AKA “The Year I Spent Watching One Movie (And Had No Time Left Over For Anything Else)”.
OK, so they’ve made the same Hollywood bockbluster all over again – the one with the slow-moving bigness on screen, and the same soundtrack, and the big echoey footsteps BADOOMING through your head, and everyone running around like loonies and yelling, looking terrifically earnest about the Great Overriding Importance Of It All.
The great news is, this time they completely forgot about the silly business of people having to sit and watch it in cinemas or at home, and thus avoided the cruel artistic strictures of having a running time, like a normal over-long movie with 87 needless additional climaxes, and made it the movie-biz equivalent of pro wrestling’s ‘No Time Limit’ match instead.
King Kong 2005 is the gift that keeps on giving all right. Unfortunately it’s one of those classic Christmas gifts that you never wanted in the first place, and while you force a grin and humbly thank the giver, you’re already thinking about exactly which Op Shop you’re going to drop it off at subsequently. That kind of gift, giving itself over and over to the shadowy edges of Infinity, is not such a bargain when you stop and drink about it.
I have to come clean here, as the jazz ballet student once remarked to the archbishop. Unlike many heroic souls out there in Movie Wonderland, I didn’t tackle the great Matterhorn of King Kong 2005 all in the one three-hour-plus clump of cutting edge entertainment from 72 years ago. First I watched one hour, when they still somehow hadn’t got around to introducing the title character, then I allowed that to richly ferment in the barrel of my mind for a couple of months while I chose to pursue other more significant pastimes, like watching TV shows that are only allowed to run one hour including commercials, and studiously avoiding making eye-contact with the growing mountain of unwashed crockery in that room with the stove in it.
Then I watched another ten minutes of it, carefully observing, via the unconventional but surprisingly effective method of grinding my teeth and banging myself repeatedly on the skull with a metal spectacle case, that they were almost getting around to thinking of introducing the title character about then. At that juncture I was kind of wondering why they didn’t name the movie after the only threatening, disconcertingly large special effects object that had thus far received a lot of screen time, and call it “Adrien Brody’s Nose”. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’m a fine one to talk about large noses, but if this guy ever turns around suddenly on the set, they must have to stop filming to right the props, re-frame the shot and treat the injured.
Anyway, another month or two of mulling, brewing and crockery-shunning later, and I finally sat down and watched the second day, err hour, following which they still hadn’t got either King Kong or Adrian Brody’s Nose off the island and back to civilisation. Utterly inspired by the terror of letting this thing sit around and haunt me for another few months, and also because I needed to use the re-writable disc I’d zapped it onto, I plucked up all available courage and shotgunned straight through the final hour as well.
Please commit all that to memory, as you may be tested on it later. I include the information as a kind of disclaimer since movies are generally better off being viewed in one hit. Of course movies also generally have a running time, rather than the open-plan, “rest of your natural life” type alternative that Peter Jackson decided to shoot for here.
OK, so the deal here is, they spend one hour brainstakingly laying out all this 1930s vintage bric-a-brac and the hearts and minds of a bunch of characters who are anything but unfamiliar and everything but appealing. (Naomi Watts probably excepted, doing the Fay Wray duty as the heroine. The role’s a glorified cookie-cutter job, but she’s meant to be vulnerable, big-hearted and likeable, and that’s how she comes across.)
Then they get around to bringing on the big monkey and the dinosaurs, and they remake the 1933 picture, only with “expanded insight”, by which I mean a lot of stretching out. They add in a lot of stuff with giant revolting insects and bats and leeches that seems to have come largely out of the leftover kit from Lord of the Rings. For some reason, they leave out Kong’s battle with the pterodactyl, which was an unforgettable set-piece from the original movie. They must have really wanted to give those bats a work-out.
(Quite frankly, if you want a thrill from giant bats audibly winging overhead, you don’t have to go to a big budget movie. Any quiet night in the leafy green eastern suburbs of scenic Poo-Town right here will give you all the bat-related jollies you can handle.)
There is a lot of that classic modern-day Big Movie thinking in King Kong 2005. You can’t just have Kong fight a dinosaur. That would be a dumb idea considering how effective it was in the first picture, which people still watch and talk about seven decades later. There has to be a whole herd of dinosaurs, and then more dinosaurs attacking those dinosaurs, and then perspective shot from underneath the trampling dinosaurs as the humans fight smaller dinosaurs, and every time someone comes to rest, the log next to them turns out to be another kind of dinosaur, accompanied by its dinosaur buddies. The net effect of this is not so much wonder piled upon cinematic wonder, as it is that the sight of dinosaurs becomes about as rare and appealing a spectacle as finding a busker who sings Pearl Jam songs loudly and off-key, accompanying themselves on a guitar tuned to Z-Hell Major sounding like it’s strung with slightly undercooked spaghetti.
Also everything is a climax, so nothing is a climax. You’ve got to give them some knot-headed credit in a way, for throwing everything that wasn’t firmly bolted to the floor into this movie, heedless of anything vaguely resembling dramatic structure or previously established characterisations, and then breaking out the hacksaws, and throwing in everything that was bolted to the floor as well. And the floor. You know that scene in the Marx Bros’ Go West, where to keep the train going when they run out of fuel, they chop up the train itself and feed that into the engine? Well, this is that philosophy adapted to a whole movie.
All this is, is a grimly straight-faced, amazingly silly collection of movie serial climaxes shorn of the storyline set-ups and thrown together at random. The extent to which they completely ignore any nominal integrity of the characters and sense of conventional plot development so they can frantically throw more Big Moments and theoretically edge-of-your-pants climaxes over their shoulders into the pile is so heroically avant-garde that you feel Jean-Luc Godard by all rights should have got a big kick out of this movie if he’d (a) lived to see it, (b) lived through it, and (c) hadn’t done what he was more likely to do, and thrown up quietly into an empty popcorn container and left the cinema white-faced and shaken, muttering “Mon Dieu!” a lot.
We all have every reason to be grateful that if Peter Jackson and the Jackson-ettes had decided to stretch the Kong base-material out to THREE MOTHERFATHER HOURS for the sake of the Good Lord, they were determined that if anyone was still conscious after Hour One, they were going to have so much crap thrown at them that they couldn’t possibly get bored with the rest of it. And to be fair, once it gets going, (i.e. when the monkey shows up), it isn’t a boring movie. It may be one of the stupider things anyone’s ever spent the gross national product of the Planet Earth on, and you may well wonder why they spent one hour building up all these feeble plastic little character templates when they were going to completely ignore all that stuff (along with logic, motivation, story momentum, and even the vaguest discernible consistency within its own lunkheaded parameters), but boring, it isn’t.
It even has a dandy of a climax, which, finally, is a real climax, and unlike modern movie-making tradition, doesn’t have any climaxes that come after it. It’s the exact same one as the first King Kong movie, with the big monkey and the girl on top of the tall building, and the bi-planes attacking, but they get it right, and it adds a whirl or two of stomach-juggling vertigo that the original didn’t have, and it even tugs the old heartstrings and gets away with it. You might well wonder why we took three hours to get around to the one stand-out scene in the picture, and why the best thing in it was something that stayed closest to the 1933 original. Well, you might not wonder so much about the latter.
The special effects work is a mixed bag of beans. The dinosaurs look lovely and everything, and the creepy things are creepy, but some of what used to be called the process work is astoundingly tailored to completely convince you that the actors flailing and blubbering around were working in front of a screen and had utterly nothing to do with the bazillions of dollars worth of computer monsters ballomping around in the background. There’s more shots like that in the finished product than you would expect in a megatronic ultra-production of the 21st Century.
