Out of the Past: The Week in Film

Cess Pool Cinema:
1. Ghoulies (1985) Dir. Luca Bercovici - US

The Banal, the Blah, the Banausic:
1. The Doctor and the Devils (1985) Dir. Freddie Francis - UK


Guilty Pleasure Cinema:
1. The Deep (1977) Dir. Peter Yates - US
2. Trick 'r Treat (2008) Dir. Michael Doughtery - US

Astounding Cinema:
7. Horror Hotel (1960) Dir. John Llewellyn Moxey - UK
6. Crazy Love (1987) Dir. Dominique Deruddere - Belgium
5. Coup De Grace (1976) Dir. Volker Schlondorff - West Germany
4. To Catch a Thief (1955) Dir. Alfred Hitchcock - US
3. Kansas City Confidential (1952) Dir. Phil Karlson - US
2. Wise Blood (1979) Dir. John Huston - US
1. Army of Shadows (1969) Dir. John Pierre Melville - France


Theatrical Releases:
1. The Damned United (2009) Dir. Tom Hooper - UK 9/10


You know, I didn't go into watching Ghoulies (1985) thinking it would be a good or even a decent film, but what I didn't expect was something almost worse than Troll (1986). There's no use even going into bitching about the plot---there just really isn't one---it's just bad, bad, bad 80's fare. The saddest part of the whole awful affair is the presence (though brief) of Jack Nance (of Eraserhead, 1977) as a character named Wolfgang. Mariska Hargitay also has a brief appearance. The most notable part of the whole screening was the fact that my Netflix copy was a double feature of this film and Ghoulies II (1987)---and this was notable because, in an unprecedented move, I returned the disc without watching the sequel. For an aficionado as dedicated as myself (I did sit through The Howling III: The Marsupials, 1987) this should be a harsh strike of disdain on my part. Honestly, not worth the time.

As for mediocre films, this week yielded a film that encompasses the word completely, the 1985 adaptation of The Doctor and the Devils, supposedly based on an "early screenplay" by Dylan Thomas. In fact, this film holds a record--longest delay between creation of the script and completion of filming, a whopping 32 years. Featuring two very melodramatic performances (Timothy Dalton as the doctor and Julian Sands---who is always an unsavory over the top performer, as his assistant) mixed up with completely histrionic performances (Stephen Rea and Jonathan Pryce as the graverobbers) and then the completely miscast and utterly dull Twiggy, a prostitute that falls for Julian Sands---though every time he visits her brothel she's curiously the only free one....hmmmm..... Based on a true story of a 19th Century English doctor that would pay more for 'fresh' corpses than rotting ones for the purposes of anatomical education, his suppliers find no qualms in killing the homeless for a higher yield. As many have pointed out, never before has murder seemed so completely dull. The whole time I watched it I wanted to get out a copy of a far superior film based on the same material (and from which Robert Louis Stevenson based a short story) the 1945 Robert Wise classic, The Body Snatcher, featuring Boris Karloff (and small part for Bela Lugosi), that is truly chilling, creepy, and excellent.


I decided I needed to create a new classification amongst this week's selections---I watched two films that confounded me---neither were they so dull to be labeled mediocre, and neither were they well done enough to be classified as astounding. These films will be termed guilty pleasures.

After the success of Jaws (1975), it was only natural that other of Peter Benchley's material would be adapted. Unfortunately, most of Benchley's works are all kind of the same. However, as a kind of mindless adventure film, The Deep (1977), was quite entertaining. Helmed by Peter Yates (of Bullitt, 1968 and Eyewitness, 1981) the film supposedly was an infamous mess of a shoot. It features the reunion of Robert Shaw (from Jaws) with the Benchley material, as well as French sensation Jacqueline Bissett and Nick Nolte. Nolte was in his mid 30's here, so it was irritating to have Shaw constantly refer to him as a 'boy.' The Deep is set in Bermuda, and features a young couple (Bissett and Nolte) diving for lost treasure in the wreck of ship that had contained a lot of explosives. The underwater diving scenes with all the creatures, including icky eels and plenty of sharks, are all breathtakingly excellent. The film is just a bit slow and in need of more thrilling music during it's, errr, meant to be thrilling scenes. Bissett fares alright, but it's mostly her breasts we're meant to focus on. One particularly creepy scene shows her being held down in her hotel bed by island natives while they perform a creepy ritual on her with chicken blood and a chicken foot. Fun! Shaw is always entertaining, and Nolte's alright in a shaggy dog sort of way. Of course, the conflict comes in the form of Louis Gossett Jr as an island native hungry for the cache of highly concentrated morphine still intact in the wreck. The Deep takes a lot of flack for it's villains---they're all Haitian. Meaning, they're all black. Even that aside, the most damning moment has Nick Nolte describing the man accosting them to Shaw - "he looked like a basketball player." Now, nothing against Louis Gossett, but obviously, the only trait he shares with some basketball players is his skin color---so, yeah, it's a bit of the 70's politically correct racism.

