the murderer literally starts to quack like Donald Duck.  That's his trademark.  He's a killer who speaks like Donald Duck.  From there, the movie descends into the realm of pointless gore and derivative plot devices.  There are long, drawn out scenes of sex that have nothing to do with the story.  Two prominent murder scenes are later revealed to be fake-outs, so ultimately they are worthless to the film other than providing the audience with more gore.  The police procedural aspect becomes a tired hodge-podge of cop cliches that grind on the nerves.  I've said it before, I like a little gore when it's all in good fun.  But Fulci approaches this film with such a sense of seriousness and solemnity that it sucks all of the enjoyment from it.  It's a lifeless, unenjoyable film.

5/10

El Cid: Anthony Mann

Anthony Mann's El Cid is one of the great historical cinematic epics.  It stands alongside such classics as The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, and Lawrence of Arabia as shining examples of the peak of old school Hollywood entertainment and showmanship.  This romanticized story of Castilian knight Don Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, also known as "El Cid," recounts how he befriended hostile Moors through acts of mercy, shamed a corrupt king, and contributed to the ultimate unification of Spain.  There are tremendous battles filled with thousands of costumed extras, a earth-shattering score by Miklós Rózsa, and magnificent 70mm cinematography.  Charlton Heston commands the screen as El Cid, delivering one of his greatest performances as a man eternally torn between loyalty to his king and his personal convictions.  Some of the human drama falls flat, particularly in the scenes surrounding El Cid's wife Doña Jimena where she comes off as wooden and mechanical.  But for the most part, the human drama echoes the magnificence and scale of the tremendous battles.  And what battles!  Shot before the time when massive armies could be encoded onto the screen with computers, El Cid featured to-scale battles that shimmer on the screen.  Despite the obvious romanticization of the events and characters portrayed, El Cid is a delight to watch and a wonder to behold.

8/10

Don't Torture a Duckling: Lucio Fulci

Lucio Fulci's horror films were never designed for the faint of heart.  Here, in Don't Torture a Duckling, he tests the limits of the audience by focusing on one of the most heinous crimes imaginable: child murder.  In a small village in the south of Italy, there have been a string of incidents where young boys have been found murdered.  The entire village is up in arms.  Frantic whispers start to insinuate a local black magician who lives on a hill and his devious female assistant.  But ultimately it's a red herring.  The real murderer, revealed in the last five minutes, is so eye-rollingly stupid that it kills the entire movie.  Not that this was a great movie to begin with.  The more and more films by Fulci I watch, the more convinced I become that he was a sub-par director who is held in high esteem because he knew how to put gore onscreen like it was nobody's business.  This murder mystery at its core is bizarrely bereft of tension and drama.  And unfortunately, the gore isn't up to par with Fulci's other macabre works like The Beyond and Zombie 2.  Still, it isn't frustratingly opaque and confusing like The Beyond.  It could have been worse.

6/10

The Fall of the Roman Empire: Anthony Mann

The historical reasons behind the fall of the Roman Empire are so vast, so numerous, and so intricate that the idea of making a feature film about them seems absurd.  How could you condense hundreds of years of history, of battles, of political maneuvering, and decay into a film that audiences could be expected to sit through?  Anthony Mann had a clever idea: focus the film on a group of individuals who's actions REPRESENT the forces the tore the empire asunder.  The film focuses on the late life and death of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius and the subsequent power vacuum.  His bastard son Commodus steals the throne away from Livius, the man Marcus Aurelius appointed as his successor, and begins to undo everything that his father accomplished.  His rash, selfish actions send the empire into rebellion.  The film ends with a fight between Livius and Commodus after which the throne of Rome is literally auctioned off to the highest bidder.  Much like his Westerns, Mann's film adaptation of these historical events are highly symbolic and metaphorical.  Rome wouldn't fall for a few more hundred years...but the actions undertaken by the elites effectively doomed it to a slow death.  A fine film, Mann's massive epic would become a worthy template for future films such as Gladiator.

7/10

The Beyond: Lucio Fulci

If you fancy yourself a fan of Italian horror...then you can list off The Beyond's most famous scenes off the top of your head.  The man getting eaten alive by tarantula, the woman getting a spike driven through the back of her head so that it pops her left eye out, the woman getting her face melted off by acid...all are considered to be classic scenes of gore cinema.  But therein lies the problem...the only thing truly memorable about this film are the scenes.  As a whole, the film is an incoherent mess with a plot that ranges on the inexplicable and characters who are ultimately worthless.  I read that Fulci originally wanted The Beyond to be non-linear.  Well...it feels like someone took the disjointed pieces of his nonlinear effort and smashed them together into an unholy jigsaw puzzle.  The only things that I could gleam from the plot is that there's a hotel built above one of the seven gates of hell and it accidentally get opened by its new owners, unleashing the living dead on the world.  Other than that it's just scene after mismatched scene of gore, violence, and zombies.  But if that's what you're looking for in a movie, then The Beyond is your Holy Grail.  If not...then it won't do anything other than give you a debilitating fear of spiders.