The irony is that the old King Kong did more with less. Less monsters, so the impact of each was greater, less climaxes, so that the dramatic highpoints registered as such, and less technology to work with. The effect of the latter is interesting. With Willis O’Brien’s little stop-motion creatures, there was a little in-built charm to go along with the wonkiness. Something about the process inspired the viewer to suspension of disbelief, or if you prefer, to go along with the gag and be a co-conspirator in helping the movie folk tell the story.
The irony seems to be, the more you give people, the more they want. The current movie-going contract is that the industry professes, and people expect, that they can show us anything and make it work 100%. When it doesn’t, we see the wires and the camera-guy’s thumb-print, or whatever, and we’re knocked out of the illusion.
Anyway, that’s all gilding the lily. The main difference between King Kong (1933) and King Kong 2005, other than the former being a timeless classic and the latter being a gigantic exploding birthday cake, is that the original was a much more efficient storytelling apparatus. It didn’t try to be all different ingredients on the planet piled onto the one pizza. It had a simple if odd story of a giant monkey, unattainable love and the occasional dinosaur battle told with imagination and heart. It captured a little bit of wonder.
The newer version thinks that if we know the characters better, we’ll get more out of them, ensures that they’re all unlikeable, boring, or strictly-from-hunger cardboard cut-outs, and then completely ignores everything it took untold ages to tell us about them anyway. It thinks ten monsters is better than one monster. It drowns the skeleton of the essential story in a tidal wave of unending steroid-pumped climaxes. It tries to be funny here and there and is everything but; and spends most of its time trying to be monumentally serious and significant, resulting in occasional uncontrollable hilarity. By the time it hits the final climax out of the ball-park, you’re more climaxed-out than Linda Lovelace, but at least it’s over and they hit a home run. And then they give Jack Black of all people, the big bring-it-home line, and the Great Score-Keeper of Moviedom sadly shakes his head and erases that homer off the scorecard. No runs, one hit, too many errors.
On the acting side of the ledger, bearing in mind the script was doing nobody any great favours, Naomi Watts couldn’t have been much better. The role’s not exactly Mrs Macbeth, but she registers exactly the way she’s meant to. The scene they’ve brilliantly Frankensteined into innovative life where she “establushes a ree-leetionship” with Kong by doing circus-tricks and tap-dancing for him is a stunning example of cloth-headed miscalculation at its finest, but her charm survives the thoroughly embarrassing ordeal, possibly rather better than the luckless viewer does.
Jack Black’s trademark, err, “thespian delivery” and attempts at intense gazing in a dramatic category are some of the funniest work he’s ever done, the only minor problem being that wasn’t either the job or the intention here. Anyone whose head wasn’t rowing way waaay up the ol’ Alimentary Canal could have seen that problem coming. Almost anyone off the set of Law and Order – any set of initials – could have filled this role better, possibly including the guy who gets the coffee. His delivery of the famous “Beauty that killed the beast” line will stand alongside any “Yonder lies da castle of my fadder” moment in craptastic Hollywood acting history.
Adrien Brody’s puppy-dog eyes routine and tragically wistful nose-acting are a complete monument to inertia in this movie. Admittedly the character’s a major wet-end to start with, but all I could think of watching him in this was that if you threw a truckload of dynamite into this guy and made him swallow a match, he’d fizz quietly for a while, and then hold up a flag with “Pop!” written on it. I guess if I was in his position, well…Actually I can see myself immediately entering into fierce litigation with my agent. The reality is that pretty much anyone short of Jesus would have taken the money, and handkerchiefs the size of football fields don’t buy themselves.
King Kong himself is pretty good. They used that facial-animotion-captivating stuff to get Andy Serkis’s acting into the monkey’s dial, and other than him pulling a Gary Coleman “Whatchoo talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?” face every time he’s angry, it works quite well, and the animation of the rest of him moving about looks like a giant gorilla rather than a man in a monkey-suit.
The only other guy in the movie who gets the job done is Thomas Kretschmann as the Schipp Kaptainn, and the quiet fatalistic dignity he brings to the barest detectable wisp of a role should earn some sort of Peter Cushing Memorial Award, for rugged, thankless labour against all possible odds in the field of Actoring.
A lot of gruelling hard work went into King Kong 2005, and not just on the audience’s side of the screen. For all the ceaseless pelting with monsters and knee-knocking danger, it’s a grim-faced, laborious undertaking of inordinate length without a detectable trace of redeeming humour (except by complete accident), so the legion of fans of Muster Jeckson’s Load of them Rings pictures ought to be in hog-heaven, you should pardon the expression.
To anyone else, with a wisp of imagination, an interest in classic movies, and a mind-set of some suspicion toward the apparently unshakeable popular wisdom that “The latest is the greatest”, I strongly recommend you see the original King Kong, and then, and only then, maybe sometime later, for comparison purposes, see the original King Kong again. Then you might want to watch it another three or four times. After that, finally, well, you know…you’ve eventually got to wash the dishes.
I figure the best time to get around to watching King Kong 2005 when they run out of other movies, or you’re retired or you’re dead. You’ll have a lot of time on your hands then. About the strongest recommendation I can come up with is that it is, at least, as silly as a wheel (which isn’t altogether a bad thing), it doesn’t get boring when the boring part is over with, and it’s better than the 1976 version when the special effects broke and they wound up having to shoot it with a guy in a gorilla suit.
(6 out of 11 on the much-lauded MPHOAH scale)
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(A brief word about the musical score. In the aftermath of this movie, as dinosaur parts and shredded brain cells rained gently down around the lounge-room at Leapster Towers in equal quantities, I was thinking that James Newton Howard did a heck of a job doing a rousing old-fashioned orchestral soundtrack. And to be fair, he probably did. However in the fine print up the caboose end of the credits, you find out there’s a darn-tootin’ good reason why it sounded so much like Hollywood Classic – they just picked up chunks of the music Max Steiner wrote for the first Kong movie, and stitched that in there. To my way of thunking, at least without having further detail to hand, it would have been fairer to co-credit Howard and Max Steiner in the big print music credit, under these circus-dances. Undoubtedly Howard wrote this score and interpolated (and no doubt had to do some re-scoring as well as direct an entire new recording of) the Steiner pieces, but it’s still someone else’s composition work laced into the new version, and while the letter of the law was doubtless fully served, it would have been, well, nice at least to see some sort of co-crediting arrangement, even if it was “Music by James Newton Howard (featuring themes by Max Steiner)” or some magical word-play along those lines. I mean, that Beethoven cat might be both public domain and as dead as a door-knocker, but when they put out his albums, they don’t say “Music by Fred Conductor” all over the front cover, and then mention Beethoven fleetingly in the liner notes under the name of the recording engineer and the CD-handling tips.)
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SMALL WHEELS, BIG TICKETS, AND A BLOCK RIGHT UP YOUR JAMMER
OR
SHERMAN, BROADEN ALL SHIRT COLLARS, SET THE WAYBACK MACHINE FOR 1973, AND TAKE NO PRISONERS
OR
DOWN YESTERYEAR LANE
A belated reappraisal of the timeless motion picture classic, Kansas City Bomber.
Today’s saunter down the green-fronded paths of wondrous, blundrous ForgottenLand requires a certain amount of assembly before playtime can officially begin.
