The Exorcist III: William Peter Blatty

Reprinted from Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear.

Dammit!  It isn’t supposed to work this way!  Everyone knows the rules to making Hollywood sequels, particularly for horror films!  The first one is supposed to be an instant classic that breaks the rules and challenges preconceived notions about horror (i.e. Jaws, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street).  Then a half-baked sequel comes out that receives lukewarm to negative reviews from critics and audiences (i.e. Damien: Omen II, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, The Hills Have Eyes 2).  And then, in a last ditch effort to squeeze as much money from the public as possible, an abysmal third film comes out that mocks the franchise, offends the fans, and becomes a massive flop (i.e. Child’s Play 3, Amityville 3, Friday the 13th 3).  The Exorcist franchise was following the rules perfectly at the start.  The Exorcist (1971) was one of the few horror films in history to be critically acclaimed, ludicrously profitable, and nominated for several Academy Awards.  It was followed six years later by Exorcist II: The Heretic, a film that did a decent amount at the box office, yet was universally regarded as one of the worst horror sequels of all time.  And then, thirteen years later, it was followed by yet another sequel, The Exorcist III.  So, by all rational accounts, The Exorcist III should have been a horrendously horrible film, right?  Wrong!  Not only is The Exorcist III a fantastic horror film and sequel in its own right, at times it is even better than the original! 

I know that last sentence is quite an inflammatory one.  But I kid you not.  The Exorcist III is hands down one of the best horror films that I have ever seen.  Directed by William Peter Blatty, the writer of the novel that The Exorcist was based on and its Academy Award winning screenplay adaption, The Exorcist III both honors and respects the legacy laid down by the first film while looking ahead towards new horizons.  Blatty wisely decided to ignore the events of Exorcist II: The Heretic when making this film.  So, in a sense, The Exorcist III can be viewed as an official sequel to the original.

The Exorcist III is set fifteen years after the original film.  It follows Lieutenant William F. Kinderman (George C. Scott), a grizzled old policeman who should have retired years ago.  Recently, there have been a series of gruesome murders in Georgetown.  A 12-year-old boy was found with his head cut off by the river after being tortured.  A local priest was discovered decapitated in a confessional.  Kinderman’s best friend, another priest named Father Dyer, was found dead in a hospital bed, having been paralyzed and drained of all of his blood with a catheter while still alive.  What’s worse is that on the wall next to his body, the words “It’s a Wonderfull Life” were written in his blood.  It’s a Wonderful Life was their favorite film.  A few days before his murder, Kinderman had gone with Dyer to see it in the theaters.  But what’s worse is that all of the murders have something in common: they all fit the description of a notorious serial killer known as “The Gemini Killer.”  And The Gemini Killer was captured and put to death in the electric chair fifteen years ago.

The original film worked because it operated on two different levels.  The Exorcist was not just a horror film, but an investigative mystery as well.  In a sense, it was a kind of priest procedural.  Father Damien Karras spent a good portion of the film trying to figure out whether it was an authentic possession.  He talked with a psychiatrist, had recordings of the possessed girl’s rantings examined by a linguist, and even faked out the demon by spraying it with regular water while claiming it was Holy Water.  The film provided ample room for doubt as to whether or not the possession was real.  In an introduction given by director William Friedkin on an anniversary re-release of The Exorcist, he mentioned how people seem to take away whatever they bring to the film.  If they believe that there is a God and that good will prevail, they see The Exorcist as a tale of triumph.  If they don’t believe in a God and have a pessimistic world view, then they see The Exorcist as a confirmation of their convictions.  This is especially curious considering how The Exorcist confirms the existence of the supernatural in the final scenes.  The fact that people can watch the little girl’s head spin around 360 degrees and levitate in the air and still believe that it was a hoax speaks to the film’s ability to create doubt.

The Exorcist III operates similarly.  For the first hour or so, everything is up in the air.  It could be a deranged copycat serial killer or a case of the spirit of The Gemini Killer possessing people so he could carry out his murderous deeds.  By following Kinderman, an actual cop, the film focuses even more on the investigative aspect of the storyline.  There is more suspicion of foul play, more distrust of the supernatural.  Of course, in the last act the supernatural is revealed to be the ultimate culprit. That isn’t a spoiler, by the way.  There are supernatural forces at work in this film...but not in the way you’d expect.

Also, The Exorcist III remembers one of the most forgotten rules of the horror industry: we won’t be scared about characters in danger if we don’t care about them in the first place.  One of the reasons why horror films are so bad these days is that too often they make their characters completely unlikeable.  Yes, yes...we know that most of them will die hideous, gruesome deaths...but after establishing them as horrible people, we start to cheer for the killer.  In a true horror film, the hero shouldn’t be the killer, but the people who stand up to them.  Films like Poltergeist, Jaws, The Shining, Halloween, and The Exorcist remember this.  They spend a large chunk of the film making us genuinely care about the people on the screen. Therefore, when a masked killer comes for them, we don’t want them to die...hence the horror.  The Exorcist excelled at this.  We came to identify with and emotionally connect with the possessed girl, her mother, and the priests involved in her exorcism.  In The Exorcist III, the film takes its time, letting us get to know the characters.  We find faults in Kinderman, but we sympathize with them.  We watch him go to the movies and dinner with Father Dyer.  We see them shoot the breeze and reminisce about old times.  When Kinderman learns of Father Dyer’s death, it is one of the film’s most powerful scenes.  The Exorcist III succeeds because we have an emotional investment in the characters.

But what would a great horror film be like without authentic scares?  Thankfully, The Exorcist III has plenty.  Another one of the great problems with modern horror is that they are too reliant on jump scares; people jumping out of shadows and loud noises that explode out of nowhere.  Both The Exorcist and The Exorcist III create horror through atmosphere.  Blatty used noted cinematographer Gerry Fisher to create claustrophobic shots and lighting.  The film’s two greatest scenes both involve Kinderman interrogating a man in an insane ward who claims to be possessed by The Gemini Killer.  I personally consider them to be two magnum opuses of the horror genre.  Watch Fisher’s use of camera angles and shadows.  But more importantly, listen.  Listen carefully to how...you know what...never-mind.  I’m not going to tell you what to listen for.  You’ll notice it.  I guarantee you.

The Exorcist III is a true triumph of the horror genre.  It deserves to be as respected as the original.  It makes me weep that to know that he has only directed two films.  The Exorcist III proves that he has a genuine talent and distinct cinematic voice.  It frustrates me that I can’t tell you more about this film...but that’s just the way things have to be considering that it’s a horror film.  If I say too much, it’ll ruin the suspense.  All I can do is beg you all to go out and see this film.  You won’t be disappointed...or left unscathed...

9/10

Re-Animator: Stuart Gordon

Re-animator is the kind of film that I hold near and dear to my heart.  It was made for pocket change by a talented group of passionate film-makers with something to prove.  It is full of truly remarkable gore and special effects, yet is entirely character driven.  It doesn't rely on the gore...oh no...it has a story to tell.  It's about two scientists who discover a serum which can revive dead brain tissue, thereby restoring life to dead bodies.  However, once revived, they come back as murderous zombies.  The film features a surprisingly well-crafted screenplay which makes us truly care for the characters involved.  Yes, the film turns into a gore-happy hack n' slasher at the end, but it doesn't matter...the film has earned it.  There's a lot of love in Re-animator.  Originally based on a story by H.P. Lovecraft, Re-animator is both a tribute to and an expansion of the zombie film.  It is further proof that the horror genre is the best place for wannabe directors with small budgets and big dreams to cut their teeth.  I highly recommend this film...both as a marvelous piece of entertainment and as an example of what is possible when true film-makers do what they do best: create.