5/10

Upon a second viewing, I feel compelled to revise my original score. I decided to try and enjoy this film on a purely visceral level instead of trying to comprehend it as a narrative. I must say, I was much more impressed this time around. I found Fulci's visuals and imagery much more striking and bold. Several sequences that left me unphased the first time around felt more disturbing, such as when Liza and McCabe are fleeing through an unpopulated New Orleans. The shot where they leave the house and several silhouettes suddenly appear in the windows was particularly effective.

8/10
Revised December 16, 2012

House of Bamboo: Samuel Fuller

There really isn't anything to distinguish House of Bamboo from other thrillers and noir from the 50s other than the fact that it was set in and shot in Japan.  Other than its exotic location, the film is a standard, generic thriller that was a dime a dozen back then.  The heart of the story is that the police become embroiled in an undercover investigation of a crime syndicate that has been knocking over military trains.  One of the men falls in love with the ex-wife of one of the gangsters who was killed in an operation.  This story could have easily been transplanted anywhere in the United States.  But instead we get shots of post-war Japan in all of its glory: geisha, bath houses, the Kamakura Shrine, pachinko parlors.  They are interesting, but considering the massive amount of films that are about Japanese culture and actually come from Japan, they seem unnecessary.  I can only recall two principal characters who were Japanese.  The rest of the cast, including the evil criminal overlords, were American.  Overall, the film, while competent enough on its own, just begs the question of why bother?

[I later wrote a more in-depth review of the film which can be read here: http://theretroset.com/house-of-bamboo/]

6/10

Street Trash: James Muro

Street Trash is a sick, dirty, twisted movie...for all of the wrong reasons.  An avid and outspoken fan of Troma Studios (and their flagship character the Toxic Avenger), I have no problem with the occasional gore flick for kicks and giggles.  But this film is neither entertaining from a visceral standpoint nor engaging from an amateur film-making one.  The plot of this film, if you can call it that, is that a liquor dealer starts selling off a box of 60 year old liquor that he found in his basement.  The only problem is that it causes the drinker to explode and/or melt in the most graphic way possible.  But here's the film's central problem: it isn't gory or violent enough...or at least consistently enough.  I'd wager that only about a third of the film has ANYTHING to do with the problem of liquor that makes hobos explode.  The rest is devoted to dull and noticeably non-violent vignettes about life on the street.  We see them eat, have Vietnam flashbacks, panhandle, and steal.  But only at the very beginning and the very end do we see anything exploitative.  What director James Muro doesn't understand is that if you are going to make an exploitation film, you have to go all out and keep the good stuff coming at a steady pace.  Quiet simply, it isn't interesting enough to warrant any special attention.  Now, if you'll excuse me...this is easily the scuzziest, nastiest film that I have ever seen...I need to take a shower and get a Tetanus booster.

3/10

A Clockwork Orange: Stanley Kubrick

I'm not sure if half of the people who claim to love this film know why they do.  Well, let me rephrase that.  They like it because of what it contains: graphic sex, ultra-violence, dystopian science fiction.  But that's where it ends.  They like its content, but could care less about its message or its inherent craftsmanship.  A Clockwork Orange is a film with graphic material that is justified by its even more graphic message: what is morality without choice?  Is forcing people to be good in and of itself inherently good?  The central character, Alex, is a murderous youth who is subjected to an experimental treatment to make him physically adverse to violence and sex.  But afterwards, can Alex even be called a human?  His free will defined him as a human.  Without it, is Alex more than just a shell?  There's much that can be said about A Clockwork Orange's exquisite craftsmanship.  Stanley Kubrick, a noted perfectionist, slaved over ever frame to make sure that it was just right.  The result is a film that seems to exist in two worlds: that of real life and that of the most frightful Orwellian hellscape.  Much like Lars von Trier's Antichrist, the film seems to exist in a world where the Devil has already won.  Yes, there is great evil in this film.  But for once, such graphic material is necessary.  I couldn't conceive of this film without the rape, the sex, the violence, the profanity.  It is a disturbing film because it has a disturbing story to tell.  Whether or not you partake of it is up to you.