Sometime in 1973, when it was possible for crazy thoughts like this to occur without anyone calling in the authorities for an official competency hearing, some maverick shishkebab in Hollywood decided there were only two things his next picture needed for surefire box-office destroying success – Raquel Welch and roller derby. The first part was easily excusable in a time when people like Michael York, Liza Minnelli, Ryan O’Neal, Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore, and Michael York were frequently confused with being big-time movie stars. At a time when the mainstream idea of unfettered sexual freedom and exploration basically boiled down to (a) Playboy magazine, and (b) Raquel Welch as the living embodiment of everything celebrated in (a), well, why the hell NOT Raquel Welch?
The second part probably needs some explanation. Basically, trying to explain the not-quite-sport phenomenon of Roller Derby to a modern audience under the age of 50 is like trying to explain nitro burning funny cars to the ministerial cabinet of Julius Caesar, only in reverse. Some cultural outbreaks of their time endure as classics, like the Beatles, Rolling Stones, the Coca-Cola “buddy” container and the reclining armchair, and others remain firmly in their original time as museum exhibits, such as Richie Brockleman Private Eye, the eight-track cartridge, Kajagoogoo and what I call the Landlubber Boat-Scupper footwear special - those over-sized rubber sandals with holes in them, available in all the colours of the super el-crappo spectrum, which were all the rage of summer 2007 and may be the first item of clothing since the Nehru jacket to officially have gone horribly out of fashion while they were still nominally in fashion.
Roller Derby falls firmly, if not thuddingly into the latter category. It was kind of a sport, more of a touring entertainment, and was somewhat like pro wrestling on old-fashioned four-wheel skates. It was skated on a small, banked track, a bit like a less exaggerated indoor cycling track. Each team consisted of two units – five male skaters and five women skaters. The women skated exclusively against the women, the men against the men, except for the odd inter-gender incident between official periods, which was either for comedy purposes (i.e women knocking men over) or to goose the crowd into an outraged frenzy (men knocking women over).
Basically someone would blow a whistle and everyone would roll off in a pack at high speed and high dudgeon (the “blockers”), except for a couple of skaters who would loiter behind, chatting of misplaced baggage and the well-being of family members (the “jammers”). At some indeterminate point, they’d take off like maniacs after the pack, a tremendous amount of elbowing, yelling, chafing, falling over and random violence would ensue at high speed, someone would fly over the guard rail landing on top of the inevitable lunatic old women yelling obscenities in the front row of the audience, and then a buzzer would go off and referees would award points on some mystifying basis that may have been based on neatest dressed team member, most prolific bleeding, or best gob into the crowd for all the majority of the audience could ever work out.
While there were, at some point, leagues, and even rival major leagues, this was hardly the issue, and not something that was ever really observed with religious Major League Baseball type strictness. Basically it was a touring show, there was one good-guy team, known in the business as the “white-shirt” team, and one bad-guy team, known as the “red-shirt” team. That was all the fans needed to know, and the skaters performed accordingly.
At one point in 1973, it was big enough to draw crowds in the tens of thousands in outdoor US arenas. At another point in 1973, Roller Derby owner Jerry Selzer made his famous speech which still echoes down the ages: “Today is December 7, 1973, and tomorrow, December 8, 1973, Roller Derby as we know it will cease to exist.”
On that note, Selzer sold Roller Derby to his direct rival, the Roller Games, and about one whole year later, they were cactus as well. You can see how the business tended to the ephemeral side of things.
You can also probably see why it wasn’t an act of unequivocal showbiz genius to bring a roller derby picture out in 1973. The defiantly non-genius result was the much-celebrated motion picture classic, Kansas City Bomber, a roller derby picture starring Raquel Welch, the latter phrase still inspiring a certain amount of innocent hilarity in yours truly all these years later.
Certainly the crowds occasionally glimpsed camouflaged in between empty seating in what were evidently depressingly real roller derby arenas - and apparently shot at real roller games - sometimes swell to the point where there might be as many as 137 people present, if you included officials, skaters, cameramen, and the announcing crew.
Even weirder, Raquel Welch only plays about two minutes of movie footage as a member of the Kansas City team before leaving, and also despite which, she is known as “KC” for the remainder of the movie. In terms of both movie title and nickname, it’s probably just as well that she didn’t start out playing for a franchise based at Intercourse, Pennsylvania.
By now you’re probably wondering when this amazing old fart, err, that is, your esteemed interweb host, will get around to telling us the blot of the blay, and the good news is that blot is now, and also, given the painstaking depth of the screenwriting, we should be free of this section within about three minutes, allowing time for beverage preparation.
OK, so Raquel Welch – or KC as she’s known throughout the travesty, err movie – is transferred to our good-guy roller derby team for the purposes of fiction, the slightly hilariously named Portland Loggers. There she immediately meets with the emnity and suspicion of much of the close-knit bunch of Casting Central hamhocks making up the team, and in particular their long-term #1 female skater and all-gender drinking champion, Jackie Burdette, played with a winning disregard for hair care and make-up niceties, by 60s/70s movie icon Helena Kallianiotes.
The Big H plays her character with a kind of foul-tempered, animal, snotty disregard that you just don’t see in leading ladies anymore, and without a lot of obvious help from the script manages to strongly convey that she’s previously humped half of Portland and knocked out the other half, and without a lot of regard for which locker-room preference those halves fell into. One of the undoubted, and few, highlights of Kansas City Bomber is Helena’s uncanny ability to decant and consume alcohol from a bewildering array of containers and in any location and circumstances. She’s also guilty of larceny in that she steals the picture pretty much every time she’s on, and does so while apparently half-asleep, but given the circumstances, that’s more of a misdemeanour than a Federal offence.
Other than a rather stern, be-suited, Dick Tracy-jawed, and coiffured den mother type that runs the women’s team and only reveals her rather obvious sexual preference with a non-gross but presentably off-colour line of dialogue late in the business when you pretty much think they must have forgotten all about it, the team-mates tend to the forgettable, and/or cookie-cutter usual suspects types. There’s the good-girl type who buddies up with Raquel Welch, named with great consideration “Lovey”, so I guess the script-guys were watching Gilligan’s Island around that time. And there’s the loveable lunk-headed, but slightly simple big guy on the male team, who absolutely should be named ‘Moose’ and would be in any other self-respecting starvation row picture like this, but I guess the script-guys weren’t watching The Archie Show around that time. You know from frame one that both of these characters will come to a no-good ending, and suffice to say that when God was handing out predictability, this movie kept coming back for more like a fat guy on Lasagne Buffet night.
OK, I left one out – the slimy owner of the team, played by slimy Kevin McCarthy, who was no oil painting when everyone in Hollywood was out for a smoke in 1957 and he somehow got selected for the lead role in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and 16 years later, well let’s just say you don’t want to approach the scenes where Kev and Raquel attempt lip-smearing and entry-level simulated tonsil-hockey with a full stomach, a queasy stomach, or perhaps just a stomach.
Any attempts at describing the plot in greater detail tend to be foiled, much like many Australian lakes, rivers and dams at the moment, by a comprehensive lack of viable raw material. Predictable it may be when it’s coherent, but the viewer soon gathers that no-one was a real stickler in the coherence area on this project.
Raquel is depicted as a single mom with two kids living back on the homestead with a rigorously annoying mother, but it’s not like they actually resolve the part about her wanting to spend more time with them. Her mom just yells at her a few times every so often, Raquel and the kids mope about being away from each other, and ‘we just leave it there’, as the clergyman observed to the performance artist.