9/10

Ringu: Hideo Nakata

Ever since seeing Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kairo, I've had a sort of understanding with J-horror films: I stay away from them, they stay away from me.  To this day, I STILL don't think that I've fully recovered from the scrotum-clenchingly terrifying Kairo, a film which I still consider to this day to be the scariest ever made.  But, I finally decided to see another one, Hideo Nakata's Ringu, mostly because I'm an idiot.  I had already seen Hideo Nakata's Dark Water, a pretty tame film all things considered.  Oh, the climax was so scary that I couldn't sleep for a week.  But I figured that I might as well try out his most famous film.  After a bevy of sequels and a remake franchise here in the States, the story of Ringu is pretty well known.  There's a scary tape.  If you watch this scary tape you'll get a scary phone call where a scary voice tells you that you'll die in seven days.  And in seven days, a scary little girl will climb out of a television and kill you.  Notice a pattern?  I feel that I was too familiar with the story for it to really be effective.  One of the reasons why Dark Water and Kairo were so effective was that I went into them completely cold.  But I already knew the story to Ringu and how it would end.  A great horror film scares you even when you know what's going to happen.  Take Stephen Speilberg's Jaws.  I did a report on that movie in elementary school, so I knew when and who the shark would attack.  And yet, the first time I saw that movie, I was legitimately terrified.  Ringu was a landmark film in J-horror and if I had seen it when it had premiered, I'm sure that I would have been psychologically scarred.  But I can admire its superb craftsmanship.  I wish I had seen it before it was remade, because if I had, this probably would have been one of my favorite horror films of all time.

8/10

Inferno: Dario Argento

I don't think that it's a secret anymore that I dearly love Dario Argento.  The man doesn't just make slasher films...he makes transcendent slasher films.  They defy convention and expectations with an almost palpable contempt.  Inferno was is a thematic sequel to his greatest film Suspiria.  It deals with a brother and sister who investigate a strange book which claims that there are powerful spirits trapped inside three buildings in Rome, Freiburg, and New York City.  Why should they care?  Well...it turns out that the sister has been living in one of the buildings and discovers a corpse in a sunken ballroom beneath the floorboards.  One by one, the people around them start getting picked off in increasingly gruesome manners.  The film is a wonder and glory to behold.  But it has two major problems.  The film never explains who or what kills off all of the victims.  And second, the film is very fragmentary.  It seems to follow a bizarre stream-of-consciousness as it drifts from one location and character to another.  There are several prominent scenes which are inconsequential to the plot.  One of the most unnerving examples is a scene where a man drowns a sack full of cats in a river.  Why is he drowning the cats?  Who is he?  The film never really explains.  Of course, he is then attacked by sewer rats and stabbed to death by a nearby hot dog vendor.  See what I mean?  Inferno doesn't behave like most horror films.  But then again, that's what we have come to expect from Dario Argento.  I wouldn't want it any other way.

7/10

Pet Sematary: Mary Lambert

I went into Mary Lambert's Pet Sematary very cautiously, fully aware that screen adaptations of Stephen King's works are either classics or complete stinkers.  It didn't help that the director's most recent project was Mega Python vs. Gatoroid.  But I was pleasantly surprised.  Pet Sematary is a well structured and effective horror film.  It follows the Creed family who move to (where else in a Stephen King story) Maine.  They have the misfortune of living in a house right next to a road where massive trucks periodically speed by.  There is a local pet cemetery especially devoted to the pets that are killed by these trucks.  What the Creed family discovers is that there is an Indian burial ground behind the cemetery wherein anything that is buried there comes back to life.  However, it comes back as a mindless, evil zombie-like creature.   This doesn't stop the father from resurrecting his son when he is run over by one of the trucks.  Pet Sematary has some genuinely terrifying scenes, particularly involving the little boy when he comes back to life.  I didn't know that it was possible for a movie to make me scared of babies.  Well...that's not true...Trainspotting did a good job at that...but that baby was a hallucination.  This baby is very real and will put the fear of God into your heart.  Overall, I would highly recommend Pet Sematary, even ranking it with the best Stephen King movies, including Carrie, The Shining, and Misery.

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Funny how a few years and reading the book by Stephen King will change your opinion of a novel. The novel may be King's most objectively fantastic, mostly because it's not really a horror novel--it's really more of a novel about grief and how it can devastate us. If I directed an adaptation of the novel, I would literally remove everything supernatural from the story except for the sematary itself. But the Lambert movie has it all: Victor Pascow, the strange creatures off the side of the path to the sematary, the possible demons inhabiting the newly revived. Also, the film changes all the dread and tragedy of King's novel into jump-scare pulp. It's more grotesque than disturbing. Also...I hate how they removed Norma as a character: without Louis saving her life, Jud has no reason to repay him by taking him to the actual sematary. Here, Jud takes him there just...because.

5/10

Basket Case: Frank Henenlotter

Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case contains one of the few scenes in all of cinema that has truly made me feel sick to my stomach.  It is the scene where Duane Bradley, a young boy, is held down by a group of surgeons who forcibly remove a monstrous conjoined twin attached to his side.  It's remarkable how effective this scene is, especially considering how little of the operation we actually see.  All of the horror caused by this scene comes from the nauseating sound effects, the crunching and squelching of surgeons pulling apart the bone, tissue, and sinew connecting the two twins.  If the entire film had been this effective and masterful, I would have considered it a classic.  But the rest of the film is just another revenge flick as Duane hunts down the three surgeons who operated on him and sets his deformed brother (whom he keeps in a large wicker basket) on them so he can murder them.  The central problem of the film is that we never feel any sympathy for the two brothers.  The deformed twin, appropriately named Belial, is such a spoiled brat and terrible person that we can't support him.  Belial telepathically tortures Duane, destroys all of his property in a rampage, and rapes his girlfriend.  But I guess that's what you get for naming your conjoined twin after one of the 4 crown princes of Hell.  If they had made Belial a sympathetic character like Duane, then maybe we could have cheered him on despite his grotesqueness.  But quite frankly, by the end of the film, we feel that they both deserve their ultimate fate.

6/10

The Soft Skin: François Truffaut

One of my biggest problems with the French New Wave is that their respective films are too long.  Oh, not in terms of how many minutes, mind you.  What I mean is that I feel that many times, their films outstretch their subject matter.  Stories that should only take maybe 30-40 minutes are stretched out into full length films.  The Soft Skin is a fine example.  This film only has about half an hour of plot, yet it is nearly two hours long.  The film follows a successful writer and family man who falls in love with an airline stewardess and starts an affair.  He falls madly in love, but she doesn't take it as seriously as he does.  His wife finds out and promptly murders him in a cafe with a shotgun.  Like I said, this story should not have taken two hours to tell.  Yet Truffaut indulges in long, drawn out scenes of pointless conversation and dialogue.  It leaves me wondering why.  Someone recently told me that they didn't like the French New Wave because they believed that their respective directors didn't actually like making films.  I heartily disagree.  I think that Truffaut loved making films.  The problem is that he didn't know when to stop making a film.  As a result, we have to sit in silence through such misfires as The Soft Skin.

