ATTACK OF THE RETURNED EVIL BLIND DEAD

The first semi-surprising thing about Amando de Ossorio's first sequel to Tombs of the Blind Dead is that it really isn't a sequel in any of the ways that word is usually meant. It's certainly not a classic follow-up in that it looks at the same characters in events subsequent to the first movie; nor is it a Dawn of the Dead-style continuation, taking place later on in what can roughly be thought of as the same chain of events, though in a completely different place from the original. There's no way to shoehorn Return of the Evil Dead into the same chronology as Tombs at all; it is a sequel only in that it uses the same concept as the earlier film, and tells a wholly different story using the same titular undead killers.

In Return of the Evil Dead - actually, if you'll forgive me, I'd like to spend a few minutes talking about that title. The first film, as I mentioned when I reviewed it, is actually titled in Spanish La noche del terror ciego, "The Night of the Blind Terror", making it one of the few times in history when a European horror film's title was improved by its American distributors. The sequel, in Spanish, is El ataque de los muertos sin ojos - "The Attack of the Blind Dead", which not only removes the implication that the same Blind Dead from the first movie are the ones that are returning, it also includes the phrase "Blind Dead", the whole damn reason we're seeing the film in the first place. There are plenty of zombies that could be plausibly called "evil" - and these days, the English title can only really serve to confuse Ossorio's picture with Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead; but you know, they don't pay me to bitch about American distributor's names for movies that were released before I was born. I just want to register my belief that in a saner world, we'd be calling this Return of the Blind Dead, and move on.

So where was I? Ah, yes: in Return of the Evil Dead, we find ourselves once again in a small Portuguese town, here called Bouzano and not Berzano like in the original (this might just be a subtitling issue, but I am pretty sure the actors pronounce the two words differently. It's sometime in the 14th Century, and the local townsfolk have gotten sick and tired of these Satanic Crusaders drinking the blood of virgins right and left. When we join them, they've already gone most of the way to fixing this problem: the knights are bound to stakes, speaking haughty words about how they're going to live forever. The villagers' respond to this claim by blinding the knights with the business end of torches. Do note that in Tombs the story is that the knights were hung in the town square, their eyes pecked out by crows. And let us then return to the notion that this sequel is more of a riff on the first film, instead of anything in the same continuity.

500 years later - or so we are told by a title card, which fails to appreciate the the 1970s are in fact 600 years after the 14th Century - Bouzano is like any number of those little rural European towns in horror movies, where everybody knows everyone else, there's a local ruin with a dark superstition attached to it, and once a year there's a great big festival to celebrate that superstition. Return of the Evil Dead takes place on just such a festival, the quincentennial of the knights' demise. In all those years, there hasn't been a peep out of the blind dead, but all that is going to change if the creepy, lazy-eyed hunchback Murdo (José Canalejas) gets his way. Incidentally, the whole bit where Murdo resurrects the zombies is cut from most English prints of the film, meaning that they have no particular reason for rising and he has no particular reason for existing at all. Let us take this opportunity to once again thank the good people at Blue Underground for making the Spanish version of the film available in such a handsome DVD edition.

While Murdo is skulking around, resurrecting Templars, there's a whole lot of personal drama going on in Bouzano, which boils down to this: Jack (Tony Kendall), the man hired by Mayor Duncan (Fernando Sancho) to put on the fireworks show, used to have a relationship with the mayor's girlfriend, Vivian (Esperanza Roy), and since her attachment to the politician is largely motivated from mercenary concerns, it doesn't take long for the two of them to hook up again, which pleases neither Duncan nor his hatchet-man Howard (Frank Braña), who has been quietly lusting after Vivian ever since she showed up in town.

The first thirty minutes or so of the movie follows this thorny situation, and the gala festivities that take place on the night of Jack's arrival; and then, just when we're starting to get restless, the blind zombies pop up, terrorise a young woman named Moncha (Loreta Tovar) on the outskirts of town, and eventually make their way to the festival, where they kill most of the townspeople except for a handful who make a break for the nearest point of civilisation to seek help, and another handful - conveniently including Jack, Vivian, Duncan, Howard, Moncha, Murdo, and a fella named Bert (Ramón Lillo), his wife Amalia (Lone Fleming), and their daughter (Maria Nuria) - hole up in the church on the town square, hoping to survive until any kind of help comes. Most of the second half of the movie is focused squarely on the people in the church, and the ways that their petty personal squabbling leads directly or indirectly to their death at the Templars' hands.

It is strange to think that after creating Tombs, an undead film notable for so many things, but especially for having a plotline mostly unlike any other in the notoriously derivative zombie subgenre, Ossorio should, in his second Blind Dead picture, embrace with such full-throated enthusiasm almost the exact same plot structure as George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Okay, so let's be fair: if we started discounting zombie movies that didn't baldly rip-off Romero's films, especially the first two, we'd be left with very few zombie movies indeed. And as retreads of Night go, Return of the Living Dead is exceptionally successful. Yet a retread it is, and the precise nature of the retread means that it is not nearly so marvelous and unique as the film that preceded it.

In Tombs, the Blind Dead were a rumor and a myth, only present for perhaps 15 minutes of a 100-minute movie. In this sequel, with its Romero-esque need for the ghouls to be a constant, hovering threat, they're onscreen for something much closer to half of the time, which robs them considerably of their atmospheric quality. Besides that, there's a huge difference between undead knights that shuffle around slowly, hunting for their prey by sound, an undead knights that swing their swords through crowds of screaming people. Return of the Evil Dead commits that most heinous of all horror movie sins: it shows too much, when the effectiveness of Ossorio's zombies previously lied in how very little we actually saw of them. They have become, in this sequel, an antagonistic force to overcome, not a supernatural force that can, at best, only be avoided.

It's not all doom and gloom. I mean, all things considered, this is still a pretty good zombie movie; it just suffers for not being next door to perfect, like the first one. The Blind Dead themselves are, of course, still masterpieces of design; though unless my jaundiced eyes deceive me, the costumes seem a good deal cheaper, more latexey. Maybe that's the fault of how much screentime they get, maybe it's how they were lit. Hell, maybe they really were cheaper. But still, they look way more creepy than just about any other movie zombies out there. And the characters, although none of them are individually as interesting as Bet from Tombs, are probably more developed than is necessary for a genre that is by its nature mostly unconcerned with strong characters. Even the supremely musty "girl torn between her true love and her wealthy boyfriend" subplot is much more engaging than something this clichéd has any possible right to be. I understand that "there are many ways in which it does not suck" is not a rousing defense, but we are talking about a zombie picture here, and you can never take for granted that a zombie picture - especially a European zombie picture - will come even close to justifying its cost in film stock. For this, I must still tip my hat to Ossorio in gratitude.