She is depicted as a modern 70s woman going places in her life, but it’s not like you can work out where she thinks she’s going, exactly how she’s going to get there via roller derby, why she’s playing tonsil hockey with a guy in a shocking rug who she doesn’t like, and why the final non-plot-twist of the movie is apparently meant to be a triumphant resolution despite any hard evidence that would convince any idiot who sat through the picture.
In fact I feel sure that the only people in the history of God’s green earth who got anything out of the ending of Kansas City Bomber were the makers of Rollerball two years later, since they basically grafted it directly onto the ending of their movie right down to the final freeze-frame, only they did it with a point, and it successfully resolved something, and made sense.
Basically Kansas City Bomber much like other revolutionary breakthroughs in cinematic experimentation like Last Year at Marienbad, Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil and the entire Smokey & The Bandit franchise, pretty much runs nowhere in particular, without any particular recognisable narrative drive in any direction, and then it stops. Eventually.
Highlights to look out for:
- The more lifelike of Raquel’s two kids in the movie is actually Jodie Foster. Presumably when she’s negotiating for her next bazillion dollar role these days, Kansas City Bomber is one movie the Jodester tends to leave off the resume.
- Raquel lives up to her main job in the movie, in that she manages to look good in everything, not only the rather dopey roller derby outfit with the traditional satin-look shorts worn OVER the long, thick mosquito-resistant tights, but also in some astoundingly dowdy 70s hipster mom-wear she saves for visits to the kids, including a memorably Wrongway Feldman combination of a bottle-green cardigan clashing nicely with an unearthly beige three-quarter length skirt that screams “Fast food waitress, Anytown”, and a white wing-keel collar shirt that manages to successfully collide gratingly with both other items.
- Raquel’s screamingly obvious stunt double, with an ironing-board physique and a Cousin Itt wig pasted firmly all around her head so that no one will notice the delicate subterfuge.
- The portion of the climactic scene where Helena and Raquel actually do their own stunt-work, in which what has previously resembled a two woman war-zone suddenly looks like a fully-clothed lesbian mutual-groping scene gone mysteriously awry.
- Raquel almost kind of acts in the picture. I mean, you see worse on television every night. Her one great scene is near the end when she cuts a ripper of a bad-guy promo speech on Helena Kallianiotes which compares favourably with almost any heel female utterance in sports or entertainment history, short of Germaine Greer’s famously warm-hearted, well-received and timely farewell to Steve Irwin. The only problem is, Raquel is meant to be the good guy in the ensuing scene, but by that stage, I’m presuming that all creative and production staff were too busy preparing their next art movie or applying for the dole to concern themselves with such mundane technical matters.
- Despite the fact that there’s endless amounts of transitional footage of everyone sitting around on a bus on a highway, with vroom-vroom noises helpfully dubbed on the soundtrack, wherever they get off, they wind up back in the exact same arena. Apparently Wrongway Feldman was employed for navigational duties as well as fashion consultancy. I think they try to depict around 380 roller derby games in this movie, and at most they all seem to be held in two arenas. Actually, after awhile, you tend to notice that, of the 43 people in attendance, the same ones keep turning up in the cutaways.
- Keep an eye out for the look on the face of the kid in the boy scout outfit in the front row when Raquel Welch’s character pantomimes punching her rival right in the downstairs smallgoods section. Either that kid was a great actor or I hope they had a tutor on set to de-program him afterwards.
- The most accessible version of Kansas City Bomber, the one showing every few weeks on a forgetful basis on the Turner Classic Movies channel on pay TV, has its own special advantages. First the colour has washed out like a much-worn rock band tour t-shirt, so that everything is in liverish shades of green, brown and grey, with the odd blob of colour recalling the well-known Procul Harum song, A Lighter Shade of Puce. Secondly, they’ve thoughtfully toned down the spicier dialogue – including conventional four-letter words, the odd three-letter word, I think some two-letter words, plus any direct reference to a member of the Holy Trinity other than the ghost – by simply omitting it from the soundtrack. The result in some busier sections of heated dialogue is reminiscent of a mobile phone conversation being conducted while travelling through an intermittent series of tunnels, or listening to someone recite Shakespeare with the hiccups.
In conclusion let me state firmly that Kansas City Bomber is without doubt, one of the six greatest roller derby movies ever made. And let me add, that if you count both versions of Rollerball, and some Mickey Rooney picture from the 1950s, there were only six roller derby pictures ever made.
Ok, so it’s some time in the Clang dynasty or whatever, and the regular folks are doing it hard, while the mandarins, military and muck-a-mucks make out like bandits.
Coincidentally, this is about the only way for poor village folks to get by and actually make a Chinese shekel or two – as bandits.
Which is what two of our three hee-roes in The Blood Brothers are doing - waiting in the hills to knock off “yon rich and weary travellers”, just like those famous folk heroes Daffy Duck and Porky Pig in the epic tale Robin Hood Daffy, only with Chinese dialogue - when they happen to run into the guy who becomes the third of the gang. He is kitted up like some wealthy merchant, but they find, after lengthy and extensive choreographed insane martial arts negotiations, that he’s obviously some sort of multi-task guy.
Turns out Bright Boy has some ambition and education to go along with ability to beat people up in any number of madcap tap-dancing time-signatures, so he kind of takes the other boys, Laughing Guy and Mr Grunty, into the fold, and they start to set up and train a pirate army of the local kung fu kidz, and get down to some serious corporate banditry. *
After an idyllic period of smacking the wealthy around and taking their money, and living in a kind of wooden Frankenstein castle out in the sticks, Bright Boy decides his destiny is never going to be fulfilled there, and his other Blood Brothers obviously think destiny is some kind of underwear brand or card game, so he heads off to the big smoke to try to weasel his way into the army, and tells the other guys and their little money-grubbing militia to stay put for two-three years until he sends for them. Others of greater ambition may have debated orders like that that seem to have a fair amount of air and lack a certain degree of detail, but Laughing Guy and Mr Grunty are pretty much party animals, and other than losing the company of their “brother” are pretty sanguine about the whole deal.
However Grunty’s wife Mrs Grunty has had a wild fling of hand-holding and eyeball-gazing with Bright Boy before he leaves, and they’ve bonded on a deep spiritual level signified by some deep orchestral sobbing on the soundtrack, so you know there’s going to be more to that story.
Eventually, he does send for his former boon companions, but they aren’t greeted with quite the open arms, hog-roasting and free bar hospitality that they’d expected. Bright Boy has risen right to the top of the local army franchise, and for a while they have to show due deference. Also Bright Boy now has a moustache, which pretty clearly indicates villainy to follow. However they are issued with free silk dressing gowns as uniforms, which would double nicely as ladies nightwear, and are apparently delighted.
Soon they and their old troops are vital parts of the official army, and they’re pretty much spreading their kung fu goodness all over the countryside, just like the old days, except now they’re beating up bandits and “rebels” and coining it in at a far greater rate than they ever did as unofficial robbers.
However trouble is a-brewing, because Mr Grunty is neglecting his wife while he gets up to his old ways at the local chicken-shack down by the river, and Bright Boy and Mrs Grunty are inevitably drawn to rekindling their earlier tendency towards romance, and are maybe even thinking of holding something else other than hands this time around. Shakespearean tragedy involving triple-segmented nunchakas ensues.
Chang Cheh, who directed this for Shaw Bros productions in old Hong Kong, was kind of a grindhouse Chinese Kurosawa. He didn’t have Kurosawa’s consistent and pointed humanity, his protagonists didn’t have that degree of complexity, but in and around a certain degree of ever-present cheese in his movies, he had something.