6/10

The Devil Rides Out: Terence Fisher

This may very well be my favorite Hammer Horror film that I have ever seen.  It combines all of the elements of a great horror film: an unbearable atmosphere, terrifying imagery, fantastic performances, and a story that revels in the unknown and what we can't see.  The film stars Hammer work-horse Christopher Lee in an unusual heroic role, playing the Duc de Richleau, a man who investigates the odd habits of his friend's son only to discover his participation in black magic.  They kidnap his son from a Satanic ritual that actually succeeds in summoning the Dark One.  Afterwards, they must keep him safe from demonic possession until morning when the ritual is over.  Thus begins one of the most compelling horror sequences that I have ever seen: black magic attacks upon Duc de Richleau and his friends.  They stand inside a magic circle which protects them, and the son, from magical possession.  The trouble is that the black magicians can do anything they want to get them to leave the circle.  They are bombarded with tricks, spells, and illusions that nearly drive them to madness.  In one of the film's best scenes, they summon an illusion of one of the participant's daughter and make them watch as she is attacked by a giant tarantula.  Everything about this film works.  Christopher Lee is at the top of his game.  The effects are spectacular and effective.  The story is compelling and captivating.  The suspense is real and terrible.  For those of you who have never seen a Hammer Horror film, this is where you should begin.

9/10

Murderers Among Us: Wolfgang Staudte

I almost hesitate to review Murderers Among Us, as it is impossible to view it critically outside of its historical context.  Wolfgang Staudt's film was one of the very first German films to be made after the end of World War Two.  Made under the watchful eye of Soviet censors, it deals with a soldier and a concentration camp survivor trying to survive in the ruins of Berlin.  The soldier obviously suffers from PTSD and drowns his psychosis in alcohol.  Then he discovers that his old army captain, a man who once ordered the execution of 36 men, 54 women, and 31 children in a Polish village on Christmas, has returned from the war and is a successful industrialist.  Unable to decide what to do, he tries to kill him.  Fortunately the young woman stops him at the last second and they decide to turn him over to the police.  As I said, it is impossible to consider this film outside of its historical context.  It was one of the first German films to address their nation's terrible past and the crimes committed in the name of the Third Reich.  But there are a few glaring idiosyncrasies that make this film more fit for historical, not critical, analysis.  For instance, the young woman supposedly survived three years in a concentration camp.  Yet she returns to Berlin beautiful, well-fed, and optimistic.  The Germans obviously knew about the concentration camps as there is a scene where a newspaper reports that 2 million had been gassed at Auschwitz.  Yet they depict her as if the concentration camp was a safer place to be than wartime Berlin.  Also, the obvious pandering to Soviet censors through the condemnation of industrialism and organized religion are noticeable.  Still, the film remains well shot and emotional, even if it feels occasionally out-of-place and contrived.

7/10

Phantasm: Don Coscarelli

Phantasm's plot sounds like a young boy's wet dream: alien zombies from another dimension invade earth, steal corpses, and turn the freshly deceased into undead dwarfs so they can be used as slave labor on their planet.  I am not making a word of that up.  The film has gone on to be viewed as a classic of 70s independent horror.  And man...does it FEEL like an independent horror film.  One of the obvious challenges of the independent film-maker is the acquisition of decent amateur actors.  Director Don Coscarelli failed spectacularly on this account.  Not a single character (except for the film's bogeyman referred to as "The Thin Man") gives a convincing performance.  Everyone in this film acts like they are on Quaaludes.  They accept the fact that not only are there dimension-skipping aliens, but that they are literally making an army of the undead, the same way they would if they walked into a room that smelled slightly bad.  Not to mention that the central characters (a pair of recently orphaned brothers) make no attempt to alert the authorities, or any other people except the local ice cream man, of the invasion!  Not to mention that the film seems to have been shot without the use of artificial lighting.  Folks, if you ever direct a film where the night-time scenes make day-for-night shots look good, you should quit the industry IMMEDIATELY.  Phantasm would go on to spawn three sequels.  This begs the question of why.  What else could the director possibly say about this story and its characters?  I'll probably never know, because I'm going to stay the hell away from them.

5/10

Design for Living: Ernst Lubitsch

Here's a film that I firmly believe wouldn't have been popular or memorable if not for the risque plot and central character dynamic.  Quite simply, it is about a trio of Americans who initiate a ménage-à-trois in France.  The two men, one an artist and the other a playwright, are smitten by Gilda, a young woman who works for an advertising executive.  She can't decide between the two of them, so she chooses to live with both.  She then gleefully bounces from one bed to the other, oblivious to how her affairs torture the two of them.  This was a film by the legendary Ernst Lubitsch.  But with the exception of a few scenes, it feels absent of the infamous "Lubitsch touch."  It feels dry, formulaic, and contrived.  Not to mention that by the end, we aren't cheering for the three of them, but for the two men to leave Gilda.

6/10

Deep Red: Dario Argento

I usually take offense when people dismiss Dario Argento's work as simple slasher fodder.  He worked within the slasher and horror genre, to be sure.  But he used the genre as a springboard to create stunning stories of suspense, mystery, and carnage.  Deep Red is one such film.  It involves an investigation over a series of axe murders that all seem to stem from the killing of a psychic medium.  Music teacher Marcus Daly becomes involved in the investigation.  Just like in many Argento films, by trying to help, he accidentally leads to the murder of several other people.  I've always felt that Argento deserved the kind of exploration and examination usually afforded to directors like Hitchcock.  His films always seem to have a certain series of tropes and plot devices.  His films are usually sinister and pessimistic in nature.  And yet, Argento's films are always thrilling to watch.  He had an eye for color and composition that stuns audiences to this day.  Even if his films are occasionally difficult to follow and understand (like Deep Red, for example), they are never boring or tedious.  And much like how Marcus Daly finds a disturbing secret sealed up behind a particular wall, Argento's films mask unbelievable discoveries for those willing enough to look for them.

7/10

Witchfinder General: Michael Reeves

One of the most famous characteristics of the legendary Vincent Price was his ability to combine horror with high camp in his performances.  However, upon occasion Price would drop the pretense of camp and deliver performances that were genuinely chilling and disturbing.  One of the most famous examples was Michael Reeves Witchfinder General.  A heavily fictionalized account of the life of Matthew Hopkins, one of 17th century Great Britain's most famous and deadly witch-hunters, Witchfinder General is not standard Vincent Price fare.  There is no laughter in his eyes, no coy smile shining through the screen towards the audience.  Price is a true monster.  The film follows Matthew Hopkins as he traverses the English countryside, randomly accusing and executing people for witchcraft.  He eventually draws the hatred and vengeance of a Roundhead soldier, a supporter of the Parliament during the English Civil War, after raping his bride-to-be.  The film technically follows the Roundhead and his wife, but Vincent Price steals the show.  It's a shame that Prince didn't do more serious dramatic work...Witchfinder General proves that there was sincere, yet terrifying, talent behind the king of pulp.

8/10

Once: John Carney

Some films take your breath away mere minutes after they begin.  A magical hush descends as you become entranced by what's occurring on the screen.  Once is one of these films.  Literally within a few minutes of the film beginning, I was astounded.  Shot in 17 days on only $160,000, Once is a miracle of low-budget filmmaking.  It follows two unnamed musicians, the Man and the Woman, who meet on the streets of Dublin, fall in and out of love, and make some of the sweetest music to ever grace the cinema.  The songs, including the Academy Award winning Falling Slowly, seem so real, so natural, that they leave you dumbfounded.  There are only a handful of films that I believe realistically portray actual love.  Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and A Year of the Quiet Sun come to mind as examples.  Now another movie joins them...a film as simple as a melody and as magnificent as the sweetest harmony.

