2010 - SUPER, very bizarre super hero film.

The writer/director James Gunn's take on vigilante violence. An ordinary citizen decides to be a masked super hero in order to fight crime, this a very strange film.  Gunn mixes comedy, drama, violence and satire.  Gunn takes a lot of shots at Christians and has a Christian hero, in this case a short order cook who becoming a masked super hero called "The Crimson Bolt" whose ex addict wife becomes mixed up with a drug dealer.

This film kind of walks the same path as Kick Ass except the female sidekick in this film isn't a potty mouthed little girl but a half crazy comic book store employee who can't separate reality from comic book fiction.

It's hard to know what to make of this film when it shifts into a very serious tone towards the end of the film.  Gunn appears to trying to make some statement about real violence vs fictional media violence and the individual's inability to separate the two. 

However since this is a film, the storytelling gods must be served and good trumps evil in the end.  In reality this story would end in a tragic mess for everyone involved.  Unfortunately James Gunn didn't have the courage to go there.

96 minutes.

1957 - THE GROWLER STORY, another odd career moment for John Ford

Film director and navel reserve officer John Ford was asked to dramatize an incident for the US Navy.  During World War II when the Captain of the USS Growler, Howard Gillmore was wounded during an attack by a Japanese patrol boat.  Gillmore ordered the sub to dive with him on the deck in order to save the ship from being sunk by the Japanese.

Ford brought along two of his actor cronies, Ken Curtis who played the captain and Ward Bond who played a typical Ward Bond character a loud mouthed sailor named Quincannon.

Shot in color with 16mm film by a navy camera crew, this film is mostly amateur hour with occasional moments of the John Ford touch.  Ford really indulges him self with lots of sloppy sentiment about navy traditions, (marching bands, the professional of arms, corny humor etc).  The battle scenes are rather poorly filmed, it's tough to know what exactly is going on.  But you have to give the actor Ken Curtis some credit since it appears he actually laid on the submarine's deck while the ship dived.

Well at least it's short.

22 minutes.

1978 - DAYS OF HEAVEN, Terrence Malick's beautiful film and it's at a reasonable length

Malick's film about a love triangle in the early 1900's is one of the best looking films ever photographed.  The film runs about and hour and a half and believe me a short Terrence Malick film are is a lot easier to take than a long Terrence Malick film.

Slight criticism, for all the care brought to the look of the film the actors have very contemporary haircuts and looks.  Don't know if this was intentional or just sloppy.

Still the film looks stunning particularly the scenes of the mansion standing alone on the prairie.

It's probably best to watch this in the most optimal conditions possible, a good TV with a large screen and a high quality copy of the film since I doubt it will be seen on a large screen anytime soon.

94 minutes, written by Terrence Malick.

1967 - THE DIRTY DOZEN, on Blu Ray

Tough guy director Robert Aldrich had a big hit with this war movie which at the time was known for it's violence.  Robert Aldrich was an interesting filmmaker.  He had been an assistant director to Jean Renoir, Lewis Milestone and Charlie Chaplin.  His style of film making was to hit the audience over the head with films like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Kiss Me Deadly, Attack and The Dirty Dozen.

 

Aldrich was looking for a commercial hit with this film and was also trying to make a statement about the nastiness of war.  The 12 convict soldiers were not exactly the kind of Army men you would see on a recruiting poster.  However, Aldrich sort of diluted his message by loading the film up with lots of little comedic moments.

When you get right down to it, this is a superbly cast film.  Aldrich used a lot of actors he was very comfortable with and added a real live wire by hiring John Cassavetes as the criminal turned soldier, Victor Franco.  Finally there is ex Marine Lee Marvin as Major Reisman the leader of The Dirty Dozen.  This is an actor who is completely immersed in his part.

As a Blu Ray, the film looks pretty good if maybe a little over saturated in the colors.

150 minutes. Written by Nunnally Johnson and Lukas Heller.

1961 - CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF, wrapping up the Hammer film weekend.

Hammer does what Hammer does best, make a lurid horror movie with sex and lots of violence.  Oliver Reed is the werewolf and he looks like Oliver Reed even in his werewolf makeup (ha ha good joke).

Anyway, the director Terence Fisher is good with this horror stuff and holds off showing the werewolf until the end of the film.  The story is completely original and not a remake of the unimpressive Wolf Man film that Universal filmed back in the 1940's.  There is lots of mumbo jumbo about good vs. evil and evil spirits inhabiting the bodies of innocent people to turn them into werewolves.  It's all presented very soberly even though it's a bunch of nonsense.

When it comes to acting, Oliver Reed is in a class by himself.  This guy just never heard of the word "restraint" when it came to giving a performance.  Even in the love scenes he's still kind of a scary guy. 

The film ends with the usual angry crowd scenes of people running around with torches and the silver bullet through the heart.  Hammer wrote a new werewolf story but couldn't entirely let go of the old cliches.

91 minutes.

1962 - THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, disappointing Hammer prouducion.

Well at least it's short because this is a slow moving version of the old melodrama that's been kicking around for years.  You think that The Phantom of the Opera would be perfect for the Hammer treatment but the director Terence Fisher seemed to get bogged down with the opera segments and the mystery of the Phantom.

The film has a decent cast, Heather Sears, Herbert Lom and Michael Gough.  They are certainly up to the Grand Guignol aspects of the story.

Universal took a shot at remaking The Phantom of the Opera in 1943 and it had a lot of the same issue as this version.  It had to many opera sequences and the mystery of the Phantom took forever to solve.  A boring film.

84 minutes.

1960 - BRIDES OF DRACULA, where's Dracula?