While he pays a great deal of attention to the history, the hierarchy and the pageantry of both the military and the bureaucracy of Olde China, he patently has a disdain, or perhaps more of a savage dislike for their lies and exploitation of the local rural types. In The Blood Brothers and all the other movies I’ve seen of his, his sympathies are always with the bandit outsiders and the dirt-poor civilians, never with the authorities.
His use of wide-screen for composition is striking as well, but in rural settings, he’s pretty obviously conveying something specific in its use, other than pretty pictures. His characters fight, and strain, and plot, (and fight some more) and die, but something about the way he shoots the action in those landscapes conveys a further conviction – the land is changeless and beautiful, and it’s seen all this before, will see it again, and no protagonist, cause, or mighty Don King-like emperor figure can alter this. This tends to give the action and stories of his movies a case of the haunts – a fatalism of futility that underscores even the greatest heroics of his characters.
Mind you, for all that, in The Blood Brothers, you also get a Batman-ballet approach to unbelievably long fighting scenes, overdubbed with hilariously cartoon-like sound effects that even the Three Stooges production unit at Columbia might have balked at, and the level of cheese in the acting of death scenes in this movie could cause severe distress to the lactose-intolerant. Forget what it takes to kill the main meanie in a slasher movie – I haven’t seen a five-act death scene to rival these since Hrundi V. Bakshi’s heroic and infamous multiple passing-away sequence at the beginning of The Party.
Those sound effects are really something as well. For human body part hitting human body part, you get such diverse elements of the sonic spectrum as ‘Baseball bat wrapped with leaves pulverising plastic garbage bin’, ‘Mallet striking giant glockenspiel’, ‘Giant Salmon beaten with truncheon’, plus ‘Assorted large percussion dropped down stairwell’. Let’s hear it for diversity, I guess, and by the way, we do.
If you haven’t twigged already, basically The Blood Brothers, like a lot of Chang Cheh’s other movies, is a kung fu variant on the (Kurosawa) samurai versions of a western. It has certain tweaks of local interest that spin a different take on Hollywood or spaghetti westerns, but that’s what’s at the core.
One other little peculiarity of this movie is that there is almost no blood. Everyone beats the living catacombs out of each other – sometimes with swords yet – and there are enough highly theatrical deaths to beat the band and the bus they rode in on, but other than maybe two or three scenes involving the main guys’ deaths, there’s hardly any blood in sight, and when it is, it’s strangely, err, for want of a better word, decorous. For a guy who splashed gallons of astoundingly fake-looking blood around some of his other pictures, this is a little weird, and presumably there’s a back-story there somewhere.
Anyway, Cheh’s insistent vision tends to over-ride all the cheese, as it did in the other pictures I’ve seen by him. In some ways, he was a hell of a movie-maker. Also the cheese is enjoyable in itself.
Performances are pretty good here too, better than I’ve seen in the leading roles in some of his other films. The stand-out is David Chiang as the Laughing Guy bandit. Boy, does that guy have a great time. He could get major chuckles out of a Russian movie festival.
(8 out of 11, MPHOAH scale)
* (Paint me five flavours of pure barbarian, but all the names sound the same to me, they spell them around five different ways each in the subtitles, and then they go ahead and have abbreviated pet names that they use in dialogue for the same characters. This way at least I can keep track of who I mean.)
(Additional note – The Blood Brothers turns up on the World Movies channel on cable from time to time. Presumably it must have the odd run on SBS as well, so if you keep an eye out on the program listings, you should have a shot of seeing it.
A lot of Cheh’s pictures, some of which are better than this one, were also released on DVD here a while back. The one I’d recommend you start with is The Five Venoms, aka The Five Deadly Venoms. If you had any time at all for Kill Bill (at least part one), I can’t see how you wouldn’t enjoy this. Tolerance for kung fu movies would help too. Incidentally, if you want to buy some of Cheh’s movies, always go for the official Shaw Bros reissues (which fortunately include the Siren versions released here). The restored prints are as glowingly sharp as the tip of a punk’s Mohawk, and are in the full “extreme” Asian widescreen. The cheap copy I bought of FDVfrom overseas contained a print apparently assembled from small pieces of chopped liver, was panned’n’scanned in 4:3 ratio, and had a strikingly mistimed dubbed soundtrack apparently entirely performed by the vocal ensemble responsible for the cartoon series Hong Kong Phooey. Cheh’s movies would take a particular battering from malpractice of the aspect ratio. You’d be missing half the picture in more ways than one.)
Since I’m not even close to posting at a movie per day rate, I thought I’d play some more catch-up netball, and throw in a few Mexican quickie reviews of all the other movies I’ve watched during the M-A-D regime. These, like Lindsay Lohan’s brain-cells, are in no particular order.
All movies are ranked on the Leapster-trademarked Margaret Pomerantz Heads On A Hubcap (MPHOAH) scale.
MURDERS IN THE ZOO (1933)
I’d always wanted to see this since relentlessly haunting the local library’s copy of William K. Everson’s Classics of the Horror Film as a kid, and I finally got tired of waiting and brought in a “public domain” copy (ahem) from overseas a few months ago.
(And finally got myself a copy of the Everson book too – highly recommended if you’re a fan of old horror movies. There’s a darn good chance it’ll put you on to a few that you’re not aware of.)
Lionel Atwill plays a complete zestful nutbar, which was the kind of role Lionel Atwill was patently put on this flat Earth to play. There demonstrably are nowhere near enough horror movies about insane zoologists. Lionel has a spotlessly sparkling modern new zoo (by 1933 standards – although on visual evidence, the poo-hiding technology is still cutting edge on a 21st century basis) which is also in effect, a series of grisly death-traps as long as Lionel is around. In particular visitors should watch their step around that alligator pit.
You see, despite being a brilliantined cheese-puff with a 19th century moustache, he also has a bride of unlikely youth and attractiveness, and he’s jealous on a hair-trigger level regardless of any actual threat to his wedded bliss. (The greatest threat ironically coming from the wife unavoidably starting to notice how crackers he is.)
What they do here is make creepiness come out of a (then) contemporary or even ultra-modern setting, which would have been unusual for the time, and more to the point, director A. Edward Sutherland (probably better known for comedy movies now, if at all) is effective doing it. What they also do is be rather more blatant and graphic about the means of the murders than you’d expect for an early 30s picture, which also results in its own shocking pleasantries.
The opening scene in particular is a match-winner, and along with some other molasses-black humour in there, Atwill has a line just after this scene which is one of horror movies’ most golden.
It’s amazing for a movie that goes barely a knock over the one-hour mark, how much they pack in there in terms of twisted psychology, funny-book science, comedy relief, butcher-shop horror mentality, and even time for a few slow, dull stretches.
But, as an unambiguous and unabashed horror movie, it probably holds up better than most of its contemporaries, and Murders in the Zoo is definitely worth a look if you get the chance.
(8 out of 11 MPHOAH)
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MURDER BY THE CLOCK (1931)
This one I also found via the Everson book (mentioned above) and also doesn’t exist in a studio-issued DVD version. It’s often, if not exclusively, described in the few film books that know about it as a mystery with some horror trappings. This is pretty much a crock. There are enough “horror trappings” here for a solid year’s worth of crap Halloween-themed TV programming, and Edward Sloman’s clear orientation in direction of the material towards horror removes any piffling doubt.