9/10

High Tension: Alexandre Aja

In Spike Jonze's Adaptation, one of the running jokes is that one of the most overused and abused plot twists in all of moviedom is the revelation that the hero and villain are one and the same person.  Director Alexandre Aja must have never seen that film.  If he had, then he might have not made it the central twist of his film High Tension.  Oh...I'm sorry...did I spoil the film for you?  Good.  I'm glad that I did.  Nobody should be forced to watch this abysmal film.  It's a poorly shot, horribly written, and terribly executed slasher film that makes no sense whatsoever.  It features two young women who drive to a house in the country to stay with their relatives.  Once they arrive, a serial killer shows up, murders the entire family, and takes the two women hostage.  Of course, it's later revealed that one of the young women is the killer because she is in love with the other one.  So...is Aja trying to equate lesbianism with homicidal psychopathy?  I dunno.  The bottom line of this movie is that the plot twist doesn't make sense.  Films that use the split personality plot twist successfully (like Fight Club) do so by dropping subtle hints that make the revelation make sense.  These films reward repeated viewings as the audience can then pick up the clues that two characters are one in the same.  High Tension does not.  The plot twist is so contrived that it breaks an already shoddy film.  So now that I've spoiled the film, you have no excuse to sit through this train wreck.  Go watch a good movie instead.

2/10

Bad Taste: Peter Jackson

Years before Peter Jackson stunned the world with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, he made a name for himself as an exploitation/gore director.  His most notorious and famous film from this period was Braindead, a film which is literally considered to be one of the goriest ever made.  But before he was slicing up waves of the undead with a lawnmower in Braindead, he directed Bad Taste.  The film more than lives up to its title.  Made for $255,000 and starring his friends and film crew as characters (Jackson himself played two different roles), it is a nauseating romp of aliens, blood, and brain matter.  Quite simply, aliens invade New Zealand in order to harvest humans for an intergalactic fast food chain.  The Astro Investigation and Defence Service (AIDS) sends a whopping four agents to investigate the disappearance of an entire town after these invaders arrive.  From there, the film descends into a smorgasbord of childish violence and carnage.  I remember as a young boy I used to make movies with my friends with an old VHS camcorder that my parents owned.  Bad Taste plays like one of these movies, only shot on better film stock and with grown men instead of children.  It's sophomoric, poorly acted, gross, vile, and disturbing.  And I loved it.

5/10 (Official Critical Rating)
8/10 (So-Bad-It's-Good Rating)

Once Upon a Time in China: Tsui Hark

While watching Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China, I jokingly tweeted: "Wow...'Once Upon a Time in China' is a fantastic film! Great martial arts with just a touch of delightful racism and xenophobia. Good stuff."  Having finished the film, I feel a bit embarrassed by my little joke.  Not about my comment concerning the martial arts, mind you.  The martial arts and fight choreography is exactly what fans of Tsui Hark's work have come to expect.  It's the part about the racism and xenophobia that gives me pause.  The film is about Wong Fei-hung, a Chinese cultural hero who was both a doctor and a skilled martial artist who fought back against foreign invaders at the start of the 20th century.  The film's plot is simple: foreigners (of British and American origin) have begun to show up in Foshan, a city in southern China.  Wong Fei-hung, along with an eclectic group of followers, must stop a sinister plot by foreigners wherein they capture Chinese women and sell them as prostitutes in America.  Oh, sure, there are subplots concerning a pretty woman and gangs of Chinese criminals who work for the foreigners.  But at it's core, Once Upon a Time in China is a story of us vs. them, of China vs. outsiders.  At first, this may seem disconcerting.  But pay attention.  Yes, foreigners are depicted as bad guys.  But as a history major who extensively studied Chinese history, I can say that their crimes have historical basis.  I mean, we have no problem depicting Japanese, Vietnamese, and Germans as the villains in our various war films.  Why should we expect anything different from Chinese cinema?  But notice how the characters come to the conclusion that the West does have things to offer, that China can benefit from peaceful trade and cultural friendship with outsiders.  It is a remarkably fair film in this regard.  As a martial arts film, it's phenomenal.  As a piece of cultural anthropology, it's crucial to understanding China's evolving views towards foreigners and the outside world at the turn of the 21st century.

8/10

Dead of Night: Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, and Robert Hamer.

One of the rites of passage for young boys is the legendary campfire story time.  Gathered at a fire in the middle of the woods, they would scare each other with the most terrifying stories that they could muster.  Dead of Night recalls such gatherings by presenting a portmanteau of chillings stories.  They are linked by a overarching story of a man who travels to a country house for a party.  Once there, he realizes that all of the guests have previously appeared in his nightmares.  Fascinated, the guests ask him to recall his ghastly night visions.  These stories range from the comical (a pair of golf loving best friends can't be separated, even by death, from their favorite game) to the horrific (a ventriloquist's dummy takes on an apparent life of its own).  Each of these stories shift drastically in tone and style, mostly due to the film's use of different directors for each segment.  Therefore, the overall film feels disjointed.  But it's a delightful piece of early horror and well worth the watch by scary movie aficionados.

7/10

Theatre of Blood: Douglas Hickox

Theatre of Blood is in many ways a remake of the earlier film The Abominable Dr. Phibes.  Both are about artists, one an organist, the other an actor, who suffer some great tragedy in their lives.  Both go about avenging themselves by murdering the people they see as their perpetrators in creative and unusual ways.  In The Abominable Dr. Phibes, the organist kills off a series of doctors and surgeons who failed to save the life of his wife after a terrible car accident using methods based off the Ten Plagues of Egypt.  In Theatre of Blood, an actor kills off a number of critics who trashed him in reviews and refused to give him an actor of the year award using techniques taken from various Shakespearean plays.  Oh...and of course, both films have Vincent Price playing the lead role.  Vincent Price was the absolute best at what he did: cruel, over-the-top, and slightly campy horror.  Watching him in Theatre of Blood is a delight.  The writers must be given credit for their incredible inventiveness in devising ways to kill of Price's victims.  The film is a fresh, exciting piece of macabre horror.

8/10

The Green Room: François Truffaut

The Green Room is one of François Truffaut's darkest and most tragic films.  It follows Julien Davenne, a journalist who served 11 years ago as an artillery operator in World War One.  A year after he returned from the Great War, his wife died.  Having lost so many friends and loved ones in such a small amount of time, he becomes obsessed with death.  He keeps all of his dead wife's mementos in a small green room in his house.  However, after the room accidentally catches fire, he moves them all into a renovated chapel.  He transforms the small room into a shrine for the dead.  Julien Davenne is a tragic figure who is so obsessed with death that he is unable to truly live.  He is so concerned with those who have died that he can't appreciate those around him, such as Cecilia Mandel, a like-minded auctioneer's assistant.  But much like Julien Davenne, the film itself seems devoid of life.  There is a certain coldness and sterility to the sets and acting that it seems as pale as a freshly deceased corpse.  The Green Room is a bleak film bereft of the charm that infects Truffaut's other works and makes them so endearing.