Reviews in this series
Tombs of the Blind Dead
Return of the Evil Dead
The Ghost Galleon
Night of the Seagulls

STREET FIGHTING MAN

When people like me are pressed to justify our love of those nasty, horrid exploitation movies of the 1970s - and I should mention that people like me are never actually pressed to make this justification, for the other people, not like me, are usually content simply to ignore people like me and dispose of the entire corpus of grind house cinema with a broad-ranging "Garbage! All of it!" and proceed to ooh and aah over mediocre Oscarbait without ever realising that people like me existed in the first place. But people like me are also given to florid turns of rhetoric - one of the objectively good reasons that anybody should be able to support is that exploitation films, by dint of being produced quickly and on the cheap, don't get to dress up real-world settings in heavy production design. For a B-picture, reality often is production design, and this is never truer than in those particular exploitation films which are set on the streets of major American cities. It is a perfect combination: the filmmaker is too broke to use anything but the actual location as it actually looks; and at the same time, the film is probably (being exploitation) a visceral matter of thieves and killers, pimps and whores, and so the reality being depicted is of a particularly gritty texture. These exploitation films, I mean to say, are as squalid as their enemies suggest, but their squalor is entirely real and therefore the best part of their value.

Nobody could be more surprised than I that this musing about the documentary value of exploitation cinema was occasioned by a new Channing Tatum picture, but there you go. Not that Fighting is really an exploitation film, even less than it is a documentary. But in the early going, as much as fully the first half of the movie's 105 minutes, it's more than a little tempting to mount a defense of it along exactly those lines. In the film, Tatum plays Shawn MacArthur, a young seller of counterfeit goods who has an unexpected gift for fighting, which he accidentally demonstrates one morning to a shady ticket broker and sometime promoter named Harvey Boarden (Terrence Howard). Harvey immediately spots in Shawn his own ticket back to the fast lane, and he pushes the young man into a series of underground brawls, which take place in disreputable holes throughout New York City.

A great deal of the film consists of very little more than Harvey shepherding Shawn from one place to another, with the enthusiasm of a demented tour guide whose out-of-town client insists on seeing "the real New York". From a broken-down church in Brooklyn to a filty alley in the Bronx, all the way to a posh penthouse in downtown Manhattan, the two men take in a panoramic slide-show of all the parts of the city that nice people aren't supposed to think about. All this local color is obviously candy for director Dito Montiel, a native New Yorker whose debut feature A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (also featuring Tatum) was set in similarly poverty-wracked neighborhoods. He certainly has a tremendously gifted eye for capturing the essence of a part of the city's identity, the kind of of unerring knowledge of exactly how to frame a location so that it expresses its soul instantly that can only come from a lifetime in that place.

There are many cinematic New Yorks, more than any other city I can name; and this is sensible, for it is perhaps the most mythological of all modern urban centers. For my tastes, though, I've always preferred the films that present New York as a blasted hellhole, and Fighting is the very best of that kind of movie that we've had in many long ages, perhaps as long as since Martin Scorsese stopped making movies about the city. It is filmed by Stefan Czapsky (Tim Burton's former collaborator!) with a colorful, grimy intimacy that unabashedly showcases all of the oozing pores that the filmmakers can find, but never makes its settings seem unpleasant or unlivable, even though they are ugly. For this is where people live, people who are not at all well-off in life; to capture the essence of those places on celluloid is not a glamorous job, but a necessary one, and Montiel and his crew deserve all the respect and admiration in the world for that success.

As is often the case in location-intensive movies, Fighting loses its way drastically the more it is about its own story. The A-story, in which Shawn becomes a great fighter and has to balance his desire to prove himself with Harvey's hunger for money, is serviceable and familiar, if not terribly interesting; however, the major subplot concerning Shawn's attempts to romance a single mother (Zulay Henao) who waits tables at Havey's favorite club, is bad altogether, underdeveloped and completely uninteresting, studded in apparently because Montiel and his co-writer Robert Munic are aware that movies about young sports stars who rise too quickly commonly have romantic B-stories. Though this plot does give the film one of its best characters and best performances, in the feisty grandmother (Altagracia Guzman) who is utterly disgusted by this hunky white boy who is trying to break into her family.

Other than her, the acting is mostly functional, if it is not less: Terrence Howard isn't a great performer but he's professional enough that you're never embarrassed to watch him, but Channing Tatum's one trick is as it was always been that he has an extremely well-toned abdomen and a face that's very pretty in a lunky meathead sort of way. But acting? Perish the thought! Tatum is no more untalented than many of the other pretty boys of his generation, yet that still leaves plenty of room for him to suck the wind out of the movie every time he opens his mouth. I will say this on behalf of the film's cast: Luis Guzmán, in a small role playing a rival promoter, demonstrates once again that there is no such thing as a motion picture in which Luis Guzmán is not a tremendously delightful person to watch onscreen.

The fighting scenes that are the film's titular raison d'être are fine or very good, although there are only four of them, and the last one comes at a great remove from the rest. Nothing about the fight choreography is balletic or lovely here: this is the kind of fighting that you win by being the last one upright, and if that means throwing your opponent through a window or smashing his head on a sink, then that is what you shall have to do. They're actually quite brutal, not as gory as a PG-13 rating will allow but still violent: more violent than entertaining, I'd wager, which is also something I'm inclined to praise the film for achieving.

By all means, this is not a great film, nor even an especially great entertainment; yet it serves one purpose exquisitely well, and tells a clichéd story with enough sincerity that you don't have to be too generous to forgive the clichés. I am shocked that I would ever find anything with large doses of Tatum to be this engaging and - dare I say it? - enlightening, but that's one of the great charms of minor little movies that nobody thinks about: sometimes, you can be really surprised.

7/10

SOCIAL STUDIES: SPRINGTIME EDITION

Originally planned for an Oscar-friendly release last autumn, The Soloist has finally debuted and we can finally learn what Focus Features was so ashamed about. I kid! The Soloist isn't very good, but it's certainly no worse than plenty of the godforsaken 2008 Oscarbait films that did get released on target.