Somewhere between the dribbling homicidal halfwit, err “mentally challenged guy” (Irving Pichel), the cataleptic “premature burial” stuff, the creepy crypt, the spooky house with all the hidden doors and passage-ways, and the raft-full of fast developing murders, there’s really not a lot of room left for doubt of what this movie is trying to do.
For a complete antique, it’s reasonably zippy by the standards of that time. Most horror movies from back then are glacially paced to contemporary eyes at any running length. 76 minutes was a marathon haul by early 30s standards, and there’s enough going on that this is less likely to bore than many of its early 30s horror bunkmates, even some of the comparatively well-known ones.
(Look, the classics are still classics, but many of them probably play more as atmospheric and fascinating fantasy pieces now. Also it’s one thing if you’re in a forgiving mood and are willing to put yourself in the frame of mind of how audiences would have seen the movies then, and you can still learn a lot, not to mention extract a considerable amount of enjoyment. But don’t kid yourself that you could stick most current kids in front of one of these artefacts and provoke anything other than either a sudden attack of deep slumber, or a mass-insurrection leading to the banishing of the movie concerned and a quick reversion to use of the screen for PlayStation-related activities.)
Actually other than furphies like the Pichel character (who is memorable, one way or another) and the “horror-horn” as I call it, which indicates that someone is awake and moving around in the crypt who, medically-speaking, shouldn’t be) the main thing that makes this movie keep right on a-truckin’ is the amazingly slinky, slimy character portrayed by Lilyan Tashman, and her performance thereof. This may be the most purely evil man-destroying female character ever portrayed in any movie, and Tashman seems to get such a blast out of playing it, it would seem rude (not to mention impossible) not to reciprocate her enjoyment. If you know the character played by Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box (or the one Marlene Dietrich plays in The Blue Angel for that matter), imagine the same kind of femme-fatale effect, but less as a force of nature and more as a result of sheer scheming evil. She has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and that works out just dandy for the folks at home. The rest is standard bumps in the night stuff, but it’s bumps with feeling.
(8 out of 11 MPHOAH)
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BOYTOWN (2006)
If you want to save some time and eyeball-wear here, just go back to my earlier comments on Bad Eggs, because this is pretty much the same story.
The makers of Crackerjack come up with a boy-band theme, and the gist is that a successful vocal group of the 80s has decided to reform in spite of past rifts and a fair chance that they’ll look completely ridiculous given the amount of time that has passed.
What they needed to do here was decide whether they were sending the boy-band phenomenon up, or trying to make another marshmallow feel-good comedy. They try both, so they fail. That’s about the fundamental story right there.
There are good moments in both directions that really work (Glenn Robbins’ likeable performance, Sally Phillips glowing presence and real chemistry with Robbins as his estranged former singer wife in one direction; and the ruthlessly sly pure sell-out song lyrics in the other direction) and no evidence whatsoever that the two directions can operate in harmony. Every time they pull towards satire, it makes the feel-good stuff seem half-hearted, cheesy and futile. Every time they go all hearts and flowers on your candy-ass, it renders the satirical elements impotent, and makes you wonder whether Australian comedy has become so drippily soft-core that we can’t even send up a prime target like boy bands anymore, because we don’t have the conviction and guts to send up ANYTHING and mean it.
The tug of war becomes tiresome around 10-15 minutes in, and is kind of an academic issue by the time they come up with an ending that would be perfect (or at least adequate) in a satirical black comedy, but in this context, simply tells the audience they were idiots for caring about any of the characters, presuming they were able to care about any of the characters. It’s one thing to have your cake and not eat it too, but here I think they were trying to eat the cake without having it. I don’t think they really even came to a consensus decision on what the ingredients were. Someone brought flour, someone brought along a hamburger patty, the eggs rolled off the bench and cracked on the floor. It’s a bit of a mess.
Enough is done well, that it’s more a shame than sheer simple irritation they didn’t get the rest right. Some of the songs are pretty good for what they’re meant to do, and the occasional lyric (by the Molloy brothers) is hilarious. Some of the voice work on the songs (including a well-disguised Joel Silbersher from the great Australian rock band Hoss supplying the Glenn Robbins character’s voice, and one sensational female voice doubling for Sally Phillips) is aces, not that that’s exactly what you go to see a movie for.
Loitering somewhere in the echoing abandoned spaces between the satirical movie it isn’t and the feelgood comedy it isn’t either, is a quiet little performance of straight-faced unease and failed dignity by Bob Franklin which is the only genuinely funny bit of underplaying I’ve ever seen from this guy, (out of all the hundreds of tries he’s had at it that we’ve enjoyed the pleasure of, but, still, he’s really good in this), and also supplies the only faint ghost of an outline of how the movie could have worked as both a send-up and emotional involvement enterprise. As mentioned Sally Phillips brings a lot of eye-sparkling charm to her role and supplies further mountain-sized proof of her gifts as what used to be called a “light comedienne” back in ye olden Grandpa Leapster days. It’s a shame that these efforts are effectively futile due to a motion picture that insists it can engage first gear and reverse at the same time and still get somewhere, in the face of all Year 12 Physics to the contrary.
If I had to have a windy punt at it, I’d say that for any future movie projects, the Molloy boys might want to get a-hold of the director bloke who helped make sure that Crackerjack only went in one direction, and have a listen to him if he says the script is trying to go three places and likely to get nowhere. That would be my best guess, for the very little it would be worth.
(5 out of 11 MPHOAH)
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DEAD OF NIGHT (1945)
The best of all the anthology horror movies, and one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen. It’s fundamentally a collection of ghost stories, in the old English tradition (well, the ventriloquist sequence is a story of possession) told with total conviction (the comedy golf story being the inconvenient exception this time), yet capable of thoroughly integrated humour varying from the effectively understated to the blackest of the black.
Each story is executed about as well as its possible to imagine, but the stand-outs from a horror point of view are the story involving the haunted mirror that comes between a newly married couple, and the complete screaming-mimi job involving the world’s most evil-looking ventriloquist’s dummy, which apparently has a life of its own. (Both the look and the subject matter of this sequence really seem to anticipate Hitchcock’s Psycho. *)
What makes it work, apart from good material, total commitment to that material (no undercutting or underselling the supernatural elements), perfect casting and acting, and highly sympathetic and adroit direction throughout, is the linking story which introduces and wraps up the movie, and encompasses each story.
Rather than being purely a blatant device to link the stories, it’s central to the movie, and has the effect of lending more momentum both to Dead of Night as a whole, and to the individual stories.
An architect goes to the countryside to investigate a potential job. He finds a gathering of local people there, none of whom he has met before, one of whom is a psychiatrist. Our nervous architect has a feeling of impending doom, like he’s not going to get paid or something, only worse. He also has the feeling he has been in this exact situation before. The psychiatrist tries to explain this away. The other guests disagree, and each tells a story of some inexplicable event, apparently involving the supernatural, that they have personally experienced. (Which we see, as the stories mostly comprising the movie.)
After each, the psychiatrist attempts to explain these away too. As afternoon becomes evening and the tales are told, the nervy architect continually raises disturbing premonitions of what he feels will occur as the day continues, and disconcertingly, they seem to come true. The more the psychiatrist explains things away, the more the audience becomes convinced he is wrong.
Ultimately things all end in the most unlikely way possible – a horror movie twist ending which actually works, and makes the movie even creepier than it already was.