A very dumb French school teacher releases Baron Meinster, a vampire and all hell breaks loose.  It's up to Dr. Van Helsing to stop Meinster and his vampire brides.  

Apparently Brides of Dracula had a lot of censorship and script problems.  The film was rewritten by the producer, Jimmy Sangster,  Hammer's top screenwriter and Peter Cushing.  Major parts of the story at times just don't make any sense.  You can see there must have been some issues since Dracula isn't even in the film but has his name is featured in the title. 

Still for all the script problems, nobody knows how to do battle with vampires like Peter Cushing. His confrontations with Baron Meinster are definitely the high points of the film and the final battle in an abandoned windmill is very entertaining. 

Coming in under 90 minutes, this is a film that does not push it's luck.  An entertaining B-movie from Hammer studios.

85 minutes.

1963 - PARANOIAC, sort of implausible horror thriller from Hammer

Hammer's go to screenwriter Jimmy Sangster borrowed from a couple of Hitchcock films to put it mildly.  There are traces of Vertigo and Psycho in this heavily plotted film.

The film is well directed by Freddie Francis who was a top cinematographer in England for many years.  Photographed in high contrast black and white Paranoiac looks very good.

But probably the standout in this film is the performance of Oliver Reed.  Talk about over the top.  Reed plays the potential alcoholic heir to a family estate and he really "lets er rip," as the British like to say.  Whether he is slugging down a bottle of brandy, driving his car through a flower garden or  playing a pipe organ in the basement of the estate, Reed's over the top acting is really fun to watch.

I don't think anyone would mistake this film for some sort of a classic thriller, this is a Hammer production after all.  However, there are enough plot twists and overacting by a scenery chewing cast to make this a very enjoyable time killer.

100 minutes.

1964 - MARNIE, Hitchcock loses the light.

 Marnie is a Hitchcock film that has it's defenders but I wonder if these defenders have actually watched this film recently.  It's not very good but very fascinating.  Exactly what Hitchcock ever saw in this story completely escapes me.  Hitchcock had been critical of Spellbound a film that he felt had a lot of psychological mumble jumble.  However Marnie has as much pseudo psychological garbage in it as Spellbound.

If there is any insight to be gained in Marnie, it's mostly watching Hitchcock load the film up with loving closeups of the actor Tippi Hedren.  She is carefully photographed in about every conceivable way and clothed and gowned to the "nines".  It's been well documented that Hitchcock had an almost pathetic infatuation with Hedren needless to say this situation did not end well.  The problem with Tippi Hedren was that she couldn't act her way out of a paper bag.  At least Spellbound for all its issues had Ingrid Bergman an actual performer.  About the only one who survives this mess is Sean Connery who at least turns in a real performance.

The other major problem with Marnie was the terrible script that Hitchcock put together with the writer Jay Presson Allen.  Hitchcock always claimed he was a visual director but almost every actor in this film yaks away in scene after scene.  Marnie would probably have worked better as a stage play than a film.

Marnie marks the end of Hitchcock's association with Bernard Herrmann.  Hermann wrote a very melodramatic score for the film.  Apparently Herrmann felt that Tippi Hedren was completely miscast in the film and tried to boost the film with a lot of over the top music.  Hitchcock was  not pleased with the score.

Hitchcock's previous film The Birds had it's issues but at least it was an interesting film.  Marnie marks the beginning of Hitchcock's very depressing decline at Universal Studios.

130 minutes.

1975 - OVERLORD, D-Day from the infantry soldier's point of view.

The director Stuart Cooper decided to tell a story about a World War II recruit training for the Normandy invasion.  He ended up mixing actual war footage and carefully filmed black and white recreations.  It's an impressive accomplishment I just wish I would have liked the film a little better.

Cooper should get a lot of credit for sorting through a bunch of World War II footage and picking out film clips that weren't beat up and scratched to hell.  The cinematographer John Alcott used old cameras and camera lens to match the lighting of the actual war footage and except for a couple of scenes it all looks very seamless.

The problem I have with this film is the central story that revolves around the young recruit and his premonition of death that he has throughout the film.  The actor playing the recruit drains all the emotion out of the character which makes it extremely difficult to work up any sympathy for him.  I can appreciate that Cooper didn't want to load the film up with a lot of overblown drama but I don't think it would have hurt to have a little emotion in the film especially from the central character.

Overlord is an impressive technical achievement but it doesn't have much heart to it.

85 minutes.

2013 - MACHETE KILLS, a failed B-movie spoof

Hispanic filmmaker Robert Rodriguez can't seem to let go of the Machete character he created for the Grindhouse film he and Quentin Tarantino directed in 2007.  The first film Machete was over the top with it's silly violence and comedy bits.   But the film also had a bizarre cast which included Lindsey Lohan, Cheech Martin, Steven Seagal and Robert De Niro of all people.

Going back to the well with the same silly formula as the first film just shows how tired his exaggerated B movie concept has become.  Rodriguez pulled together another eccentric cast and has lots of over the top violence but it all seems kind of stupid this time. 

As the lead Rodriguez again uses Danny Trejo an actor who is so physically stiff he seems like he can barely walk across the set much less hack people to death with a really big knife.  Rodriguez managed to talk Mel Gibson into appearing in his film and talk about how the mighty have fallen.  At least Gibson managed to inject some humor into this turkey but it's kind of painful to see him in this "bow wow" of a film at all. 

Toward the end of Machete Kills, Rodriguez steals the plot of Moonraker with a space station in orbit ready to start a new world order.  It was at this point in the film I finally realized what I was watching was a very cut rate James Bond film.

108 minutes, written by Kyle Ward.