Based on true events, which were given the customary veneer of fiction somewhere between newsprint and celluloid, The Soloist is the story of two men who entered the other's life in Los Angeles in 2005: L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey, Jr.), a writer of human interest pieces, and Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a musical prodigy suffering from schizophrenia and living on the streets. At first, Lopez sees Ayers as a fascinating case, and the perfect individual on whom to hang all sorts of musings about the state of transients in the L.A. area, but as time goes on he slowly becomes Ayers's best and only friend. And as even more time goes on, Lopez decides to make it his mission in life to save Ayers from both homelessness and mental illness, as he discovers, perhaps for the first time, what a human being looks like when he's moved into a state of grace through the beauty of art.

It's a very nice story, although to be perfectly honest, I'm not entirely certain what I, as a viewer, am supposed to get out of it, primarily because of the film's considerable lack of focus. For the most part, the POV is yoked quite firmly to Lopez's point of view, except that from time to time it hops over to a flashback of some event in Ayers's younger days, looking to lay out the path by which he moved from extraordinarily gifted child cellist to adult with crippling mental problems. And sometimes the POV shifts over to Ayers just for the hell of it This isn't really a flaw, exactly - how else do you make a movie with two protagonists? - but it kind of muddies the question of what exactly the film wants to be about: is it the story of how Lopez finds his humanity again? About Ayers overcoming his difficulties? About the transformative power of music? Or just a good old-fashioned Message Picture, designed to make us all aware of the terrible life of a homeless Angelino? I'm inclined to assume that it's mostly the latter; it has some of the same feel of the L.A.-centric Crash, although the exact opposite problem of that film's ceaseless clarity of message. Whatever the case, there's an unfinished feel to The Soloist, as if writer Susannah Grant was so pleased by how interesting the real-life story was that she never actually thought to figure out why. Well, the story surely is interesting, but in this form, not terribly enlightening.

Director Joe Wright doesn't help matters out much, or indeed, at all: he is stuck in the same mode that I at least thought marred Atonement in 2007. Namely, his stylistic choices, though frequently well-executed, don't seem to have any real relationship to the movie at hand. He reminds here as in his last film of an undergraduate film student of good talents and little discipline: every now and then he comes up with a really great shot or cut or sound effect or whatnot, and gives it a prominent spot in the movie without necessarily thinking whether or not that exact placement is really where it belongs. And just to add insult to injury, these moments of brilliance aren't integrated into the rest of the film successfully, leaving a more or less anonymous bit of craftsmanship studded with nuggets of style in no apparent pattern, annoying in Atonement, and downright damaging here, where his glossy ideas conflict with the gritty matter of the film's story. It comes across like he's showing off, just because he can.

And then, there are the stylistic touches that don't even work on their own terms, such as the silly attempt to dramatise Lopez's reaction to Ayers's playing by showing helicopter shots of seagulls flying around downtown Los Angeles, or the less-silly attempt to dramatise Ayers's own reaction to hearing Beethoven as a multicolored light show that reads as an unsuccessful lift from Fantasia.

The cast, thankfully, is good enough to rise above this muddle, almost enough to make the film just nearly worth watching. Downey, Jr. is unsurprisingly terrific in a role tailor-made to his persona: a cynical bastard who melts in the face of things that do not fit into his nihilistic worldview. But you really don't need me to point out that Downey, Jr. is a good actor by this point, do you? The other stand-outs include Catherine Keener as Lopez's ex-wife and editor (giving the journalist a broken marriage was an invention of the filmmakers, and one of very little apparent value), and Nelsan Ellis as David, the operator of the shelter that Lopez tries force Ayers into, in the hopes that it will magically cure him. Both of these actors have essentially the same purpose in the movie, to present a realistically humanist counterpoint to Lopez's early selfishness and later crusading naïvete; both do it with no small success, and I am particularly excited to see a new face in the form of Ellis, a man of at best minor exposure to this point, and talent that far exceeds his name-recognition.

Foxx himself isn't quite up to his co-stars' level, although he has certainly been worse than this in other projects. He's maybe stretching for the awards-friendly Rain Man thing too much, giving a fairly surface-level presentation of a schizophrenic man that's all bout twitches and mumbles, and not nearly as much about the torrent in his skull (though Wright tries to help him out with myriad close-ups). To be fair, he gets the twitches and mumbles down pat; it's not as annoying a performance as it easily could have been. The bigger issue is that Foxx is simply miscast: even with make-up, the 41-year-old actor is too movie-star pretty to convincingly play a 55-year-old who has weathered life on the streets for God knows how long.

The best I can say about The Soloist is that it means well. And it's hardly an awful movie, just one that doesn't have much to recommend it beyond its sincerity. Hey, that's something - it is late April, after all, and we're about to get the storm of shallow-minded effectsploitation movies that we always get from May through mid-August. The Soloist may not be a very great movie for grown-ups, but it is for grown-ups nonetheless.

6/10

I HAS A TWITTER

It can be seen here.

Forgive me my sins.

DEADLY INFATUATION

There is one good reason to see the lifeless new thriller Obsessed, and his name is Idris Elba. I should immediately qualify that: Elba decidedly does not bring his A-game to this project (his A-game being immediately familiar to anyone who witnessed his tremendous performance as Stringer Bell in HBO's The Wire, among other fine roles). But he's sharing the screen mostly with Beyoncé Knowles, irrevocably entrenched in the choice to play her character at all times, no matter what the context, as a sassy black lady, and Ali Larter, mugging like a hacky vaudevillian. It's kind of an "any port in a storm" situation, but a good actor who isn't trying very hard is still miles better than a crummy actor who also isn't trying very hard.

The plot of the movie, to quote a much better screenwriter than Obsessed's David Loughery,* is "just a rehash of something that wasn't very good to begin with." We've got Derek Charles (Elba), see, who is happily married to his former secretary Sharon (Knowles), with a big house in the Los Angeles suburbs and a little toddler child who's just cuter than a barrel of buttons, and a swell job as the executive vice president of an investment brokerage. One day in the elevator to his office, he meets the new temp, Lisa (Larter), who seems nice and friendly and maybe a wee bit too flirty, but what harm did flirting ever do anybody, and at first Derek ignores the good advice of his co-worker and friend Ben (Jerry O'Connell), who warns him that Lisa is on the prowl, looking for a good man to possess. Ben turns out to be pretty savvy, as Lisa becomes increasingly forward at the office Christmas party and in the parking garage, until she unexpectedly quits. That turns out to be just the start of her stalkery obsession with Derek, which takes on an ever-more psychotic flavor, until she's doing things like breaking into the house and lying to police detectives about her suicide attempt.