I think Dead of Night is pretty much perfect. Michael Redgrave as the haunted ventriloquist and Mervyn Johns as the shaken architect are probably the stand-out performances, but everyone’s great in this. The young Sally Ann Howes is so ridiculously radiantly beautiful you might need to look at her through a pinhole via a piece of cardboard. Googie Withers has never been more flat-out adorable (and she’s working against the name.) Admittedly Frederick Valk’s vaudeville comedy Sigmund Freud accent as the psychologist takes some getting used to, but he’s right for the role.
Some film books carp about the flat-out comedy bit with Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford as the golfers. It’s a little slow-starting, but pops when it gets going, and frankly I love watching those two guys work together (they were unforgettable in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes as the two Englishmen ignoring all signs of Nazi activity due to their obsession with the Test Match in progress). In atmosphere and as balance, it adds to the whole of Dead of Night.
I only watched it again recently, and it’s still completely engrossing. And through a unique trick of the mind, re the framing story, it’s one of the few horror movies that actually gets scarier each time you see it.
(11 out of 11 MPHOAH)
*(By “subject matter”, I mean the protagonist parlaying his poor twisted brane into two distinct personalities, not that Hitchcock’s movie was a well-disguised plea for greater tolerance of ventriloquists.)
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ASYLUM (1971)
One of the later English anthology horror movies, another four tales with a linking story, although this one is more fondly remembered than most of its colleagues of the 60s and 70s, many of which had a high snoozer/letdown dud-to-hit ratio.
A young idealistic psychiatrist, Dr Martin, (Robert Powell, apparently strangled by his three-piece suit into a barely detectable performance, which oddly kind of suits the movie anyway) turns up to apply for a job at an old fashioned creepsville mansion asylum. He thinks he’s meeting the mysterious guy who runs the joint, Dr Starr. Instead he meets Dr Rutherford (Patrick Magee) an eerily disengaged slow-talking old buzzard in a wheelchair who thinks all the inmates are incurable insane and need to be locked up in their cells permanently. Bobby Powell doesn’t like that for starters. Rutherford explains that Dr Starr has recently gone mad himself and is now locked in the incurable ward. He poses Dr Martin a challenge – if he can identify Dr Starr once he’s met the star loonies upstairs, he’ll get the job.
Thus, via Martin, we meet the four star patients, who all have a story to tell.
With Asylum, as with Dead of Night, the difference is made by the linking story, which not only offers a mystery (again with a decently solid twist in it, plus an additional creepy ending stab) but also provides the actual fourth story in terms of the film’s construction, which is a slight departure from how Dead of Night handled things, and something of an innovation for these movies.
This is kind of a road company Dead of Night at best, but it has a good cast, and it does know how to work that particular mechanism of using the link to heighten the movie’s momentum and add something extra to the resonance of the individual stories.
As to the stories, well the first one feels like an EC comics horror story, and would have fitted better into Vault of Horror, or Creepshow or something like that. The performances are better than the material deserves, and add to the effect, but there’s only so much you can achieve in terms of mind-numbing horror from slow-moving body parts neatly wrapped in string and brown paper attacking somebody. (Although getting them to move without the means being obvious is something of a weird technical achievement. That leg really gets around. Slowly.)
The second story is about a magic reanimating suit that brings the dead to life (and apparently tailors’ dummies as well). If anything, it’s an even bigger groaner than the first one, and rushed besides, and wouldn’t go over at all, other than the performances. These are all solid, but the blow-away one is by Peter Cushing, and if you ever needed proof of what a quality actor can do with deadly material, this is the definitive evidence right here. You actually feel some resentment that a character as rich and emotionally convincing as this should be piddled away on such shabby material, right up until you realise it has very little to do with the character as written, and everything to do with what Peter Cushing brings to the role. When in the DVD extras on this, Amicus and Hammer director Freddie Francis says that Cushing could do amazing work with frankly hopeless dialogue, and was worth “twice his weight in gold” to these movies, this is exactly the type of performance he’s talking about.
Up to this point, it’s been pretty much the wraparound story that’s been doing the bull-work in Asylum to hold our attention, but from here on is where, as wrestling commentary doyen Jim “JR” Ross often says, “Business is about to pick up.”
The third story features the unlikely, if not once in a lifetime, actressing duo of Charlotte Rampling and “Vita” Britt Ekland. Even though Rampling admittedly does most of the heavy lifting, astoundingly they’re BOTH really really good. I mean, including Ekland. If she was ever better in anything in movies, I haven’t seen it. Rampling has suffered from some mental disturbance of an unspecified nature but involving “certain pills”, and is returning to life with her brother in their country home. To her surprise, the brother has hired a nurse/guard to supervise her. Her mysterious friend Lucy (Ekland) resurfaces from the old days, and tells her her brother is trying to get her certified to take over her inheritance, and suggests a plan to escape.
There is, how shall we say, doubt to the actual existence of Lucy, although there seems to be evidence to suggest she’s around and about. Basically we’re in Psycho territory, which is not such a surprise given that Robert Bloch wrote both the screenplay for this and the novel on which Psycho was based. (Also called Psycho.) What might be more of a surprise for those interested in piecing together the antecendents for Psycho is that the Bloch short story this sequence is based on was published seven years before Psycho.
Frequent British horror movie director of the time Roy Ward Baker occasionally gets called on the carpet by horror boobs for having a much more flat, just-the-action-Ma’am directorial style than guys like Terence Fisher and Freddie Francis who were visually able to convey a convincing fantasy world and madness respectively. The rap on Baker’s stuff is that it had more of a flat TV look. I dunno, to me this ignores too many sequences of his over the years that really did convey a sense of the creeping dreads (and dreadful creeps) and his knack for incorporating coal-black humour (not exactly Fisher and Francis movie strong-points) without interrupting the chill-flow.
Anyway, although humour isn’t the issue this time, the Lucy story is made for Ward’s visual style and the matter of fact storytelling and modern interiors actually add to the effect of a story that includes madness but eschews the supernatural. It’s a real good job, I be telling yez, and the ultimate pay-off, which occurs after the tale is told, back in the linking section, might be predictable, but nonetheless raises a decent chill.
Then it’s all rousing thud and blunder through to the end. The final prisoner, Dr Byron (Herbert Lom) is convinced he’s as sane as you or I, he’s just being victimised by his jealous former colleague Dr Rutherford. Oh and did I mention he makes odd little disturbing dolls with robot like metal-shell bodies but human facial features, which he says are a perfect likeness of a human being, including internally, and the brain. And he plans to bring them to life and exact revenge on Dr Rutherford. And you thought Lom was mad as Inspector Dreyfuss in the Pink Panther movies. (His playing of hurt dignity and professional demeanour played off against apparent madness is really something here, other than a couple of green eggs’n'ham moments forced on him by script and direction later on.)
Then it’s back downstairs, as Dr Martin has to meet with Dr Rutherford to announce which of the candidates from upstairs he believes was once Dr Starr who used to run the asylum. Only we haven’t quite heard the last of Dr Byron and his mad little dolls.
Asylum eventually pays off pretty big for an anthology horror movie of the time. The surrounding story and the final two sequences are solid, and the opening couple of stories are no great trauma to sit through, and at least move along and are well acted, if nothing else.
It borrows from its betters a lot. The very final twist and overall format owe a fair bit to Dead of Night. The Rampling/Ekland story is reminiscent of Psycho, although as indicated before, there’s an excuse there. There’s no small debt owed to the Edgar Allan Poe story The System of Dr Tarr and Professor Fether. The funniest abstraction involves the credit, “Original Music by Douglas Gamley” *, which depending on how you interpret it, may be taken to mean that he “originally” wrote Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain which is used blaringly, ruthlessly and entirely uncredited throughout the picture from go to whoa.
