Francoesque-2's Reviews

Another 48 Hrs. (1990)

7/10

Trash, but entertaining trash none the less

6 October 2007

Sure, it's not a patch on 48 hours, but it does stand as a perfect example of ne plus ultra 90s sequelitis as tougher, simpler movies are retooled into flash bang gee whizz action paintings with money flushed into entourages and re-doing the same things they did almost a decade earlier on the cheap, only this time they all actually get paid (rather than the studio running off with the money and leaving everyone to wonder why a major success still isn't in profit).

So in a sense, this is just the creative players from 48 hours getting paid their due. It's also another spin for Hill on the dying embers of the West, with a motorbike gang (I sense this was first drafted in the 70s) proclaiming themselves the last true outlaws and bastions of freedom before offing some random cops and entangling themselves with Nick Nolte and his amazing never-ending revolver (I count 11 shots in the final barrage of bullets into the bad guy alone).

Familiar scenes are replayed again by people now so rich (and yes, I'm thinking Eddie Murphy here in a redneck bar) that the good guys come off as cruel rather than heroic.

Bult Walter can still trade gunfire with anyone out there, and for that reason alone it's worthy of your attention. It also looks like a Tony Scott film with it's earthy tones and blazing suns. Pair up with Scott's Beverley Hills Cop 2 for a great retro night in.

And if you don't like, wonder how far sequelitis had worked before we ended up with Beverley Hills Cop 3 or Lethal Weapon 3 and thank whatever you worship that we never got a 48hrs squared.

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Extreme Prejudice (1987)

9/10

Pure 80s genius

6 October 2007

Sure, it's not art. It's Walter Hill remaking The Wild Bunch with a Special Forces black ops team tangled up with a Texas Ranger who has feelings for his old buddy and CIA-agent- gone-drug-lord enemy.

It has gunfights, some in slow motion. It has William Forsyth and a spec ops team full of cool characters. It has the spec ops team introduced along with brief summaries of how hard-ass they are and how KIA they are supposed to be.

It is Lone Wolf McQuade with bells and whistles.

It is very entertaining. And in Nolte-Boothe-Ironside it has three of the top action icons of our time battling it out over nothing much in particular, but it's damn good whilst it floats through the eye balls and past the brain.

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Grindhouse (2007)

2/10

Middle of the road grindhouse that does no one any favours

17 August 2007

I kind of try to understand it, but it still makes not sense. Two perfectly good filmmakers decide to make a grindhouse double bill to re-live their past: so far so good.

But, they've done it too well. Rather than make masterpieces (of even the pretty good examples) of the (sub)genre, they have made exact simulacrum of middle of the road mid-80s grindhouse cinema. The lack of achievement matched to the uncompromising nature of the presentation (bad images, heads walking through shot, fading prints) makes this the worst possible entry point into the genre.

Planet Terror - frequently inaudible, but don't mind as the dialogue never gets good, mixed with murky images derived from the well of "The Beyond:, "Nightmare City" et al, but with actors reduced to posture instead of script and a hardcore desire to reduce every element into incomprehensibility in an effort to recollect the nihilistic abandon of Fulchi (in particular) and many other Euro trash auteurs. Biehn and Fahey give their all and show what genuine B actors with skill can do to an otherwise unredeemable script: they make it work, but their scenes are few and far between and in the mean time many a decent actor falls into the pit of bad acting, not realising that the point of these films for many was seeing good work in bad circumstance. It's an absolute blow out, and no surprise that this fares the worst of the two on international distribution.

Death Proof (or "Quentin Tanrentino's Thonderbolt" as the briefly seen title card would have it is very different - this a film created from an obsession with 70s and 80s would- be road movies rather than Roderiguez's Fulchi-Avati explosion, and hampered by an abundance of dialogue - it's a full 40mins before we really get to the meat of the picture, a standout performance by Kurt Russell as Stunkman Mike, who really deserves a better film than he's given here with it's "women talking - they get killed by mike - he scopes some other hotties - he tries but fails to kill them and turns the serial killer stereotype on it's head as he turns into a screaming wimp once he's injured. Sure, there are laughs to be had - not least the abrupt ending, but still it's a serious film maker wanking til he does his next work (and what an obsession with women's arses he's developed since we last saw him in action).

in all, neither film is satisfying - if only they had decided to use the tropes to make stand-out exemplars of the genre rather than going for easy hits for the fans.

A genuine grindhouse night is better made in your own home with the likes of The Blood Spattered Bride, The House With the Laughing Windows, The Strange Case of Mrs Wardh, The Beyond, Nightmare City, Spasmo, The Case of the Scorpions Tail, Death Walks at Midnight and Zeder in any order or combination making for a much more satisfying reliving of the old grindhouse days, when you sat down not knowing if you were going to be amazed by events on screen or touched up.

