1977 - EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC, very strange sequel to The Exorcist

You have to give credit to the executives at Warner Brothers who green lite this sequel to The Exorcist. They could have easily went for the quick cash grab and knocked out a film that would have rehashed all of the violent and vomit scenes from the first film.  Warner Brothers sparred no expense with this film. A top notch director, an all star cast as it were, Ennio Morricone scored the film and the production was clearly an expensive one.

John Boorman the director was an interesting choice and signaled that the studio was looking for something a little more classy then some crappy horror movie.  The problem with Boorman was that while he was a great filmmaker he also had a tendency to go very "weird" on some of his films.  His previous film had been the very strange science fiction film Zardoz, a big warning sign if there ever was one.

Exorcist II:  The Heretic went for some high class casting.  Richard Burton played a priest investigating the first exorcism.  Burton was a fine actor but he brought a lot of baggage to his part with his somewhat hammy performance.  Louise Fletcher had won awards for her performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but in contrast to Burton she really underplayed her part to the point that she almost seemed nonexistent in the film.  Then there was the problem of Linda Blair.  Hired at age 14 to play Regan the now unpossessed child. Blair was 18 years old and was by necessity the linchpin of Exorcist II.  However her performance really seemed like amateur hour at times almost cringe worthy.  The filmed was going to rise or fall on her and unfortunately it fell. She was also stuck with some of the worst dialog in the film and there is a lot of bad dialog in this film.

Apparently during the filming John Boorman struggled with the story and never seemed to get a handle on it.  Was it going to be a horror film or a cerebral examination of good vs evil?  Clearly this was never resolved as the film jumps between impressively staged and photographed scenes and some of the laziest and most contrived plotting that would have put a 40's Universal horror movie to shame.

 

Exorcist II: The Heretic should probably be put in the interesting failure category of films. It's got good stuff in it but overall the film is a mess.  Maybe they should have stuck with the quick sequel cash grab approach.

The film was written by  William Goodhart but was extensively rewritten during filming by John Boorman.  The film exists in two versions, a theatrical cut and a shorter version that Boorman reedited in an attempt to salvage the really disastrous reviews the film received from the critics. I viewed the 117 minute version.

1980 - THE FOG, John Capenter's follow up to Halloween.

Carpenter's next film after Halloween.  The intention was apparently to make a classic ghost story.  Working with a small budget but a much larger cast, Carpenter didn't quite pull it off. Carpenter used all of his old tricks from Halloween. There are jump cuts, the usual tracking camera shots and lots of creative ways to kill people.

The cast is almost a John Carpenter stock company.  Jamie Lee Curtis, Adrienne Barbeau, Tom Atkins, Charles Cyphers and Janet Leigh (Jamie Lee Curtis's mother).  The film has lots of little in jokes as well.  One character is named Dan O'Bannon after the writer of Carpenter's first film Dark Star.  Another character is called Tommy Wallace who was the editor of The Fog and finally there is Carpenter himself in a small role at the beginning of the film.

 

I'm not sure what happened with this film. Certainly all the ingredients were there for a successful horror film but for some reason they just don't come together.  Perhaps the jumping between characters negated the film's suspense and horror moments.  Not even having Jamie Lee Curtis back helped much.  Adding gratuitous violence didn't do much for the film either.

The Fog made money since it was advertised as "from the director of Halloween," but this film is no Halloween.

The film was written by John Carpenter and Deborah Hill, the running time is 90 minutes.

2011 - DAMSELS IN DISTRESS, an attempt at a "civilized" comedy

From cultist comedy director Whit Stillman, who after a very long break between films comes this comedy about college life.  Greta Gerwig the future director of Little Women and Barbie is Violet Wister who along with a group of college girls, run a suicide prevention center.  The center's idea of working with suicidal people is to feed them donuts and coffee and have them take up tap dancing as a form of therapy.  The film pivots to the love lives of the girls and has a lot of amusing and occasionally funny moments involving smelly college guys and discussions about sex as practiced by members of a religious sect called Catharism.