6/10

Messiah of Evil: Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz

Sometimes, a low budget look and feel can propel a horror film to great heights.  After all, would The Texas Chainsaw Massacre be the masterpiece that it is now if it had a larger budget and cleaner sets?  Of course not.  But the low-budget approach doesn't always help a film.  Sometimes, it can hurt it.  Take Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz's Messiah of Evil, for example.  It relies heavily on its low budget and cheap production values to create an atmosphere of dread.  However, it fails to do so.  It is the story of a young woman who goes to a strange town to investigate the disappearance of her father.  There, she discovers that the townsfolk are under the spell of an undead member of the Donner Party which turns them into zombie/vampire hybrids at night.  The film claims that it has a dream-like quality to it.  But I think that they're using that excuse to cover up its poor pacing, shoddy framing, and occasionally indistinguishable audio.  There are a couple of interesting scenes, particularly one where a woman is attacked and killed by a mob of zombie/vampires in a movie theater.  It is heavily reminiscent of the schoolyard attack scene from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.  But it isn't enough to save this mess of a film.

3/10

The Driller Killer: Abel Ferrara

Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer is a noisy, ugly, chaotic film that grates on the sensibilities like jagged sandpaper.  It is filmed on cheap, 16mm film stock and utilizes horrible actors and non-existent lighting.  And yet...there is something compelling about this film.  I have heard it described as a slasher version of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.  Both films feature protagonists who lash out at society after being systematically isolated from it.  In The Driller Killer, Reno Miller (played by Abel Ferrara), is a struggling artist on the brink of sanity.  His girlfriend cheats on him with a lesbian lover who has the audacity to live with them, a noisy no-wave band has moved in on the floor above him and won't shut up, and he has no money for rent.  He desperately struggles to finish his latest painting so he can pay the bills.  But the city proves too much for him.  So he strikes back by going on a killing spree, murdering random hobos in the street with a power drill.  As I said...it's not a well made film from a technical standpoint.  But The Driller Killer has a strange energy about it.  Ferrara knows how to twist a film around so that it feels like he is trying to say something profound and meaningful even when he is murdering innocent bystanders with a power tool.  Ferrara would go on to make more mainstream films, including the sensational Bad Lieutenant and The King of New York.  But this is where it all started.  This is where the legend began...not with a bang...but with the terrible drone of a drill bit.

6/10

Fallen Angel: Otto Preminger

One year after releasing Laura, a film that is universally considered to be one of the all-time greatest film noir in history, Otto Preminger directed Fallen Angel.  It attempts to recapture the harsh bite that made Laura such a vicious and effective film, yet falls short.  It follows Eric Stanton, a drifter down to his last dollar who falls in love with a small town waitress named Stella.  Stella is a cruel, yet seductive woman refuses Eric's advances on the grounds that he is too poor.  So Eric marries a local spinster named June who has a small fortune.  He intends to steal her money and quickly divorce her so he can have the money needed to woo Stella.  At least, that was the plan until Stella is murdered one night.  Now a prime suspect in a murder that he didn't commit, he has to clear his name and prove that he didn't marry June for the money.  Things would be so much easier if June wasn't totally head over heels for him...Every now and then we see the inklings of a great noir screenplay pop up only to wither away as the film progresses.  It could use more energy and a greater sense of urgency.  Instead, we have a mediocre follow-up to a 5-star classic.

6/10

Childhood Days: Masahiro Shinoda

To escape the bombs of World War Two, Tokyo native Shinji Kazama is sent to the countryside by his parents to live with his relatives.  Shinji is a smart, sensitive boy who has a large collection of books that he cherishes.  He soon meets Takeshi, his cousin.  While initially friendly and loving, he soon transforms into a nightmarish bully at school.  Armed with a close gang of followers, Takeshi rules the schoolyard with an iron fist.  But slowly, Takeshi loses his authority and becomes the victim of an even crueler young boy.  All the while, Shinji looks on, caught in the middle.  Childhood Days is the second to last film by legendary director Masahiro Shinoda.  It rightly depicts how elementary schoolyard politics are more important to young children than even the guns and dangers of war.  Buried somewhere in this film is a subtext on World War Two and the American Occupation.  I know it's in here...most, if not all, films set in this period are.  My guess is that Takeshi represents the Japanese Imperial Government while his usurper represents the American Occupation.  How curious, then, that Takeshi is so lovingly depicted after his fall.  Perhaps it is a commentary on Japan losing its own sovereignty to foreign powers.  Or maybe, it's something even more simple: just a tale of schoolkids and long lost childhood days.

8/10

Near Dark: Kathryn Bigelow

Honestly, I'm getting tired of vampire movies.  Hollywood has been bombarding the world with so many lately that it's easy to forget that they used to be the subjects of good movies.  One of these is Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark.  The film makes the brave effort to combine two completely different genres: the Western and the vampire film.  And surprisingly, Bigelow does a decent job pulling it off.  It all starts when a young cowboy falls in love with a strange woman who turns him into a vampire.  He becomes part of her "family" of vampires.  But he just wants to go back to his family.  This isn't just a film that disguises teenage sexuality with a pair of vampire fangs. It explores honest questions about the nature and value of families.  It examines the HUGE moral conundrum of having to kill every night in order for vampires to survive.  Most films devote a scene or two to the issue.  But Bigelow focuses a long time on it...as well she should have.  Near Dark is a satisfying film.  It isn't quite a Western.  It isn't quite a horror film.  It finds a nice sweet spot somewhere in the middle.

7/10

I Spit on Your Grave: Meir Zarchi

I don't understand the appeal of this film.  It's basically nothing more than a 101 minute stag real of rape, torture, and murder.  I can stomach offensive material...when it's a means to an end.  I Spit on Your Grave exists for two reasons.  First, it exists to abuse and show off the naked body of its star Camille Keaton (and yes...she is related to THAT Keaton).  Second, it exists to depict the most graphic and sickening death scenes imaginable as she extracts her revenge on the men who raped and left her for dead.  Unlike some other exploitation films, I can't fault it for its production values.  It's decently shot and manages some good performances.  It just feels unnecessary.  Was this really a story that needed to be told?  Was there a market for this kind of film?  I guess...after all, it got a professional Hollywood remake.  Buster's rollin' over in his grave.

2/10

Requiem for a Dream: Darren Aronofsky

I sometimes forget what the cinematic medium is capable of.  Too often I am lured into a false sense of complacency by mediocre films.  Thankfully, every so often a film like Requiem for a Dream comes along and sends an electric shock down my spine, resuscitating me to the joys and possibilities of the medium.  Requiem for a Dream is more than just a great film, it is a stunning one.  The film is a character study of four miserable people who escape into drug addiction for various reasons.  The elderly Sara Goldfarb is tricked into believing that she will star on a television show, so she quickly becomes addicted to amphetamines and sedatives to help her lose weight.  Her son Harry, his girlfriend Marion Silver, and his best friend Tyrone C. Love are hooked on heroin.  Soon, they begin to sell it on the streets, intending to use the money to escape from the poverty that rules their lives.  All four see drugs as a means to an end.  They're tools, y'see?  As soon as they lose the weight, as soon as they get the money, as soon as they can leave the ghetto, they'll stop.  But they can't stop.  Sara slowly loses her mind as the drugs eat away at more than just her body fat.  When Tyrone is caught in the middle of a gang war assassination, they have to spend all of their savings posting bail.  Of course, what with the war, it becomes impossible to get any more heroin.  So Marion starts to prostitute herself in exchange for drugs.  Harry's injection arm becomes so infected that it has to be removed.  This is not an easy film to watch.  Director Darren Aronofsky uses such rapid-fire filmmaking and editing techniques that the audience can barely keep up.  Truthfully, I haven't seen such a cinematic lights and pyrotechnics show since the glory days of Oliver Stone.  Aronofsky fires on all cylinders and then throws the empty gun at the audience.  Requiem for a Dream might, in fact, be the greatest film on drug addiction ever made.  Just don't expect it to be like anything you have ever seen before.