What we have here is the reheated leftovers from the trashy 1987 potboiler Fatal Attraction, dressed up a bit differently; if that weren't bad enough, the primary difference between the two - in the newer film, Derek never cheats with Lisa before she hops on the Crazytown Limited - serves only to make Obsession that much weaker in the knees. I've rolled it around and around in my head, and I'm pretty sure that if the film has any real thematic drive or moral statement, it appears to be that grand old American standby, "Men are complete idiots", mixed with the equally well-worn "If men weren't idiots, they'd be better able to fend off the attacks of women, castrating harridans all of them."

Seriously. It's hard to imagine a more thankless role than Derek Charles, a fellow who comes across what feel like dozens of opportunities to stop everything with one well-placed conversation: with his wife, with the cops, with his boss, with the human resources guy, it doesn't matter. Elba isn't completely lost with this sow's ear, but there's only so much any one actor can do. He's got presence in spades, no doubt, but he is no better than the role permits. And that ain't a lot.

The film around him, though, is a trainwreck, pure and simple. A horribly bigoted trainwreck. Its outrageous sexism is right there on the surface for all to see, but that's not the only thing about it that's offensive. I'm not really prepared to join in the discussion of whether or not Obsessed is racist - it does seem a bit enthusiastic about the retrograde "white chick stealing the hunky black man" scenario, but to its credit, Elba and Knowles's ethnicity is never actually brought up. However it does seem a bit weird to me that nobody has bothered to notice how uncommonly homophobic it is, in the character of Derek's gay assistant Patrick (Matthew Humphreys), a character whose personality traits are all in the general family described by "catty, gossipy queen", and who manages to precipitate the film's climax by being so damn catty and queeny.

All this is just the icing on the cake, though, and the cake is that Obsessed is simply no damn good as a thriller. First-time feature director Steve Shill (a particularly apt name, given his aesthetic; almost as good as Taylor Hackford) is not incompetent - we know this from some of his quite fine television work - but he does nothing in this film that benefits the thrills or suspense that we've, telegraphing everything like mad, even without the benefit of James Dooley's horrendously pushy score. His weakness is most obviously on display in the scenes involving Lisa's stalking, whether of Derek or Sharon; she hops around the set in impossible ways, possessing the same skill set as a slasher film's psycho killer only without the same bloodlust. There's a certain gaudy charm to the Amazing Teleporting Villain when Jason Voorhees is doing it; when it's a reed-thing pin-up girl in what purports to be a vaguely realistic domestic thriller, it is rather obnoxious.

At a certain point in the finale, the only time when the movie really gets any blood pumping through its withered veins at all (if you've seen the hugely spoilerific trailer, you know that this is between Sharon and Lisa), I found myself enjoying the film on the shallow but present level of cheap exploitation: two girls beating each other up and destroying a house. It actually got me thinking about how, in another age and with a different production crew, Obsessed might have even been a good blaxploitation film. It's easy to imagine Sharon being played by a young Pam Grier as the avenging black woman out to stop the grasping white bitch who's trying to control a black man, just in a slightly different way than The Man usually does. This thought briefly comforted me, but it just as quickly made me even more depressed. Beyoncé Knowles is certainly no Pam Grier, and Obsessed lacks even the social awareness of a blaxploitation quickie; it is a hollow experience altogether, based entirely on its protagonist's despicable stupidity and unable to connect in a real way to anything human except the retrograde masculine fear of female sexuality. I will not do a disservice to the world of genre films by calling this trash; it is mere junk.

4/10

*Whose previous credits include such sterling texts as Lakeview Terrace, the 1993 Three Musketeers and - God help us - Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

IT IS A VICTORY BECAUSE WE'RE NOT AFRAID

The shamelessly tragic Bette Davis vehicle Dark Victory is a perfect example of everything that the Hollywood system at its height could achieve when everybody involved was working at the top of their game. The result may be naught but a torrid melodrama, but oh! what a humdinger of a melodrama it is! It's films like this that give trash a good name.

Davis plays Judith Traherne, a young Long Island socialite of seemingly inexhaustible wealth and lustful appetite; her chief love above all things, though, is for her family's collection of thoroughbreds (no, not in that way). It is while racing one of the finest horses in the stable, as much to impressive her friends and other assorted onlookers, that her vision blurs and she runs straight into a jump. Her best friend and secretary, Ann (Geraldine Fitzgerald) forces her to submit to an examination by the local doctor (Henry Travers), who refers her to a brain specialist: Frederick Steele (George Brent, Davis's frequent co-star and - for this shoot, at least - her lover). Steele manages to wring the truth from Judith: she's been suffering from headaches and poor vision for months, and it only takes a handful of tests for him to conclude that she has a brain tumor.

Her surgery to remove the tumor is largely a success, except for one kind of big thing: tests reveal that the tumor is indeed malignant, and it's going to return, and this time, there will be no cutting it out. Judith has around ten months to live. Steele, in a mixture of compassion, infatuation, and blind idiocy, convinces Ann to help him keep this fact secret from Judith, and she proceeds to engage in a constant celebration of life. But secrets have a will of their own, and only a few months later, Judith has learned the truth - just about the same time that she and Steele announce their engagement to be married. This sets her right back on the old path of debauchery, as she flails about trying to figure out what the hell the point of anything is, with a death sentence hanging over her head. From there on, Judith is torn between twin desires: to spend her final days in dignity, enjoying the love of a good man, or devouring life in one last wanton explosion of hedonism.

There are so many things to love about this hopelessly tawdry tearjerker, but it's a certainty that the biggest thing of all is Bette Davis, one of the most overpowering personalities to ever splash herself across the silver screen. She was at the very height of her powers in the late 1930s (in fact, she had just won an Oscar the year before, for Jezebel, received a nomination for Dark Victory, and would continue to be nominated for the three years following), and according to rumor, regarded her turn as Judith to be the finest performance of her legendary career. That's debatable, to say the least (I still haven't seen many of her best-loved performances, but I strongly doubt any of them surpass her blowing-the-doors-off work in 1950's All About Eve), but by the same token, there's just no denying: she is fucking magnificent in this movie, which is at any rate one of the great starring roles I have ever seen in a 1930s motion picture.