In terms of the trailers, they just add insult to injury by being far, far more entertaining that either of the main features. Standouts are Machete and Don't. But all of them are better than the features and this is never a good thing.

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Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971)

9/10

Yellow Heaven

5 April 2006

A great giallo from a director who made too-few forays into the genre but come up with the goods each time.

In particular, this (like "The Fifth Cord") is a great example of how the giallo creates a particular physical space in which the drama takes place - all ultra-modern and chic, with all sorts of psychosis rotting away under the slick surface.

Highlights include a great chase around and on the roof of a modernist office, Giancarlo Giannini's fine performance as a cop struggling with doubts about his abilities in a case that gets all too personal, a cameo by Walter Eugene from "The House With Laughing Windows", a high quota of gorgeous starlets and one of Morricone's best scores. And another guest-starring appearance by J&B scotch - surely worthy of a few PhD essays in it's own right for it's ubiquity in the genre (did the Italians drink an awful lot of this in the 60S and 70s or were they keen early adopters of product placement?)

Well worth a viewing for the general thriller fan and a must for any self-respecting giallo aficionado.

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The Possessed (1965)

10/10

Beautiful, undeservedly obscure proto giallo

26 November 2005

Having been very impressed by co-director Bazzoni's subsequent "The Fifth Cord", I have been very keen to see "The Lady of the Lake" since I first heard of it four or five years ago when i read Adrian Luther Smith's Excellent "Bloody and Black Lace" - a definitive collection of giallo reviews. It appears, under the title "The Possessed" in the obscure and rare titles section, along with a superlative review. Subsequent attempts to track the title down were in vain, until I popped into El Corte Ingles on my most recent Spanish holiday and found it on Filmax's "Giallo" collection under the title "El Mujer Del Lago". This is the only DVD outing I've ever heard of and there were both pros (a fantastic anamorphic print) and cons (it's Spanish and Italian only, with Spanish subs) - the cons apply as I'm an English speaker, but I was able to manage enough Spanish (with my dictionary at hand) to navigate through this beautiful, atmospheric film in Spanish with subs showing.

It's as good as it's advance word suggests - an ice cool, incredibly shot mood piece which emerges as a giallo only in hindsight, as at the time it was filmed, the concept hadn't been formed and we were still four years away from the giallo cycle proper which was initiated by the box office success of Argento's "The Bird with the Crystal Plummage" and Martino's "The Case of the Scorpion's Tail" amongst others.

The plot: A writer returns to the small town where he had vacationed previously. he's keen to meet up with his former maid, Tilde, with whom he had enjoyed a romance previously. However, she isn't there and the locals are not keen on talking about why. As he goes through the town, casual encounters build up an atmosphere of menace as everyone seems to be brushing her untimely death under the carpet. The writer presses on in his investigations, seeking the facts behind her death and finding an awful lot of problems lying beneath the town's impassive surface, but in doing so unleashes the pitch black heart of darkness that lies within this film's conclusion.

In terms of style, this is far away from the post-Argento iconography of the giallo. There are no black leather gloved killers here, no stalk and slash killings. All of the (physical) violence occurs off camera. But this remains one of the most claustrophobic, oppressive films of it's time. Much of the drama unfolds within the walls of the hotel, with flashbacks, fantasies and the present unfolding in this space. The film it feels most like is Renais' "Last year At marienbad", but with a more defined narrative. I suspect a lot of the time shifts come from co-screenwriter Gulio Questi, who would later return to the editing styles shown here in his own films such as "Django Kill... If you live, shoot!". Bazzoni contributes his unnerving eye for architecture as counterpoint and subtext to the story (he's on a par with Michael Mann in this respect).

This is a film about love, all types of love, from the casual to the obsessive, and the film gradually cranks up the tension until the conclusion. I hope that a wider audience will be able to embrance this with a DVD release from an outfit such as No Shame or Blue Underground. In the meantime, I'd advise anyone who cares about atmospheric horror/ thriller cinema to pick up the Spanish release, which can be had for a remarkable price (I paid 8.95).

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Mindhunters (2004)

6/10

Affable if vacuous time-waster

2 November 2005

Renny Harlin once more gathers up a cast of has beens and never-were's to play out the "And then there were none" suspense dynamics he tested out on Deep Blue Sea. As usual with Renny, it all goes by at a fair enough pace and looks nice, but it's best to check your brain on the way in.

This time the incredibly daft high concept plot has a gang of misfit serial killer profilers taken to an island by Val Kilmer's super profiler professor, who's in need of a haircut. Once there, the exercise turn serious as one of them is revealed to be a serial killer themselves. The gradually diminishing pool of profilers have to figure out who before they meet their own ends thanks to the ridiculously, comically over-elaborate traps left by the killer. who prays on their weaknesses.

