1973 - SCORPIO, more mediocrity from Michael Winner

For a guy who didn't make very good movies, Michael Winner was an amazingly prolific filmmaker.  Scorpio is typical of Winner's skill behind a camera.  The film is loaded up with a couple of good leading men, Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon.  There is also a decent supporting cast with old stalwarts like Paul Scofield (what's he doing in this?), Gaye Hunnitcutt, Vladek Sheybal, John Colicos and J.D. Cannon.  The film however is nothing you haven't seen on television a million times.

Delon is Scorpio a hired killer for the CIA who has been ordered by them to kill his mentor played by Burt Lancaster.  Lancaster is suspected of being a double agent, so he's got to go apparently.  So begins a game of "cat and mouse" as Lancaster the old pro takes on Delon the cold blooded killer.  The film's plot is basically a rehash of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, one of those who's doing what to whom spy stories.

 

About the only reason to watch this is Burt Lancaster who was 60 years old at the time they made this and still running around doing his own stunts during an elaborate shoot out.  Try as much as he could a big French star like Delon could never get a Hollywood career going, for some reason,  Scorpio is just another failed attempt.

 

Scorpio has the usual Michael Winner touches.   On location filming to the point of viewer distraction. The sound in almost every scene has a weird hollowness  to it. The staging and photographing of the action scenes are conceived from about every uninteresting camera angle he can think of.  The whole film has that "let's just get this thing done" feel to it which isn't the greatest way to approach film making.

Scorptio was written by David W. Rintels and Gerald Wilson, the running time is 114 tedious minutes.

1988 - APPOINTMENT WITH DEATH, lazy Agatha Christie mystery make that very lazy

 Hercule Poirot investigates the murder of a mean matriarch who is vacationing with her family in the middle east in this strictly by the numbers murder mystery.  This is a Cannon film production the studio responsible for such classics as Lifeforce and Ninja III:  The Domination.

Hack director Michael Winner put together an interesting cast, Lauren Bacall, Peter Ustinov, Haley Mills, Carrie Fisher and an interesting actor named Jenny Seagrove who wasn't able to really get a career going in films. 

However even a decent cast has to deal with the artistic ambitions of Michael Winner and there isn't a whole lot any of them can do about that.  Winner stages ever scene with his usual direct (coarse) approach to filming a movie. 

The chief liability in this film is the Agatha Christie murder plot.  Once again Christie withholds information from the viewer and spends an unending amount of time focusing on the time of the murder.  Was it a 4:00 pm or 4:30 pm or 4:45 pm etc.  Christie wrote a lot of murder mysteries and they weren't all winners but come to think of it mysteries kind of annoy me anyway.

102 minutes

1985 - DEATH WISH 3, middle aged white guy right wing fantasy or parody of the vigilante film genre?

Sometimes you can learn more about the human condition from watching a stupid film like this than anything that was directed by Yasujiro Ozu.  In Death Wish 3,  Charles Bronson is back in his signature role as vigilante Paul Kersey out to slaughter all of those "creeps" menacing middle aged white people in a run down apartment in one scary neighborhood in East New York City. 

It is completely impossible for me to tell if this film is supposed to be serious or a complete joke.  The plotting and characterization are so ridiculous that the director Michael Winner could not have possibly been serious about this film.  The first Death Wish film was released 11 years earlier and Charles Bronson wasn't exactly a spring chicken when that one came out.  However for a guy in his early 60's he's in pretty good shape.  He has a love scene with the film's female lead Deborah Raffin.  Raffin was a one time up and coming starlet who's career never made it into the big time.  Their love scene such that it is, is extremely uncomfortable to watch but how many 60 year old men would run around with a shirt off?   But getting back to the love scene, there is no need to worry about any additional love scenes,  since Raffin is Bronson's love interest we know she's toast.  

The plot has Kersey showing up to help a friend living in a run down neighborhood deal with an improbably multiracial gang of "creeps" extorting the good citizens of that neighborhood.  This gang of "creeps" probably has more members than the 1st Infantry that stormed the beaches on D-Day.  Since this is a Death Wish film the body count with the good guys vs the "creeps" is just extremely high throughout the film.

After lots of killing, raping, stealing,  stabbing and blowing things up,  Bronson grabs a Browning machine gun and literally starts shooting everyone in sight.  When that runs out of bullets he whips out a pistol that uses cartridges made to stop an elephant, that's when the real killing starts. This 15 to 20 minute slaughter with Bronson and what's left of the gang of "creeps" essentially demolishing the entire neighborhood is how the film ends.  A whole lot of stuntmen fall off of buildings which makes me remember the good old days when people did real stunts and weren't replaced by computer animation.  As is to be expected the police let Bronson go so he can star in the next Death Wish chapter Death Wish 4:  The Crackdown.

 

The director is an old favorite of this blogger, Michael Winner.  Winner was a pro at filming on actual locations and completely incompetent in about every other area of film making which included good storytelling.  But I could be completely wrong, Winner may have realized that this was a chance to send up this film series.  With the death of Michael Winner this year, the truth will probably never be known. Highly recommended.

92 minutes, written by Don Jakoby.

1979 - FIREPOWER, not a winner from Michael Winner

Even for prehistoric auteur Michael Winner,  this film is pretty low by his standards.  Firepower is a confused mess of an action thriller, that wants to be an Alister MacLean type of story with a little more violence thrown in for the late 1970's.

Originally set up as a Charles Bronson film.  Supposedly he backed out when the producer Sir Lew Grade didn't create a part for his wife Jill Ireland.  If you can't get Charles Bronson, (who had no taste in scripts) to star in your film then it's probably going to be a really bad film

Sophia Loren is top billed and although a great beauty she's looking a little rough.  She was probably in her mid 40's when she made this and between the amount of makeup and the wigs she had seen better days.  James Coburn was clearly brought in to fill in for Bronson in some sort of strange double role.  He did what he had to do in this film, shoot lots of people and set a lot of stuff on fire.

As typical with a Michael Winner film, everything is shot and recorded on location.  The stunts are real which include driving a bulldozer through a house or actually setting people on fire.  The film has a lot of action however it's still a pile of crap.

104 minutes written by Gerald Wilson.

1984 - SCREAM FOR HELP, sleaze from Michael Winner

You would expect that sleaze ball director Michael Winner would be involved with something like this.  If you look further at the credits you will also see the writer Tom Holland responsible for such classics as Psycho II, Fright Night and Child's Play, you get the picture.

Anyway this film as been described as a dirty version of a Nancy Drew mystery.  Although Nancy Drew seemed more concerned about solving mysteries than when and how she should lose her virginity.

Where is the  star of this film Rachel Kelly these days?  Apparently she has pretty much dropped off of the IMDB acting planet since 2003.  The rest of the cast is equally unmemorable.  But considering the material you weren't going to attract A list acting talent.

The director Michael Winner made a lot of films which were almost over the top exploitation films.  Apparently he was attracted to this stuff because the list is almost endless.  One thing you can say about Winner was that he always shot on location, no sets in his films cinema verite at it's finest.  This gave them an authenticity but they also had some what of a hollow sound to them probably due to the difficulties of recording dialog on location.

89 minutes.