When Bette Davis lusts, the sex oozes off the screen (she was perhaps the most sexual dramatic actress of her generation). When she is fearful, her already wide eyes open like two moons. When she is sad, she drives her sorrow into the viewer's breast like a javelin. And in Dark Victory she gets to combine all of those specialties in one bravura performance that is, obviously, overwrought and gaudy - but unnervingly, ineffably True despite that. This is the mystery of great melodrama: it is, objectively, unlike anything we might be tempted to call "human reality", but the oversized emotions on display, caricatures or no, is still piercing and manages to feel real by dint of its intensity, even if it's unbelievable.

Oh, how I could talk of Ms. Davis for ever, but let us push on, for the delights of Dark Victory are not limited to her exemplary work. Though director Edmund Goulding was never counted among the great studio system filmmakers (I've seen but one of his other films, the equally outrageous tragicomedy Grand Hotel), he is certainly a strong craftsperson - his only real sin is lacking the same definite personality that made a figure like Howard Hawks so beloved of the theorists. It helps, undoubtedly, that he was here working with a tremendously gifted cinematographer, in the form of Ernest Haller (who among many other well-known and not-as-well-known films shot the visual masterpiece Mildred Pierce), and together the two men created some absolutely sublime visuals, such as the repeated shot of the staircase outside Judith's room, that without apparent effort calls to mind the psychotic instability of a German horror movie. But there is more to Dark Victory than just great cinematography: the film is in all technical aspects a wonderfully tight and controlled piece of classical Hollywood cinema. Of particular note, I'd point out the score, credited (as always) to the Warner Bros. head of music, Max Steiner, though who knows who really put it all together? (IMDb suggests Howard Jackson, but I tend to suspect pat answers to these kinds of questions). It's an exceptionally subtle work for a late-'30s Warner melodrama, with rumbling undertones and plaintive minor keys that are far more experimental - and completely effective - than most Hollywood scores of the same period.

Outside of Davis, the cast is quite effective, in the main (Brent is a bit bland as the romantic lead): Fitzgerald is an absolute marvel, sardonic and rueful, and it seems unforgivable that the actress starred in so few well-remembered films. There are also supporting turns by Humphrey Bogart (as the Trahernes' stablehand, who has long loved Judith from afar), in an unusual turn in a non-heavy role (Casablanca and his career as a leading man were still almost four years away), and making the most of it; and Ronald Reagan as Alec, a particularly present member of Judith's coterie, who manages to be far less blandly Reagan-ey than he is in nearly any other movies I can think of. Or, for that matter, in his presidency.

Basically, Dark Victory is a nearly perfect weepie entertainment. I cannot in good faith argue that it's an especially robust work, and its themes are always subsumed by its soap opera excess (these being, of course, about the proper way to live life and face death; I also daresay I detect of Depression-era musing about how even the rich, with all their money and power and excess, can't stave off an untimely end). It is, however, a grand movie, the kind that is thrilling and entertaining even as it dares you not to cry at the inevitable tragedy rolling out in front of you. Sometimes, it's enough for studio product just to be the very best product it can be; if nothing else Dark Victory is a marvelous example of the kind of thing that they're not making like, anymore.

A FINE HOW-DE-DO

Here I am, all set up to watch me some Return of the Evil Dead (the second in Amando de Ossorio's "Blind Dead" tetralogy), and I find that Netflix has sent me a copy with a big ol' dent right in it, and the disc won't start.

No worries, I shall be receiving a replacement on Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest. And I'll surely pop out with a review as quickly as I can after that. But unfortunately, today's Saturday Zombie Picture shall have to be cancelled. Postponed, rather. Back tomorrow, as promised (and confirmed!) with Dark Victory.

MAY 2009 MOVIE PREVIEW

May, and the official start of Blockbuster Movie Season, is still a week away, but I hope you'll forgive me for jumping the gun a bit.

Incidentally, there are fewer summer movies this year that I'm even vaguely interested than in any other year of my adult life. A sign of worse films, or my growing cynicism? Read on!

5.1.2009
The earliest tentpole release ever (it appears that next year will see the start of summer recede to May 7), a desperate attempt to keep a foundering franchise alive under one of the most ungainly titles ever: X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Three years after X-Men: The Last Stand poisoned the once-brilliant series, I think it's an open question if anyone gives a damn anymore, or if there's anything remotely worth saying. I will admit that if Fox is hellbent on making prequels, there's probably not a better character they could have picked.

Counter-programming for the wee ones: the animated sci-fi adventure Battle for Terra, which looks so absolutely ugly that I can't even say it. Counter-programming for faux-adults: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, with Matthew McConaughey, being all McConaughish. Counter-programming for snobby cinephiles like me: The Limits of Control, in which OH FUCKING YES IT'S A NEW JIM JARMUSCH FILM THANK GOD.


8.5.2009
One of the buzziest movies of the year - which I think can be blamed on the internet fanboys who make buzz, and not the movie's actual buzz - is J.J. Abrams's revised take on Star Trek. My view: there is nothing to be excited about here. Abrams is a wholly unexceptional producer with far too high of a reputation (Lost is much better for his total absence from its daily production), and the original Star Trek became a classic for the characters and performers, not for the plots, setting or ginormous CGI explosions. I do not expect terrible things, but I expect even less that it will be more than dimly entertaining.

The only other "wide" release is Next Day Air, apparently a narcotic comedy starring Mos Def. I can be okay with that. I know essentially nothing else about this film.

Opening just in New York and Los Angeles (for the time being) - but I'm exciting enough to mention it anyway: Rudo y Cursi, the reunion of Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, eight years after Y tu mamá también, and directed by Carlos Cuarón, brother of Alfonso (and co-writer of Y tu mamá también).


15.5.2009
Of this much I am certain: Wolverine and Star Trek might be good. But the third big release of the year, Angels & Demons, will not be. A sequel to the godawful Da Vinci Code, still directed by the frequently dubious Ron Howard, still co-written by the indefensible Akiva Goldsman, still starring Tom Hanks, who at least has received a new, not-stupid haircut.

