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

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