10/10

Virginia City: Michael Curtiz

Virginia City is a delightfully entertaining film that is equal parts Western and adventure film.  It is structured around a simple premise: a group of Confederates need to transport a shipment of gold from Virginia City, Nevada to Richmond in order to help the Southern war effort.  However, they are pursued by a Union officer who has recently escaped from a Confederate prison.  The film becomes a game of cat-and-mouse as the Union tries to catch up with the Confederates and prevent them from making their delivery.  The film shamelessly rips off several scenes and stunts from John Ford's Stagecoach, released a year before.  The even recreate the scene where a soldier is knocked off the front of a carriage and dragged under it.  But in a way,  Virginia City seems to improve on Stagecoach from a technical standpoint.  The cameras are more mobile and flexible.  The editing is sharper and faster.  In the place of John Wayne, Virginia City boasts three major stars: Randolph Scott as the leader of the Confederates, Errol Flynn as the escaped Union officer, and none other than Humphrey Bogart as a the leader of a group of bandits who want the Confederate gold for their own purposes.  It's a shame that this film has been lost in the shuffle of time, because it holds up remarkably well by today's standards.

8/10

Breakfast at Tiffany's: Blake Edwards

I have a theory.  If this film had not starred Audrey Hepburn, it would not be considered a classic.  Hear me out.  The story of Breakfast at Tiffany's goes as such: a vain, eccentric Manhattan socialite named Holly Golightly learns to love others, and herself, through the constant attentions and efforts of Paul Varjak.  The thing is...I don't think that Holly deserves it.  She is a egocentric, selfish, and borderline sociopathic person.  She gained her standing in Manhattan by manipulating a wealthy Texan who married her and then ripping off a Hollywood studio who was grooming her to be a star.  She admits that she did it all for money in one scene when she's drunk.  Even when she's hauled into jail for helping a mobster run his drug business while in jail she acts like she's the real victim.  But dammit if Audrey Hepburn isn't the most adorable thing that God put on the face of the earth.  If it wasn't for her smile, her giggle, and the way that she held that cigarette holder and wore that black dress, the character of Holly Golightly would probably be universally reviled.  Not that the film is much better in any case.  The story is a thrown together hodge-podge of random plot points, throw-away characters, and scenes that go nowhere.  When you get right down to it...it's all about Ms. Hepburn.

5/10

Princess Yang Kwei-fei: Kenji Mizoguchi

During his entire career, he only made two color films.  The first was Princess Yang Kwei-fei, a retelling of the story of Chinese consort Yang Guifei, one of the Four Beauties of Ancient China.  Her story is like a tragic version of Cinderella: originally a maid working for her beautiful and corrupt sisters, she is spotted by an agent of Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang dynasty.  She is gussied up and presented as a new consort for the emperor who is broken-hearted over the death of his wife.  Yang manages to teach the emperor how to love again.  However, their romance is overshadowed by the Anshi Rebellion, one of the largest uprisings in recorded history.  As the emperor flees from the capital, she is killed by his guards who blame the rebellion on her cousin Yang Guozhong and the rest of her family.  The central romance is pulled off effectively enough.  Mizoguchi still had his warm humanism that enriched the emotions of his characters onscreen and the audiences' sympathy for them.  However, it is never played to the correct scale.  Yang and Xuanzong's romance is never depicted as the epic, earth-shattering relationship that it is usually promoted as.  In addition, we never get a sense of scale of the rebellion.  Not once do we feel that the two are mere playthings of fate who are doomed to a tragic end.  This story should be bombastic and tragic, yet it feels quaint and morose.  Perhaps the film's 90 minutes was not long enough to properly tell the epic story that Mizoguchi wanted.  Whatever the case, Princess Yang Kwei-fei is a disappointing film.  Not a bad one, but a film that missed its true potential.

6/10

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean: John Huston

To fully understand and appreciate John Huston's The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, one must take to heart the tagline that "if this story ain't true...it shoulda been."  Yes, there was a real life Judge Roy Bean, a self-appointed frontier judge who allegedly held his court in a saloon.  But the Roy Bean depicted in this film was overly exaggerated.  In this film, Roy Bean sentenced dozens, if not hundreds, of hangings and executions all in the name of law in order.  In real life, Roy Bean only sentenced two men to hang, one of which escaped.  But the Roy Bean in this film is more than just a character: he represented the spirit of justice of the Old West.  Yes, Bean was cruel with his sentences, but he never hung a man who didn't deserve it.  Bean's justice was an intangible thing that couldn't be captured by any statute or law book.  Bean was more interested with Justice, with a capital 'J', than with the word of the Law.  This is driven home in the last third of the film wherein Bean's saloon and the town around it that he helped build are stolen out from underneath him by an oil baron.  With the oil baron came law, with a lower case 'l', wherein he bribed politicians and paid off police to steal the locals' land and murder the competition.  The oil baron used the law to cheat, swindle, kill, and extort the good, honest people of Texas.  Thankfully, in the end, the good Judge comes back to town one last time to settle accounts.  This film shouldn't be taken literally, but instead viewed as a metaphorical examination of a time and place where the true villains were punished and good men slept easy at night.  Of course, that does depend on what your definition of a "good man" is.  Roger Ebert decried this movie and stated that it was about the loss of bad manners.  I say that it is about the loss of righteous bad ones and the rise of corrupt "virtuous" ones.

8/10