The main flaw is just how stupidly elaborate those evil death traps are - never mind a couple of hours, some would take an engineering and electronics degree and a few days. And being world domino champion would help.

The cast does okay, without anyone standing out. Some of the characters do some really dumb and out of character things in order to keep Renny's shock machine on the move.

It's not going to change your life or give you bad dreams, but it's not bad. Harlin will have to raise his game at some point though, if he really expects to keep getting gigs.

A TV show is also in the offing. Presumably this will take forward the "group of profilers" angle rather than the "getting a bunch of people onto an island and killing them" one, as it's likely to be more sustainable.

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Alone in the Dark (2005)

4/10

It's not too good, but it's not totally incompetent

31 October 2005

Warning: Spoilers

This film's main flaw is that it's terribly dull. It is not, however, an unspeakable atrocity against cinema, as some of the other posts here suggest.

First, all the (relatively) nice things I can say. Uwe Boll obviously has a tremendous talent - as a producer. I'm serious, when you look at how well and how often he puts together the financing for these films, it's a miracle. Using German tax laws, he manages to put out a film a year at least. All genre films, with recognisable leads and often based on identifiable properties. I admire him immensely for this. If he just took up the producer angle full time and worked on setting up properties for other directors, he could be one of the all time great genre producers with a happening little studio, like Juilo Fernandez at Filmax.

However, as a director I have some issues - he's certainly not an incompetent hack as some have suggested - the comparisons with Ed Wood in particular are inappropriate - but whilst he can put together a couple of good shots when they are all edited together the effect is underwhelming.

The main flaw is that he cannot create a coherent narrative, always going for a flashy shot when something simpler may do the job better.

I'd forgive this if he instead invested the film with vast amounts of atmosphere - take Lucio Fulchi, who often ballsed-up the talky scenes in favour of zooming in on actors mouths so that the camera had something to do, but at his best - Don't Torture a Duckling, One on Top of the Other, Lizard in a Woman's Skin, The Beyond and The Psychic - he could invest a film with a great morbid atmosphere, so that the whole was greater than the sum of it's parts. Lynch is another. Boll is missing this vital component .

Either the narrative has to work or the atmosphere (if both, great, but one or the other will do) but here we have a film that lumbers from scene to scene to no great effect and yet fails to achieve the arcane, apocalyptic mystery that I think it's searching for.

The acting is variable - Slater does Slater, which is okay and why he was hired, and he seems to be having a pretty good time. Yet with this and Mindhunters, it's two direct to DVD flicks in a month here in the UK and his career is seemingly settling into this rut, so I hope he can enjoy himself whilst he's in it - some actors, the great Michael Biehn for example, can do some fine work in the worst movies and always rise above the material, giving the brain some food regardless of the movie.

Dorff seems to have quietly gone into career free fall since the period when, although not in the biggest films, looked as though he was taking exactly the roles he wanted for his own reasons - Blood and Wine, City of Industry, SFW - and getting what he could from them. Post Blade (which he was great in) he seems to be following the dollar signs a little more, but for less return. If he plays it right, in another decade he could be a great B character actor (as Cold Comfort Manor shows), but the time for super stardom has passed him. He's perfunctory here, yelling a bit when the script requires it and delivering clunky dialogue as though it makes sense, but the sense of a man enjoying his work is absent.

Tara Reid is a joke. I don't dislike her, but she can't act and doesn't even take off her bra for the risible-but-necessary sex scene: why did she think she was hired? She delivers her lines as if at a read through, without grasping or attempting to impart any meaning.

None of the other actors make even the vaguest impression, mainly because they don't have the screen time to build "characters" - in a script which isn't doing anyone any favours in this department.

Some of the earlier comments make it clear that the epic crawl of information (well, the entire plot) that kicks off the film was an addition after the previews, due to audiences finding the film incomprehensible. But when you start with a 1m30s intro that highlights twists that aren't made clear until over an hour into the film, you do kill any sense of mystery.

It's not worth watching to laugh at, if you want true incompetence watch Samurai Cop, which highlights why this is nowhere near as bad as some have said - the film-making is competent throughout, it just doesn't add to much.

I do feel sorry for Boll and his collaborators for the kicking they have been given, but at least they got paid for doing it and they'll all get the chance to do it again. And Boll is possibly revelling in the critic-proof nature of his financing arrangements. but as I said at the top, if he wants to be admired as well as funded, he should stick to putting the deals and the packages together and let other directors have a shot at the filming.

Speaking again of Fulchi, the final shot caught me as a homage to City of the Living Dead and given Boll's other references to films such as Equilibrium, this may be intentional. but where as in that film it felt like the inevitable pay off to such a grim, nihilistic film, Here it seems like an empty gesture. Fulchi was a great misanthrope, maybe Boll's just too nice a guy.

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