The writer/director Whit Stillman specialized in these kinds of what I can only describe as very coy comedies beginning with Metropolitian, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco.  Stillman is not a prolific writer.  There was about a 13 year break between The Last Days of Disco and Damsels in Distress.  Everyone talks in a rather mannered, (some would say stilted) way. Overall Stillman's films are kind of an acquired taste.

 

What the film really has going for it is the performance of Greta Gerwig.  Her character of Violet Wister is very funny as she attempts to bring a civilizing influence to a bunch of drunk college frat boys.  The film is worth watching for her alone. Overall this film is entertaining if you are in the mood for some real eccentric humor.  This film is so strange it even has a couple of musical numbers tacked on to the end of it.

The film runs 99 minutes.

1936 - THINGS TO COME, large scale 30's science fiction film

There hasn't been anything like this film.  Socialist writer H.G. Welles was given a lot of say in the making of this science fiction epic by the producer Alexander Korda.  Welles was primarily known for his science fiction stories, The Invisible Man, The First Men in the Moon, The War of the Worlds and The Island of Dr. Moreau.  In fact much to his irritation these were the books he was remembered for.  But Welles primary interest was in being a social critic and much of his science fiction ideas contained criticisms of contemporary British society something not always recognized by his readers.  

Producer Alexander Korda was interested in making a film out of an original story written by Welles.  Welles was lured into the film production with an unprecedented amount of control on the production, something that turned out to be to the determent of the film. Korda sparred no expense on Things To Come.  This was a large scale production with a top cast and for it's time state of the art special effects.  The film's story is about the world being lured into a large scale world war.  Only after the devastation of society does a new world order arise that aims to create a utopia for mankind.  

 

The film was directed by William Cameron Menzies who had made his name as a "production designer" on such films as Gone With The Wind.   Menzies was a great visual artist but was apparently fairly deficient when it came to working with actors.  Although Welles wrote the screenplay, it's kind of a lumpy thing.  The actors are not really characters anyone can identify with.  They are essentially mouthpieces for Welles outdated ideas about society and government.  Welles clearly thought the answer to mankind's problems was an embrace of futuristic technology.  Today we can see that this is rather a naive political view. 

 Still this film is really something to see, the sets have a real 30's design to them by people who were trying to imagine what the future would look like.  The visual look is impressive even if the acting isn't so hot.  I suppose you could say the film is a magnificent science fiction folly of a film. but definitely worth watching.

The running time is 108 minutes.       

1945 - ISLE OF THE DEAD, horror film from producer Val Lewton

The producer Val Lewton known for his atmospheric "B" horror films for RKO studios in the 1940's was coming towards the end of his run.  Lewton was an extremely creative producer who when stuck with small budgets and at times lurid titles forced upon him from the studio, could turn something into nothing with clever writing and atmospheric noirish photography.  Lewton was responsible for giving talented but relatively unknown filmmakers like Jacques Tourneur,  Robert Wise and Mark Robson opportunities to direct which helped launch their careers.

Boris Karloff who was basically stuck in the horror genre had good parts in Lewton's pictures with The Body Snatcher, Isle of the Dead and Bedlam.  Lewton was a very influential figure in the horror genre and his influence can still be found on many horror films produced today.

Isle of the Dead concerns a group of people stuck on an island during the plague.  One of the group begins to believe that they are being haunted by a spirit called the "Vrykolakas." an undead creature. The film focuses on the interactions of this group while balancing the expected scary stuff the studio was looking for.  Lewton and his writer Ardel Wray mostly focused on character development which was rather unusual for these types of films.  A good film.

 

The film runs a compact 72 minutes.

2023 - MISSION IMPOSSIBLE DEAD RECKONING PART ONE, ??

Of the three big action films this summer, this was probably the best of the bunch.  Furious X was plagued by a glut of supporting players, a ridiculous villain and a bunch of very obvious computer generated action scenes.  Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny had an 80 year old hero and a nasty streak to it that the film couldn't overcome. What all three of these films do have in common is their extraordinary running time, they all come in at a bloated two hours plus.

Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning at least has a sense of humor something which the other two films didn't even remotely possess.  To sit through these kinds of action films and not have a couple of lighthearted moments shows a failure to understand how to entertain an audience looking for some escapism.

The action scenes in Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning are for my money better thought out and staged.  The car chase scene is entertaining compared to the boring Furious X car chases and the large scale action piece on the train is certainly more thrilling than the overblown time travel climax in the Indiana Jones movie.  However this Mission Impossible film lets these scenes go on and on and on which ultimately dilutes the thrills.

Finally, there is absolutely no excuse for the lengthy running time on this current Tom Cruise action epic.  This film could have easily lost a good thirty to twenty minutes which would at least made it more playable for the audience.  The formula for these films is also starting to look like it's out of gas. This is essentially the same movie as the last six Mission Impossible films.  The sixty year old Tom Cruise may be getting a little old for this action hero stuff.  There was clearly a lot of digital cleanup going on with his face. 

The film was written by Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen, the running time is 164 minutes.

2023 - BOTTOMS, uneven but ranchy and funny teen comedy

A couple of loser teenage lesbians hatch a plan to hit on some sexy cheerleaders they have the hots for. To accomplish this they start a "fight club," for girls in their school, and this kicks off a very funny and fairly dirty teen comedy which a bunch of women  playing high school students who don't particularly took like teenagers.  

There is some very twisted humor in this film, dumb football players, a nasty school principal and a clueless teacher who is their advisor for the fight club.  Lots of jokes about school lunch and homecoming also figure into this film.  The two lead actors Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri work very well together as a comedy team.  Rachel Sennott in particular definitely has a way with dialog, she has a very sharp tongue.

 

It's easy to make one of these dumb teen high school sex comedies.  Usually the filmmakers just put in a bunch of silly sex jokes and mix it up with some female nudity.  However this is a rather unusual film that manages to even exaggerate the usual tropes in this stupid genre in a funny and at times witty way and not exploit the women in the cast.

 

This film is almost the flip side to Barbie, a film about female empowerment on the crude side.  Did I mention the film has a lot of smutty (but funny) humor?  The film was written by Rachel Sennott and the director Emma Seligman, the running time is 91 minutes.

1986 - RAW DEAL, Standard Schwarzenegger action movie,

It you are looking for a pure action film with no plot to speak of and a lot of fighting, shooting and blowing up of stuff then Raw Deal is the film for you.  Arnold walks through the film hitting and shooting and generally making a mess of the Chicago underworld.

However for all the talent involved in front and behind the camera there is a curious lack of engagement.  The director John Irvin had proven himself in the action genre with films like The Dogs of War and Hamburger Hill.  The writers Gary Devore and Norman Wexler were good Hollywood professionals and Alex Thompson the cinematographer and the editor Anne Coates were well regarded film technicians.  But nobody seemed even remotely interested in making a good action film.

 

The producer put together an excellent cast for Raw Deal, Ed Lauter, Steven Hill, Paul Shenar, Sam Wanamaker, Darrin McGavin and the underrated Kathryn Harrold as a past her prime party girl.    Harrold is probably the best thing in this film. Unfortunately it was all for nothing.  There just wasn't much they could do to breath any kind of life into this film.

 

At the climax when Arnold shoots up most of the cast the action is so rote that a viewer probably won't care if he succeeds in eliminating all of the bad guys or not.  In essence this is a very generic action film.

The running time is 101 minutes

1968 - A DANDY IN ASPIC, Anthony Mann's final film

It would be nice to say that Anthony Mann's final film would be at the least a decent ending to his great career.  Unfortunately A Dandy In Aspic is what as known as a misfire.  This confusing spy vs spy tale almost rivals Funeral In Berlin for ridiculously complex plotting. 