And another guilty pleasure selection is the DVD release of Trick 'r Treat (2008), which never got a theatrical releases despite being produced by Bryan Sanger. Sort of a modern Creepshow(1982) set up, the film is basically three different scary stories all sort of interweaved. Set on Halloween in some small midwestern town in Iowa or Ohio or something (where everyone goes way ball's out for Halloween all the time, it seems) the interesting parts of the film focus on Anna Paquin and an entertaining Dylan Baker, who is poisoning children with candy (I suggest watching this right after Happiness, 1998, where Baker is the very memorable pedophile father---he just looks like an abuser of children). The film suffers from an extremely low yield plot line involving dead children on a school bus, as well as sorely underusing Brian Cox. A decent effort, I will look forward to more from director Michael Doughtery.

As for the astounding releases, I was pleased to finally sit down and watch Horror Hotel (1960), a little UK production about creepy witches starring Christopher Lee. The plot is a bit bare, but concerns a young woman doing research on the Salem Witch Trials who is led to a small hamlet in Massachusetts by her professor (Lee) to do some "hard" research. Of course, there' s still witches there! I was mostly intrigued by the uncommon violence in a film from this period---our blonde heroine is stabbed to death by the witches, amongst other surprising elements. Full of creepy atmosphere, I highly recommend this with a double feature of The Seventh Victim (1943), starring Kim Hunter.

Touted by Sean Penn, Francis Ford Coppola and Madonna upon its release in 1987 was the debut of Belgian director Dominique Deruddere, Crazy Love, based loosely on several works by Bukowski. The film is a little all over the place, focusing on three different nights from it's protagonist's life---a sexual awakening as a young boy, a tortured acne laden teen at high school graduation, and a necrophilic romp with a corpse as an alcoholic bum in his 30's. Though much ado was made about the last third of the film, it's not nearly as interesting or well done as the middle segment of the film, in which Harry Voss (Josse De Pauw) has some of the worst acne you'd ever seen, a complete creepshow. To dance with the girl he's fixated upon, he wraps toilet paper around his face and asks her to dance. She accepts. An emotional, triumphant and angst laden segment, this portion makes the film memorable. The existential necrophilia either should have been more shocking or more existential---its art house blend works against it in the last segment.

Volker Schlondorff's then wife and collaborator, Margarethe Von Trotta (the only female filmmaker from the German New Wave) is the star of Coup De Grace (1976), which tells the tale of Sophie de Reval, a Russian woman who becomes obsessed with her brother's comrade, a sexually repressed Prussian soldier during the fall of the Czar at the beginning of WWI. When he rejects Sophie, she becomes a nymphomaniac, sleeping with every other soldier she can get her hands, eventually abandoning her house to join Commie forces upon learning that the object of her affection may very well be fixated on her brother. An interesting study of sexual politics, the film also features a memorable performance from Valeska Gert as Sophie's aunt, a dried out woman that appears to be more of a creature left under a large rock for years than a human.

Continuing with my catching up on neglected Hitchcock classics, I finally sat down to watch the stupendous To Catch a Thief (1955), starring one of my favorite male Hitchcock leads, Cary Grant. Grace Kelly, always breathtakingly beautiful, is given a meaty role here (she always annoyed me in Rear Window, 1954, pining after stick-in-the-mud Jimmy Stewart). An excellent tale of jewel thieves and romantic espionage, Jessie Royce Landis is also on hand with an exceptionally funny performance as Kelly's wealthy mother. See it if you love Hitchcock. See it if you love film.

I absolutely loved Kansas City Confidential, a vicious, sweaty little noir that gives Coleen Gray some actual screen time, and John Payne a likeable role (he was a little swallowed up by the red-headed sisters of Slightly Scarlet, 1956). A heist film beginning in Kansas City and ending up in Mexico, this film is a must see for lovers of noir, and a must own for me.

Having recently read Flannery O'Connor's brilliantly weird and wicked treatise on religious zealotry, Wise Blood, I finally got around to watching John Huston's faithful 1979 adaptation, which he perfectly (and I mean PERFECTLY) cast Brad Dourif as Hazel Motes, as the confused and disturbed bundle of contradiction, who returns home after serving time as a soldier, to start his own church, The Church of Christ Without Christ, itself a reflection of Motes' own religious contradictions. With pitch perfect support from the likes of Ned Beatty and Harry Dean Stanton, there's so many religious and cinematic thematics in this piece (of literature and film) to choke a horse. Truly, a film and a novel to talk about for hours, this is a masterpiece, difficult to describe and impossible to explain---and gloriously blasphemous.

Jean-Pierre Melville's epic WWII operatic Army of Shadows (1969) concerning the French resistance (unavailable in this country until 2006) just edges into my number one spot this week. With a running time of two and half hours, this is a an intense and nerve wracking film---and you hardly even see the Nazi's. Featuring excellent performances, gloriously beautiful cinematography and best of all, in my book, the presence of Simone Signoret, that results in a heartbreaking conclusion---I loved this movie. All of Melville's work is worthy of celebration, but if you haven't had the chance to sit down and watch Army of Shadows, please do so. You won't regret it---it's feels like a gangster film, but really, it's all about resisting the enemy.