10/10

The Last House on the Left: Wes Craven

Don't get me wrong...I don't like Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left because it's gratuitous and violent.  I've liked plenty of films that were violent and over the top.  My problem with The Last House on the Left is that it simply isn't a good film.  By this point in his career, Wes Craven hadn't figured out what to and what not to put into a film.  Therefore, this film about a group of criminals who rape and murder a couple of teenage girls who are then subsequently murdered by their parents is all over the place.  Shots of brutal torture and rape are juxtaposed with scenes of two inept country cops farting around the countryside.  Scenes at night are poorly lit, but not in the intentional kind of way that many horror films are.  Even the gore effects are poorly done.  Great low-budget horror films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are gritty as a result of skilled people creating an atmosphere and environment for the film to inhabit.  The Last House on the Left is gritty because the filmmakers didn't know what they were doing.  And don't tell me that it's because the film had only $90,000 in its budget.  I've seen films made for a FRACTION of that cost that were infinitely better.  Re-Animator, anyone?

3/10

Broken Arrow: Delmer Daves

I've always been bothered by the idea that just because a film is the first to do something means that it should be venerated and praised.  So, I take a little issue with people claiming that Delmer Daves' Broken Arrow is a classic of the genre.  Yes, it is one of the very first Westerns to portray Native Americans in a sympathetic light.  The film retells the slightly exaggerated story of Tom Jeffords forging a peace between the Apache nation and the US government through tactics of mutual respect and trust.  But the film seems bereft of any kind of climax or the feeling of intensified drama.  The film is a series of smaller moments of tension and emotion, but none of them coagulate into a solid whole.  The ending feels sudden, abrupt, and forced.  So, yes, Broken Arrow should be remembered as one of the first films to depict Native Americans positively.  But that by no means makes it a classic.  It's just a decent film.  Nothing more, nothing less.

7/10

The Getaway: Sam Peckinpah

By 1972, many people felt that Sam Peckinpah's career was finished.  While many would argue the merits of such films as Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Cross of Iron, and, to a lesser extent, Convoy, by 1972, Peckinpah's career had begun its tragic slide towards mediocrity.  One reason is the 1972 film The Getaway.  The film follows two criminals who flee from a bungled bank robbery in an attempt to escape both the police and each other.  The robbery had taken three criminals to pull off.  After the heist, one of them tried to double cross the other two.  After managing to kill one of them, he was subdued by the third.  Along with his girlfriend, the third criminal flees towards the US-Mexico border followed by the enraged first criminal.  With the exception of a few terrific gun battle scenes, the film is a slow-moving, dreary affair.  Steve McQueen gives such a subdued performance as the criminal on the run that it feels like he was on tranquilizers.  It just doesn't contain the same energy as his masterpieces The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs.  It wasn't a total failure, but it just wasn't up to the high level of quality that Peckinpah had established by that point in his career.

6/10

Salvador: Oliver Stone

Salvador is the film where director Oliver Stone would discover his cinematic voice: a fiercely political outlook combined with rapid fire editing and cinematography.  Before Salvador, Stone had directed two quasi-horror films.  But Salvador signaled the true start of one of the most controversial and subversive careers in Hollywood history.  Salvador follows a down-on-his-luck photojournalist and an unemployed radio jockey who travel to El Salvador in search of both employment and easy living.  However, upon arriving in El Salvador, they discover that the Salvadoran civil war, a conflict which was widely being ignored at the time, was much deadly and disastrous than they could have imagined.  They start a dogged campaign of trying to expose the crimes being committed to the rest of the world.  Some of the events focused on include the assassination of Óscar Romero and the brutal raping and killing of Jean Donovan and three other Christian missionaries.  Stone also accuses conservative forces in the United States, empowered by the election of Ronald Reagan, of having allowed and supported the atrocities committed against the revolutionaries.  As would become his trademark, Stone observes one political interpretation of the events presented.  And really, the film is more about the two young Americans' struggle for survival than the civil war itself.  But Salvador is a mighty film that predicts the rise of one of the world's most dangerous filmmakers.

8/10

Peyton Place: Mark Robson

It was the film based off the novel that scandalized and captivated American society in the 50s.  It would go on to launch an incredibly successful spin-off television show.  And, at the time, it held the record for the most Academy Award nominations without a single win.  The film is Peyton Place.  And...it hasn't aged well.  Unlike the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, this film by Mark Robson shows its age in the worst imaginable way.  The performances are stilted (particularly from Diane Varsi, the film's main character and narrator), the screenplay is laughable, and it drags on and on to a point where you just want it to end.  That's not to say that the film isn't totally salvageable.  The film is the story of the moral hypocrisy and hidden secrets and scandals of a small New England town named Peyton Place.  The story is too complex and complicated to provide an adequate summary in the space of a few sentences.  But all that needs to be said is that it combines just about every soap opera trope one can think of into its 2+ hour run time.  It's a decent enough film...it's just too damn long.  And, quite frankly, it could have used a better director. 

6/10

The Sunbeam: D. W. Griffith

The Sunbeam is one of multitude of one-reel silent films directed by D. W. Griffith for Biograph Pictures near the start of the 1910s.  It is so old that it predates copyright laws, thereby forcing Biograph to literally brand their sets with their logo to prevent people from stealing the footage, rebranding it, and selling it as their own.  This was the first film that I watched as part of my class on the history of melodrama at NYU Tisch.  It is a perfect example of early film melodrama.  The plot centers around a young girl living in a tenement building.  One day, her mother dies in her sleep.  Ignorant of what actually happened, the girl approaches the other tenants and asks them to play.  Through the sheer power of her innocent and cuteness, she is able to change the lives of several people living in her building.  The Sunbeam is a charming little film that is a fantastic example of early Griffith.  Ynez Seabury as the little girl shines through the screen.  The Sunbeam isn't necessary viewing for anyone who wants to study early silent film and melodrama.  But at only 17 minutes long, it doesn't hurt to check it out anyway.

Kippur: Amos Gitai

Amos Gitai's Kippur feels like the end result of a collaboration between Michelangelo Antonioni and Abbas Kiarostami if they decided to make a war film.  It is a slow, calm look at two young soldiers caught up in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.  The two soldiers try to report to their units when Syria invades on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calender, but get lost and end up being recruited as part of a helicopter medical rescue squad.  The film is made up almost entirely of long, slow tracking shots that view the carnage of war in a deliberate, subjective manner.  I read in one review that Gitai was using these shots to demonstrate how different the experiences are between civilian life and combat duty even though they can be separated by only a few minutes or feet.  To that extent, I suppose that he was successful.  This is a difficult film to watch if you expect a more traditional war film.  In fact, I wouldn't even call it a war film.  Instead, it is a film about war and the soldiers caught up in the chaos.

6/10 

God's Little Acre: Anthony Mann

God's Little Acre is a slipshod, scatterbrained production that can never quite decide what kind of movie it wants to be.  It changes focus, direction, and characters so many times that it could give you whiplash.  It starts off as an amusing tale of a Georgia farmer who believes that his grandfather buried a trove of gold somewhere on his property.  So he spends years digging holes in his farm.  He even kidnaps a local albino because he believes that they can use a divining rod to locate buried treasure.  But then it becomes a clumsy romance when one of the family falls in love with the albino.  Then, the film changes directions again to become a confusing pro-labor picture where a member of the family sacrifices his life to reactivate a cotton mill that a local town depends on.  God's Little Acre is a Frankenstein-esque combination of unrelated plots and stories.  If it had just focused on one of them (i.e. the digging for gold, the romance, the pro-labor demonstration), then it might have been a good film.  But, it didn't, so it isn't.