Anyway, the movie’s still good, clean murderous fun with an enjoyable case of the weirds here and there. For some reason the print on the DVD version released here appears to have a slightly damaged soundtrack – it gets a bit shrieky and distorted on the louder sections – unless it was just my copy, which I doubt.
(8 out of 11 MPHOAH)
* As it turns out, Douglas Gamley was originally born right here in Poo-Town, Australia City, USA. Apart from various horror movies of the period, and a fairly long career in movies preceding that, he has the unique distinction of having provided “original music” for the first Monty Python movie And Now For Something Completely Different. You know, with no particular offence intended to Doug’s family, I must have seen that movie around 20 times, and I can’t remember one thing about the music.
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Cheese Whiz, these things were meant to be quick, and they’re blowing out like Marlon Brando’s diet did over time. Let’s pick it up a little from here.
MONSIEUR VERDOUX (1947)
Undoubtedly the coldest of Chaplin’s movies, but I won’t say it’s atypical, because it contains themes he developed throughout his career. It is a black comedy about a serial wife-murderer who sees that as a simple matter of doing business in the modern world when his previous livelihood fails and he has an invalid real wife and small child to support. That part is, err, unusual. What is kind of bizarre is he looks so much like an older but well-preserved version of his old “Tramp” character, and he clearly shows that he still has the physical ability and the timing to do that sort of comedy when he wants to, and he so strenuously avoids doing it. The movie actually picks up as it goes along. It’s never funny until the Martha Raye character comes in and then it gets funnier right through to a memorably sour ending. Not bittersweet, sour. The inherent optimism of the Tramp character has been worn away, and Chaplin has lost faith in most of his fellow humans. Martha Raye gets to be funnier than any other female character in a Chaplin film. She and the character are perfect, right down to her ordering a beer at the heavily champagne-inflected stuffy wedding she hasn’t been invited to later on. Movie is quite slow to start with. Chaplin character is fuss-budgety and unlikeable for roughly half the picture. It still probably comes across as an act of artistic bravery, and although some patience is required, it’s worth sticking with for the Martha Raye character and what follows, in particular a rarely cited but very funny scene when Chaplin is eager to surrender to police, but they’re so busy running about being officious and deploying themselves like gangbusters, that they omit to notice him and assault a member of a victim’s family instead.
(9 out of 11 MPHOAH)
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ROMPER STOMPER (1992)
I know everyone else on the continent has seen this, but the more hyped any movie is, the longer it takes me to see it, and in the case of Australian movies make mine a duration double.
Anyway, basically it lives up to all hype. Football legend and ace free-thinker Jack Dyer once described a then-current player as “Jack the Gripper”, and this is that as a movie. It doesn’t really let up, other than a slight timing and possibly agenda misstep when the skinhead gang raids the girlfriend’s dad’s joint, and maybe it gets a bit dithery trying to discharge all available emotional permutations while deciding on a climax. Other than that, you’re strapped to an evil but compelling rollercoaster all the way.
Russell Crowe is great. Prefer he didn’t talk other than on a movie set and with a script, but he’s registered solidly to resoundingly in everything I can recall seeing him in, and I doubt he’s ever been much more effective than in this. As the skinhead gang leader, he actually manages to bring a baseline humanity and some sympathy to an essentially horrible character.
It’s interesting because this is often if not exclusively represented as a slice of raw life off the streets, or whatever the hype bubbles usually spray around. Actually it’s very much a youth-culture fantasy juvenile delinquency picture, very similar in tone and approach to the 50s US JD pics. It has ultra-realistic Melbourne suburban settings, it raises unpleasant, awkward questions that, as they say are still “searingly relevant to today” and all that happy hodey hoo-hah. But in format it’s a juvenile delinquent run-away fantasy picture, right down to the guy trying to get away from the whole scene, man, and take the basically good girl with him. Anyway, whatever the label they care to put on the box, Geoffrey Wright made a tight, churning monster here, and it’s one of the best movies ever made in this country.
(9 out of 11 MPHOAH)
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ROLLERBALL (1975)
Way-hey-hey ahead of its time examination of the place of sport in general society, and where that society was headed. The specifics didn’t come true (I’m sure roller derby seemed a bigger deal in 1975 *, or when William Harrison wrote the original story Roller Ball Murder in 1973, than it does right now) but the essence did, both in terms of big money sport and the general progression/corruptions of the corporate ethic filtering through human values. In its way, as good and thorough a science-fiction movie as anyone ever did. Harrison and/or director Norm Jewison expanded the societal context of the original story in the screenplay for this, and it all sits just fine. The movie’s utter bleakness – its sense of something vital being lost somewhere along the way in the name of progress – is probably its greatest strength, but the (presumably intentional) irony is that the game footage is as galvanising as it is chilling. The final moments, plus the unforgettably abrupt freeze-frame are one of those great 70s Mona Lisa movie moments. Was that a triumph we just saw, or the ultimate defeat? James Caan is perfect as the incongruously gentle and thoughtful athlete who’s the ultimate killer on the track, and John Houseman is the perfect, patronising, avuncular and ultimately monstrously detached corporate figure. Not to be confused or even compared with the 2002 dog’s breakfast of a remake, apparently handled by people who thought they were making some kind of updated Elvis moto-cross movie, only with less songs and more deaths.
(10 out of 11 MPHOAH)
* (Actually, for all incense and circus-pantses, Roller Derby as a mainstream part of mass culture was pretty much dead in the water by 1975, although it had peaked not so very long before that. If the movie could have come out in 1973, it presumably would have been a bigger hit. But it couldn’t and it didn’t, and that’s the way the dim sim bounces.)
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FAMILY STONE (2005)
Well here’s an odd one out among the movie crop here. Easy-going yuppie type (Dermot Mulroney) who everyone loves takes his incredibly uptight if not totally anally-impacted yuppie girlfriend (Sarah Jessica Parker) back to his small North-East US hometown to meet his oddball, academic, unconventional-values-oriented family. Types clash.
This starts off as a comic investigation of families and personal relationships with a promising array of bizarre characters, and stays that way for just about long enough to completely disappoint you when it collapses into the usual soap-opera and completely predictable, neat “everyone swap partners and live happily ever after” Hollywood sago pudding. You lose all interest in the Mulroney character once he starts whining, which doesn’t let up for about half the movie. Parker is game as all get out, but she’s neither quite convincing (and given the change her character goes through, at a speed that could conceivably provoke whiplash, she was probably working uphill against the script) nor all that funny. For about half the picture before they recast her as the tragic dying Mommy from some old Bette Davis movie, Diane Keaton has her funniest role since the Woody Allen films, and she’s really fantastic in it, and provokes most semblances of life the movie has. I also thought Craig T. Nelson did a nice, quietly eccentric, dignified job of movie-stealing as the Dad. Someday someone should have a crack at making a movie that basically steals the opening 20 minutes or so of this, and then tacks on a middle and ending that kind of match. Family Stone isn’t that movie, obviously, and I’d be struggling to think of any reason why you really needed to see it, unless you’re a Diane Keaton fanatic, or you have the discipline to watch the first 20 mins/half an hour and turn it off when it jack-knifes and heads straight down the old S-bend. If you want a movie with weird family relationships and oddball damaged types that has the strength of mind to stay on the straight and narrow and avoid the suds-bath of convention, you’re probably better off sticking with The Opposite of Sex.