Limited releases! The Brothers Bloom, the somewhat-delayed second film by young genius Rian Johnson; Management, a quirky indie rom-com which I expect will be like every other quirky indie rom-com in the last, I don't know, 15 years.


22.5.2009
The first head-to-head match-up between presumptive blockbusters of the season: for the familes, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, the sequel to a movie that as far as I can tell, nobody much cares about anymore, and for the teenaged, Terminator Salvation, the continuation of a franchise that people still vaguely care about but not in any kind of serious way.

Leaving the poor Wayans brothers and their Dance Flick lost in between, doomed to an obscurity that... well, that it will fully deserve, in all probability.


29.5.2009
And, at long last, just under the wire for the first month, there's a summer movie that I am completely thrilled to see: Pixar's Up, directed by Pete Docter of Monsters, Inc. and boasting a truly great trailer - a real rarity for the studio, actually. There's no possible way for it to live up to the standard set by Ratatouille and WALL-E, though, right? Because if it is, I don't think I can survive the resultant ecstasy.

The rest of the weekend looks pretty good, too: Sam Raimi's return to straight-up horror for the first time in many, many years: Drag Me to Hell. Plus, the most recent Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film (in summer? Wow), Japan's Departures.


Box Office Predictions
Since I did the same thing last year, and was fantastically wrong - so wrong that I didn't even bother doing a post-summer analysis - I present for your edification and my humiliation a prediction for the ten highest-grossing summer movies.

Biggest Opening: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Tue/Wed: $35 million; Wed-Sun: $148 million)

Top 10:
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen ($325 million)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ($290 million)
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian ($240 million)
Star Trek ($230 million)
Up ($225 million)
X-Men Origins: Wolverine ($215 million)
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs ($205 million)
Angels & Demons ($200 million)
Terminator Salvation ($180 million)
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra ($150 million)

UNHAPPY IN THEIR OWN WAY

Director Kurosawa Kiyoshi has built a reputation for himself in the last decade or so as a director of horror movies - indeed, one of the directors of horror movies, a veritable patriarch of the contemporary J-horror film. Thus, it's at least a touch surprising that his latest movie, Tokyo Sonata, sees him working in a completely different mode: it's a lightly satiric drama about economic hardship in a global economy. So maybe it is a horror movie after all, but one whose terrors are mostly existential.

Tokyo Sonata centers around the travails of the Sasaki family, beginning with the day that father Ryuhei (Kagawa Teruyuki) is laid off from his white collar position in favor of cheaper Chinese labor. Embarrassed to be thus reduced to a common, useless member of the unemployed, Ryuhei hides his misfortune from the rest of his family, turning into a petty domestic tyrant, and making the other Sasakis' lives absolute hell. His wife Megumi (Koizumi Kyoko) deals with this in the same quietly seething matter that she's dealt with all her married life, but things start to get really unpleasant when Ryuhei starts to impose his arbitrary will upon their two boys. The elder, Takashi (Koyanagi Yu), sets his mind on fleeing Tokyo by joining the American military under a newly-enacted treaty between Japan and the U.S. while the younger, Kenji (Kai Inowaki), takes out his frustrations on his gormless teacher (Kojima Kazuya) and rebels against his parents' authority in the sneakiest way he can imagine: using his lunch money to pay for piano lessons, something his father is horribly opposed to for reasons that are never even hinted at. This is all, by the way, mostly just the set-up to things that happen later on, which I will allow to go unmentioned; not because the film relies in any great way on narrative surprises, but because if I start to relate everything that happens to the Sasakis, you will probably get the idea that Tokyo Sonata is plottier than is actually the case.

To an American viewer, the most immediately noteworthy thing about the film is how strangely it has been put together. Befitting its title, it has roughly the structure of a sonata, rather than a typical Hollywood three-act or four-act format, and this means that the film has fast and slow passages, feeling altogether wonky in a world where movies are usually either quick-moving or deliberate, but rarely both of them. Too, there aren't very many films that mix sober drama with wry humor in one and the same moment, so that it's never completely clear whether we're meant to laugh or not at something that may be funny or may be very tragic.

I don't see this as being some kind of cunning plot by Kurosawa to keep us off-kilter; I think he's trying to honestly reflect the fact that sometimes life is horrible and funny at the same time. For without a doubt, Tokyo Sonata is meant to be a reflection of real life, albeit a reflection colored with no mean amount of poetic realism. And allegory. My oh my, is there a lot of allegory to be found here, in what is clearly a story about Japan's Position Early In The Third Millennium. As much as anything else, the film's story is a case study in what happens when masculine financial authority is destabilised, or if you prefer, about the pegs getting knocked out from under a patriarchal leader. That the Sasaki clan is a metaphorical stand-in for Japanese culture as a whole (threatened by the indiscriminate rampages of Chinese Maoist capitalism; seduced and humiliated by the American military; discouraged from personal expression) is obvious to the point of redundancy; really, the film wears some of its allegorical colors a bit too brightly for my taste, especially in the case of Ryuhei and Takashi.

That might actually be the single largest flaw with Tokyo Sonata: it's quite precious and overdetermined in many ways. Kurosawa, lest we forget, is not used to making social dramedies, but visually assaulting horror pictures; the skill set required by one is practically the opposite of the skill set required by the other. When things in his new movie would be best-served by a light, even invisible authorial hand, the screenplay (which Kurosawa co-wrote with Tanaka Sachiko) invariably goes for the anvilicious and obvious. It is not a bad movie at all, nor is it graceful, and the further it drifts into outright magical realism - and the back half of the movie is nearly all magical realism - the more that Kurosawa's approach seems to hurt the material.

But here I am, complaining non-stop about a movie that, if it's not an earth-shattering work, still is one of the better things out there right now! For starters, it's pretty well-acted, right across the board, with special notice going to Kagawa and Kai: the former for hitting the incredibly deft balancing act inherent in the screenplay of making Ryuhei an incompetent sad-sack with a truly threatening edge, but still allowing us to know his private shame enough that he's still sympathetic, and the latter for taking the most mysterious figure in the screenplay (until Megumi, at the end) and making him seem real and explicable.