4/10

Jezebel: William Wyler

The story goes that Bette Davis was the favorite choice to play Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind.  However, David O. Selznick decided to give the role to Vivien Leigh.  One of the principal reasons was that ten months before the selection for Scarlett O'Hara was made, Bette Davis had been cast as Julie Marsden in William Wyler's Jezebel, another film about headstrong, arrogant woman living in the Antebellum South.  Indeed, Scarlett O'Hara and Julie Marsden could very well be long-lost sisters.  Marsden was a vain, selfish debutante who's actions force the man she loves away from him.  Both wore inappropriate dresses to social functions (in Marsden's case she wore a red dress to a ball where unmarried women were expected to wear white).  Marsden orchestrated this faux pas when her husband-to-be refused to go dress shopping with her because he was busy in a town council meeting trying to figure out ways to prevent a Yellow Fever outbreak from reaching their city.  Out of anger at Marsden's spoiled actions, he forces her to dance with him at the ball even when she realizes her mistake.  They break their engagement and Marsden locks herself away in her room for a year, convinced that she was the real victim in the matter and that he should be the one to apologize.  Of course, after a year of solitude, she begs his forgiveness when he returns, ignorant that in the mean time he had married a Yankee woman.  Jezebel is an incredible film that will never get its fair recognition due to its being overshadowed by Gone With the Wind.  However, it still remains one of the greatest portrayals of Antebellum South ever committed to celluloid.  It's high tragedy borne from the very manners and stubbornness that would ultimately lead to the bloodiest war ever fought on American soil.

9/10

The Two of Us: Claude Berri

Most films try to replicate real life.  Few succeed in mirroring it.  Claude Berri's The Two of Us is an extraordinary example of the latter.  It presents a full cast of characters who we actually grow to believe are real people, not just actors playing a part.  The two central characters are Claude Longuet, a young Jewish boy sent to the countryside by his parents to escape the Holocaust and Pepe, an old grandfather who takes him in.  Together, they form a close friendship.  There's only one problem.  Pepe is a rampant anti-Semite who has no idea that Claude is a Jew.  Here is where the film transcends merely replicating real life and starts to echo it.  Pepe is not vilified for his antisemitism.  By all accounts he is a loving, doting old man.  There are only a handful of scenes where he mentions his views on Jews, and even then it doesn't seem to reflect an inward hatred, but instead casual beliefs ingrained upon him by an ignorant culture.  Most, if not all, films that feature racist characters are so concerned with proving them wrong that they become one dimensional caricatures.  But here, the film views Pepe in much the way that a small child like Claude would: as an amalgam of many different persona and emotions.  Is he wrong?  Most certainly.  Is he a bad person?  No...just a misguided one.  The film is a marvelous examination of life through the eyes of a child.  Yes, there is a war going on.  But it is almost always mentioned in passing.  Claude, and the film, is much more interested in the pretty little girl down the lane, the act of chasing a goose down the side of a hill, and playing soldiers with his classmates.  When Claude's head is shaved for being a naughty boy by his schoolteacher, it is treated as a much more devastating tragedy than all of the examples of German oppression in France.  The Two of Us is a simple, honest film about growing up during wartime.  It remembers that the bombers only came at night and that the children still played in the grass the following morning.

9/10

David Holzman's Diary: Jim McBride

David Holzman wants to capture his life on film.  So, at great financial and personal expense, he makes a documentary about his life and the people that he meets.  The result is the curious David Holzman's Diary.  This 74 minute piece of cinéma vérité takes a look at a man striving for truth within the cinematic idiom.  The central dilemma is that the main character wants to make a fake documentary about himself.  But is the act of capturing the making of a fake documentary itself a documentary?  I'm sure that Jim McBride had all of these thoughts in his head when he was making this movie.  Does he answer any of them?  I'm not sure.  I don't think answering them was ever his intention.  I'm flummoxed by this film.  So, out of fairness, I'm giving it a 5 on a scale of 1-10.  Seems like the only fair thing to do.

5/10

Hobo With a Shotgun: Jason Eisener

I was not prepared for this film.  Going into it, I expected a blood and gore fest along the lines of Planet Terror and Machete, both of which were released under the Grindhouse label.  I was not surprised to find that it is easily one of the most graphically and gleefully violent films ever to have a mainstream release.  But I didn't expect to find a film that contained genuine craftsmanship.  Many people dismissed Hobo with a Shotgun as violent fluff.  Which, admittedly, it is.  But look closer...there are some really amazing things going on in this film.  Key among them is the lead performance by the legendary Rutger Hauer as the hobo.  He drifts into the inappropriately named Hope Town with dreams of starting a lawnmowing business. What he finds is that the town in ruled by a psychotic megalomaniac and his two sons.  Are they landlords?  Drug dealers?  I guess it doesn't matter.  They kill anyone who gets in their way.  With the help of a local prostitute, the hobo begins to clean up the town just as the tagline advertises: one shell at a time.  I was taken aback by Hauer's devastatingly tragic performance.  The hobo isn't just a mass murderer: he's an actual character.  There are times when Hauer transcends the confines of the film's genre and delivers something heartbreakingly beautiful.  Is this film violent and over the top?  Of course...but only when it chooses to be.  See, here's the thing...it doesn't rely on gore and violence as a crutch to support the whole film.  That is what lesser filmmakers.  Somehow, the creators of this film managed to make the violence secondary to the intense character drama.  It isn't violent because it has to be.  It's violent because it wants to be.  This film isn't for everyone.  I wasn't kidding when I described how violent it was.  It may be one of the top three most violent films I've ever seen, right up there with Saving Private Ryan and a few notorious Italian exploitation films.  But to those with a strong stomach: give this movie a try.  I guarantee that you'll be surprised.

8/10

Man of Iron: Andrzej Wajda

I'm always amazed at some of the films that win the Palme d'Or.  Yes, I know that many people have different tastes in film than I do.  But sometimes, it isn't a matter of taste.  It's a matter of craftsmanship.  I have seen several films that have won the Palme d'Or that simply did not deserve to win because they were not well made films.  A Taste of Cherry and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives comes to mind.  And now Andrzej Wajda's Man of Iron joins them.  This is a deliriously bad, insipid, stupid, and boring film.  It's about a journalist who is tasked with going undercover into an anti-Communist organization in Poland in order to provide the Party with information that they can use to slander him.  At least, I think that's what it's about.  Man of Iron is a two and a half hour long film that feels 5 hours long.  Much of the film is comprised of people talking about politics.  Not about political machinations, mind you...but people looking into the camera and discoursing on politics.  This is not how you make a film about politics.  Wajda should have taken a page from Costa-Gavras' book and not made the film a long discourse on politics but instead made the film illustrate their consequences.  Even worse, it frequently fills the film with documentary footage of real life protestors and strikers.  What do they do when confronted with the camera?  They talk about politics, of course! It isn't just the content of the film, either.  It's shot with a color palette dominated by browns and beige.  I had no idea that those two colors could hurt the eyes, but Wajda found a way.  I've seen many of Wajda's other films.  He has proven before that he can make political films which are both intellectually stimulating and exciting to watch.  Go watch Kanal or Ashes and Diamonds to see what I mean.  But skip this film.  PLEASE skip this film.  It is nothing but PAIN.