Anthony Harvey plays a double agent embedded in British intelligence by the Russians.  For reasons to complicated to explain or care he is ordered to find the Russian assassin who has been killing British spies and eliminate him.  Never mind that the person Harvey is hunting is actually himself and around and around we go with this very contrived plot.

 

Tom Courtney is Harvey's coworker who hates his guts, Harry Andrews as usual has the "M" part handing out orders. For reasons I can't even begin to understand Mia Farrow is Harvey's very gratuitous love interest who just kind of shows up at different very contrived times in order to sleep with him.  I have no idea why she is in this film.  Did I mention comedian Peter Cook is in it as a British spy?  A very odd piece of casting.

 

Sadly Anthony Mann died two weeks before he was scheduled to finish filming.  Harvey stepped in and completed the film.  Mann had started his career in the film noir genre but you would be hard pressed to find any noirish touches in this story.  It's difficult to know what attracted Anthony Mann to this story he may have been looking for a change of pace after directing his super epics, El Cid,  Fall of the Roman Empire and Heroes of Telemark, For whatever reason this dull espionage tale just doesn't work.

The film was written by Derek Marlowe based on his book, the running time is 107 sluggish minutes.

1981 - CONDORMAN, another mediocre live action Disney film

My survey of live action Disney films continues with this "thing."  Condorman was an attempt by the Disney Studio to up their game with a bigger budget and better behind the camera talent.  In this case stunt arranger Remy Julian was responsible for the chase scenes and Henry Mancini did the music and it looks like a lot of the film was actually shot in Europe instead of Disney's back lot.

The cast is certainly a bizarre one.  British actor and singer Michael Crawford plays an American (?) comic book artist called Woody Wilkins. Wilkins helps the CIA  smuggle a Russian defector played by Nicaraguan actor Barbara Carrera out of the Soviet Union.  Apparently there were no Eastern European performers available to play the femme fatale so the production cast someone from South America.  James Hampton is Crawford's friend he's about the most relaxed person in the film.  But talk about really weird, I never thought I would see British actor Oliver Reed as the chief bad guy in a Disney film.

 

Condorman is James Bond lite for most part.  Crawford has a series of Bondian gadgets to use against the bad guys and Barbara Carrera was supposed to supply the sexy "Bond girl" stuff for this film.  However this is a Disney film and be assured that Carrera did not trot out her sensual girl spy persona, in fact she's actually kind of a nothing character

 

In spite of the presence of Remy Julian smashing cars up and down a mountain and even with the larger than usual budget, this is still a very lame film.  You know you're in trouble when the best part of the film is the credit sequence.  A constant theme that runs throughout these live action Disney films are the very poor scripts that got approved.  Condorman is no exception to the substandard screenplay rule of these films.

The film was written by Marc Stirdivant and not very well.  The running time is 90 minutes.  I suppose indiscriminate children might enjoy this film with all of the silly comedy and stunts although I kind of doubt it.

1949 - THE THIRD MAN, still one of the best thrillers

For a film that is almost 75 years old, The Third Man is still one of the best thrillers ever made.  This film benefited from a creative group of talents that came together.  The director was Carol Reed. Graham Greene wrote an original script. Robert Krasker was responsible for the excellent black and white photography and of course the film's musical score played only with a zither by Anton Karas contributed to the overall atmosphere of the film.

The cast was one of the best assembled for a film.  Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee and Orson Welles.  When not directing himself Welles was generally considered kind of a monster to deal with on other people's films.  In this instance Welles apparently behaved himself and responded positively to the direction of Carol Reed who was a rare filmmaker who actually enjoyed working with challenging  actors.

There isn't much more to write about this film.  I've seen it many times on the big screen and on television and it still holds up very well.  The producers Alexander Korda was an important figure in the history of British cinema and a man of taste.  The American producer was David O Selznick who always tried to overwhelm any production he was involved in with his personality.  In this case Graham Greene and Carol Reed essentially ignored all of Selnick's attempts to influence The Third Man.

 

The running time is 104 minutes, the writer Graham Greene has said that Welles was responsible for the famous "cuckoo clock" speech. 