Also, though I may rag on Kurosawa for not stressing the right elements of the movie in the right order, I'd be a damned liar if I didn't give him credit for being a better-than-normal visual filmmaker; though perhaps some of that has to do with cinematographer Ashizawa Akiko. Either way, Tokyo Sonata is blessed with a lovely, high-grain aesthetic that gives the movie a worn-out feeling, neatly mirroring the world-weariness that each of the Sasakis feel in some measure or another. If it is not an especially inventive-looking work, it compensates by being tremendously well-executed.

Ultimately, the film isn't anything particularly special, and it suffers from some very grievous storytelling flaws. But it's entertaining enough, and smart enough to pass muster as a better-than-average art-house film. Admittedly, the single best reason to see it is probably the curiosity factor of watching a horror master dabbling in domestic drama, but such experiments have turned out much worse, and Tokyo Sonata is happily not without its charms, though it is undoubtedly a minor work.

7/10

YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH

It's probably the case that the individual's response to 17 Again is primarily a condition of said individual's response to teenybopper idol Zac Efron: how charming and cute does one find him, how satisfying a comic actor, how generally appealing &c. I base this belief on the fact that Efron is in a very, very large amount of the movie, and the whole endeavor seems especially constructed to showcase his transition from the High School Musical Disney ghetto. For myself, I do not have a particularly high opinion of Mr. Efron, and my concurrent opinion of his movie is that it is at best intermittently cute with a couple of really great supporting performances.

The plot: Mike O'Donnell (Matthew Perry) is a miserable S.O.B. with a pointless job that's going nowhere after 16 years and a failing marriage to his high-school sweetheart Scarlett (Leslie Mann), whom he wed after knocking her up senior year. On one particularly lousy afternoon, having been fired and facing down a court date where his divorce will be finalised, Mike visits his old school, remembering the glory days of being the star of the basketball team; while he's wallowing, a spritely old janitor (Brian Doyle-Murray) asks if he wishes to have it all back. Yes, sighs a despondent Mike, and later that same night, he watches as the old janitor apparently jumps off a bridge. Except that the bridge is some kind of swirly gate of magical portent, and it sucks Mike into its maw, spitting him out the following morning in the very body of himself as a seventeen-year-old (now played by Efron, whose resemblance to Perry essentially consists of the both of them being white brunettes).

All the usual trimmings kick in: crazy identity issues when he talks to Scarlett like they've been married for 20 years, and she wonders who is this little weirdo MILF-hunter who looks exactly like the boy she loved all those years ago; Mike gets an opportunity to connect with his emotionally distant kids Maggie (Michelle Trachtenberg) and Alex (Stewart Knight), and fix their horrid problems; Mike has the chance to be a great college baller like he passed up when he married Scarlett back in 1989, which is coincidentally just about the last year that any of this plot might have seemed even vaguely fresh or surprising.

It seems almost sort of pointless to list every single film since 1976s Freaky Friday that has used some variation on the basic adult-in-a-kid's-body framework or its mirror (one of them, a George Burns vehicle, is even titled 18 Again). I do not hold this a mark against 17 Again, which does find some ways to keep things lively. Jason Filardi's dialogue is at least peppy, and filled with more references to teenage boys making out with thirtysomething women than would have been acceptable for much of the last thirty years. When the film bogs down in sweet familial piety, it bogs down hard - but at least the filmmakers seemed to be aware that they were ultimately making a farce, and kept things purring along quickly to suit that.

By far the best thing 17 Again has going for it, though, is three of its supporting players: first up being Leslie Mann, if not necessarily a household name, at least a familiar face from her memorable turns in Judd Apatow's movies (and why not, she's married to him), particularly Knocked Up. Mann possesses one of the keenest senses of comic timing in modern comic cinema, I daresay, even able to wring humor out of moments that aren't even supposed to be gags; and most of her moments in 17 Again are probably just exactly that, although to her credit she is still able to suggest how Scarlett has suffered for these long 20 years just as much as Mike - the combination of funny and sad is absolutely perfect, and it's something that not one in a hundred performers could do as well.

As far as the supporting cast goes, though, it's probably Thomas Lennon who all but runs away with the movie, as Mike's supremely nerdy best friend Ned, a software millionaire with a vast collection of high-geek collectibles, including a bed in the shape of the Star Wars landspeeder, and Gandalf's staff from The Two Towers. Impressively, neither Lennon nor the screenplay ever try to make Ned into a pathetic character or a simpleton, or somebody to look down on in any way; he is entirely successful at life according to his definition of "success", and he's perfectly fine with that. He even gets to chase after a pretty girl, principal of young Mike's school, Jane Masterson, played by the great Melora Hardin of The Office. And Hannah Montana: The Movie, but we'll ignore that for now, and focus instead on how quickly she flips from brittle to sex-kittenish, without ever seeming fake.

Now if, in all that praise for the cast, you didn't see the names "Matthew Perry" or "Zac Efron", you weren't supposed to. Perry just isn't in enough of the movie to make an impression (or justify what I'm sure was not a tiny paycheck). Efron, meanwhile, just doesn't do anything. At least Perry convinces us that he's weary of the world, though it's hard to see why Scarlett wouldn't have abandoned such a wheezy loser years before. But Efron, though he's a damn sight more interesting than in the lamentable High School Musicals, is only vaguely convincing as a man suddenly given a fit, perfect body; a man with tender feelings for his children; a man slowly realising what the last 20 years of his life have actually meant. He's just too callow. About the only thing time that he is convincing is in playing a man hot to trot for Leslie Mann, which is at least a wee bit creepy until you note that a) Efron is 21; b) there is no shame in being hot to trot for Leslie Mann. Really, all Efron has to offer as an actor is being pretty; and for my tastes, it's a very fake, plastic, vanilla pretty that he puts on display, which is likely why he's so popular with the young teenage ladies. He exudes pre-sexuality.

Look, if you go for the whole Zac Efron thing, all is well. Me, I found his blandness to be a crippling flaw from which the movie had no prayer of recovering. And it's not that he's the only problem here; the script is probably bad more often than not, even if some dialogue is punchy and if it manages to dress the musty old concept in occasionally interesting new clothes. It tells a very sloppy story, with several great holes (the biggest: if Scarlett was already preganant with Maggie midway through the 1988-'89 school year, and Maggie is now a senior, how can it possibly be 20 years later?). And director Burr Steers, of the criminally overrated Igby Goes Down, can only barely manage to make the film functional; there's an episodic feel to the direction, like the movie is made up of self-contained capsules rather than chronological scenes.