1/10

Zero Kelvin: Hans Petter Moland

I'm sure when director Hans Petter Moland set out to make Zero Kelvin, he had the best of intentions.  Certainly, the wastelands of snowy Svalbard would seem like the perfect place to make a film about the human condition.  After all, what better metaphor for existence could a Northern European filmmaker want?  Bergman wishes that he could have set a film in Svalbard.  But somehow, this film about a poet, a hunter, and a scientist trapped in Greenland falls flat, both as a thriller (as it is sometimes advertized) and as an art film driven by metaphor and symbolism.  The characters seem to drift through the film without direction.  This works on some occasions, particularly in the films of Béla Tarr and occasionally Werner Herzog.  But there is no meaning, no purpose, and no point to what the characters experience.  Roger Ebert once said that if you have to ask what a symbol in a film represents, then it isn't a symbol.  Moland seems to have wanted to make Zero Kelvin a symbol for...something...but for the life of me I have no idea what it is.  And what does that make the film if I have to ask what its central symbolism means?  A non-film?  Maybe.  Because that's what Zero Kelvin felt like.

4/10

Pitfall: André De Toth

One of the cornerstones of film noir is a protagonist haunted by a past that won't leave him or her alone.  But in André De Toth's Pitfall, the protagonist is haunted not by his past, but by his present.  John Forbes lives the American Dream: he has a good job, a lovely wife, a beautiful son, and a pretty house in a nice suburban neighborhood.  The problem is that he hates it.  Forbes feels trapped by the 9-5 routine and his mundane life.  But salvation comes in Mona Stevens, a client for Forbes' insurance company.  Stevens received many gifts from an embezzler now behind bars.  When Forbes went to investigate the gifts, he fell in love with Mona and started an affair with her.  However, a jealous ex-cop and her old boyfriend, recently bailed from prison, want Forbes gone from the picture.  Pitfall examines the near-destruction of the American nuclear family that would become so stereotypical of the following decade after the film's release.  In a sense, it predates films like American Beauty and Revolutionary Road which delighted in seeing just how far such a family could bend before breaking.  The problem is that in Pitfall, the family doesn't break.  It suffers damage, particularly due to the film's inevitably violent climax.  But the family stays together. Why? Out of some sense of responsibility?  Out of a fear of not fitting in and creating a scandal?  Whatever the reason, the film's end seems disingenuous and indicative of the very culture that the aforementioned films tried to examine. 

6/10

Kung Pow!: Enter the Fist: Steve Oedekerk

I can totally understand why critics didn't like Kung Pow: Enter the Fist.  It's not a very good film, per say.  But then again...it's not trying to.  It's trying to be a loving parody of old-school chopsocky flicks that were mass produced all throughout the 70s and 80s.  It does so by digitally inserting the main actor/director, Steve Oedekerk, into old martial arts footage and redubbing it.  The results are silly, stupid, and juvenile.  But so help me if this isn't one of the funniest films that I have EVER seen.  I was laughing literally the entire way through the film.  One of the main reasons was that I have seen enough chopsocky flicks to know that many of the jokes were references and parodies of martial arts tropes and stereotypes.  Indeed...many critics didn't like this movie...I think it's because none of them had a sense of humor.

8/10

Maniac: William Lustig

Gene Siskel once reported that William Lustig's Maniac! was one of the only three films in his entire career as a movie critic that he walked out on. Apparently, he felt that after thirty minutes, the film had been so gratuitously violent that it was beyond redemption. After all, after thirty minutes he had witnessed several murders including an extremely graphic scene where a man is shot point blank in the face with a shotgun. But I disagree. I think that Maniac!, as depraved and sick as it is, does in some way have a message. Frank Zito is a serial killer who scalps his victims and places his prizes on stolen mannequins in his apartment. But it isn't out of some terrible love of murder and violence. Instead, it is due to undiagnosed schizophrenia exacerbated by child abuse. In many scenes, the audience feels great compassion and sympathy for this forsaken man. That's where this film's true strength lies. It's not easy to make such a despicable character sympathetic. But Lustig gives it his best in this great piece of slasher schlock.

7/10

In This Our Life: John Huston

John Huston's second film, In This Our Life, means well, but is ultimately a massive mess of a film.  Based off the Pulitzer-prize winning novel of the same name, In This Our Life follows the exploits of two grown sisters with men's names: Roy and Stanley.  Stanley runs away with Roy's husband one day, leaving her whole family shocked and crushed.  But then, Stanley's husband commits suicide due to alcoholism.  Stanley comes crawling back to her family but proceeds to try and win back her old husband who is now dating Roy.  When she is rejected, she gets drunk and kills a small child with her car.  She blames it on a local black friend of the family.  The whole film seems to be a commentary on the moral corruption of the rich and the mistreatment and suspicion of blacks.  However, like I said, the film is a mess.  Stanley is almost completely absent from the first half of the film.  We learn of all of her actions from Roy and the rest of her family from telegrams and phone calls.  Then, in the second half, Roy almost completely disappears.  The film can't decide who to focus on.  If it had just stuck with one of the sisters, preferably Stanley, then Huston may have had a better film on his hands.

6/10

Nightmare Alley: Edmund Goulding

Do you believe in the occult, the supernatural, the otherworldy?  The Great Stanton might be able to make you.  Once a regular carnival worker, Stanton and his wife Molly go around the country doing cold readings and telling fortunes.  They gain success through the use of a code that he learned from fellow carny Zeena after accidentally killing her husband.  But the Great Stanton is too power-hungry, too thirsty for success.  His craving for money and fame will prove his downfall in Nightmare Alley, a devastating film noir by Edmund Goulding.  In a sense, it is a twisted morality tale of uncontrolled greed.  In time, the Great Stanton will doom himself, causing him to fall to depths that he himself mocked at the start of the film.  Tyrone Power does an excellent job as the Great Stanton, clearly depicting a man to whom others are just tools for further expansion.  It is a rare kind of film noir: the kind that has a message and not just a dreary ending.

7/10

Sergeant York: Howard Hawks

By the start of the 40s, director Howard Hawks was on a roll.  He had released three of the most famous and beloved films of the era in a row with Bringing Up Baby, Only Angels Have Wings, and His Girl Friday.  He followed up this tremendous trio with what is considered to this day to be one of his greatest films: Sergeant York.  How good was it?  It competed with the likes of Citizen Kane, Suspicion, and The Maltese Falcon for Best Picture.  The true story of Corporal Alvin York, the most decorated American soldier of World War One.  The film follows his life in rural Tennessee as a drunkard who converted to Christianity after a near-death experience.  When World War One was declared, he registered as a conscientious objector due to his religious convictions.  However, he was denied an exemption and quickly became known as one of the best sharpshooters in the Army.  During the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, he managed to capture 132 prisoners through a combination of bravery and skill.  The film takes great patience to develop York's character...perhaps a little too much.  There is a subplot about him trying to earn enough money for a piece of good farmland that takes up about a fourth of the film.  It only really exists to establish that he is a good shot as he enters a shooting contest to win the money that he needed to buy the land.  Of course, this was already established at the start of the film when he shot his initials into a tree while drunk and on horseback.  Still, the film is a warm character study that is unabashed of its pronounced patriotism and religious conviction.  It might seem a bit cheesy to modern, jaded audiences...but it's well worth a watch.

8/10