1973 - DAY FOR NIGHT - aka La Nuit américaine

Truffaut's film about making a film is usually considered one of his best.  It was regarded as a return to form after a recent series of less than enthusiastically received films by the critics and the public.  Day For Night is extremely well made and very entertaining.  Besides being a great filmmaker Truffaut was also a great film buff which he refers to throughout this film with lots of references to famous directors and even scenes from his own films.

Day For Night also has a terrific cast.  Jacqueline Bisset is the lead actor playing Pamela in the film "Meet Pamela" that is being shot.  Truffaut cast himself as the director Ferrand trying to pull "Meet Pamela," across the production finish line.  Jean-Pierre Léaud who essentially played Truffaut's alter ego in his Antoine Donel films is in it as an immature actor.  Jean-Pierre Aumont who had a long career in film is playing Léaud's father and Valentina Cortese a noted Italian actor is Leaud's mother,  characters in "Meet Pamela."

 

Day For Night walks through the film process in an enjoyable way. The viewer gets to see all of the mishaps and compromises that go along during film production.  The cast and crew are like a bunch of rabbits in heat sleeping around with each other during filming.   In a way the film is about how much Truffaut  loves making films and working with his actors even when it's a challenging situation.  

 

Day For Night is an agreeable film to watch.  It is also basically a very lightweight film.  Like the brainless love story "Meet Pamela" that they are filming, there just isn't a whole lot to think about after it's over. The film is apparently a favorite of many film directors and movie buffs but I think the general audience will probably wonder "what is the point" of this thing.

Written by Francois Truffaut , Jean-Louis Richard and Suzanne Schiffman.  The running time is 116 minutes.

2023 - THE LITTLE MERMAID, another live action remake of a Disney cartoon

This  overlong remake of another Disney cartoon was not the money making success the company was hoping for.  The film apparently will make back it's production and marketing costs but it won't be a billion dollar hit. There has already been a lot of finger pointing about what went wrong. 

 The right wing bunch had a problem with the skin color of the title character played by the singer/actor Hallie Bailey.  The foreign market did not embrace the film particularly the Asian market. The budget of probably 250 million dollars didn't help.  However I would argue that the whole Little Mermaid experience was just plain tired.

The original film zipped along at under 90 minutes, this behemoth lumbers along at over two hours.  The original film had a score with at least three decent songs this new version has additional and very forgettable songs by Lin Manuel Miranda who somehow scored a producers credit.  What was short and compact in the cartoon now is an overproduced mess with lots of CGI stuff.  

Hallie Bailey seems a competent and charming performer but there is so much "computer magic" applied to her it's hard to know when she is a live actor or yet another enhanced computer generated character.  The character of Eric her love interest is completely bland and his scenes just stop the film cold.  Daveed Diggs was a big deal when he appeared on stage in Hamilton as Thomas Jefferson.  Here he's nothing more than a crab and not even a real crab.  The less said about the rapper Awkwafina the better, she's just another voice in yet another computer generated character.  I'm sure the price tag for Melissa McCarthy wasn't cheap.  Javier Bardem who at one time worked with Pedro Almodóvar is now a fish king or something and what exactly did those two bring to the film? A bigger question, what is the point of even using actors if you take their images and completely modify and digitize tham?

 

I fully realize the Disney studio is in the business to make money and they are going to gamble on sure things like Marvel movies, Star Wars movies and their library of animated cartoons.  However the creative inspiration for this stuff just does not seem to be there these days.  The computer artists put a lot of colorful digital image junk in almost every scene in the movie but after a while it just doesn't mean anything.  The director Rob Marshall is supposedly the guy in charge but lets face it the real behind the film talent are the hundreds of computer nerds who overlay this stuff on to the film.  It appears the public is beginning to get burned out on the Marvel and Star Wars stuff and this flop won't help.  Will Disney ever be able to develop new and interesting ideas?

  

The screenplay was written by David Magee who wrote the equally inspid Mary Poppins Returns for Disney.  The running time is 135 minutes.