So basically, 17 Again is kind of bad, although it's just about as good as a bad movie can be. It's vaguely cute, and entirely non-threatening. With a worse actor in the lead, it could have been a much worse movie; I am uncertain that a good actor could have made it better, but I guess I'm glad that no young men of any particular talent wasted themselves in trying.

4/10

A SHOCKINGLY GOOD TIME

The passage of almost three years has done nothing to temper my embarrassing enthusiasm for Crank, the Jason Statham vehicle where he plays Chev Chelios, a hitman given an exotic poison that forces him into all sorts of ridiculously contrived situations where he must do something outlandish to keep his heart rate up. So I was honestly pretty excited for that film's new sequel Crank: High Voltage, and not in any kind of ironic hipster way, nor even in a guilty pleasure way, although God knows that I should feel guilty about it. And I'm happy to report that High Voltage lived up to my expectations.

It's not that it's altogether a better film than the first Crank, although it is a great deal more consistent (the first film started to lose steam pretty quickly at about the 2/3rds mark, whereas this film keeps up the pace pretty much right to the end credits, and even a short way into the end credits). As much as anything else, this is probably the fault of the unavoidable fact that the new film isn't, well, new: while Crank was, for all that it looks to be impossibly derivative, a mostly unique and inventive brainless action movie, High Voltage is pretty much exactly the same thing as Crank.

Ordinarily this sort of thing would bother me, and here's why it doesn't this time: Crank the First was, as far as my explorations have shown me, the most perfect example in movies of the tropes, visual style and narrative language of a video game given cinematic form. If there's one thing that any good video game player knows, it's that the sequel to a great game isn't a paradigm-changing experience; it's the same damn thing with new levels and enemies, a slightly tweaked look, and maybe one or two things changed from the original, just so that you can be certain that it's really new (this is the logic by which Capcom was able to stretch the Mega Man franchise into the tens of games, nearly all of which possess essentially the same gameplay as the 1987 original). This describes Crank: High Voltage to a T: the same "game engine", only the story has changed and there's a new set of enemies and helpful NPCs.

This time around, we find that Chelios did not in fact die from falling thousands of feet from a helicopter, though he didn't end up in very good shape. Unfortunately, the same people who nursed him back to life did so only to take advantage of his preternatural stamina, cutting out his heart and replacing it with a temporary mechanical doohickey, in preparation for harvesting all his other organs (in the first of the film's many great moments of Big Dumb Awesomeness, Chelios wakes up, briefly, right in the middle of his transplant). Now, being an angry British tough guy, and being played by the current cinema's finest master of that type, Chelios isn't just going to sit around and let them chop bits from his body. So he kills his captors and heads out to find the man who stole his heart.

To freshen up the gimmick, without fundamentally changing the nature of the beast, it turns out that Chelios's new ticker only has about one hour of rechargeable battery capacity. So at least once every sixty minutes, he has to find somewhere to give himself a high voltage shock, or he will die of heart failure. Oh, and strenuous physical activity shortens the battery life. So thank God a pissed-off assassin facing down a Triad gang in downtown Los Angeles doesn't have to worry about doing anything strenuous!

Without doubt, the movie's primary charm is that it redoes everything that made Crank a blast, just more of it. The same crazy-quilt mélange of music video-derived style - freeze-frame, sped-up motion, black-and-white, random floating titles, inexplicable music cues - is still here, and many of the new film's setpieces are at least conceptually similar to some of the biggest moments in its predecessor. If High Voltage is better than the first movie, it's because of its generally greater devotion to the specifics of video game logic, and to its somewhat loopier soundtrack (e.g. when Chelios is obliged to screw his girlfriend, Eve (Amy Smart) in this film to stay alive - that is all the more sense it needs to make - he does so to the wholly unexpected accompaniment of the Marshall Tucker Band's "Heard It in a Love Song"). If it is weaker, it's like I already said: there's much less sense of discovery this time around. But still, the directing and writing team of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor have between them a boundless imagination, constantly topping one absurdly overstated moment with another, even more absurd.

In the end, it's hard to think of the film as anything but a live-action cartoon, even more than the first time around; and thankfully, the filmmakers don't seem to expect that we're going into their work looking for any more than that. High Voltage has an unusually large number of moments where it becomes inescapably clear that we're not supposed to take it remotely seriously: it is a relentlessly silly movie, far more than it is action-packed or violent, though it is both of those things. If it is a hard thing to accept a movie for being out-and-out silly, well then I offer my condolences. Sometimes, silliness is just what you need - not the kind of mindless stupidity that requires you to stop thinking and passively accept whatever garish tchotchkes a studio's $100 million bought for you, but raw, childish, goofy silliness.

The film is trash, absolutely: racist, sexist, homophobic trash at that. But there is trash and there's trash, you know? And if a film is absolutely delighted to splash about in its own trashiness, and constantly call attention to itself in that "Look what I can do!" manner of a hyperactive kid... I can't complain. High Voltage isn't great, but it's ridiculously fun. More popcorn movies ought to be like this.

7/10

THE GOSPEL TRUTH

And now, the notorious Pier Paolo Pasolini makes his first appearance in this blog! The Italian filmmaker of the 1960s and '70s known best for his unabashed Marxism and his late run of movies so outrageous as to border on the grotesque and pornographic, culminating in the infamous Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a work with the shadowy reputation of being so overstuffed with sociological pretension that even the most pretentious audience finds it hard going, and so appalling in its violence and scatology that only the most blood-hungry gorehounds can make it through without blanching.

Today, we meet the director long before those days of his most terrible reputation, in 1964. In the earlier parts of his career, Pasolini was naught but a Neo-Realist, continuing the post-war tradition of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini in making pseudo-documentary films about the crushing condition of impoverished life in Italy. Even in these first films, Pasolini could never be mistaken for anything but a controversialist; while the filmmakers of the generation before him were regarded in their own day as the next things to Communists, the modern reputation of Bicycle Thieves and Rome, Open City are centered rather around the humanist messages and the poetry within them. By contrast, it's hard nearly half a century later to view Pasolini's debut feature, Accattone, without recognising it as being an angry message film, with enough political vitriol to still seem a bit unsettling and radical.

The director's third feature had the potential to be his most controversial yet, particularly after his arrest on blasphemy charges related to his segment of the omnibus Ro.Go.Pa.G. - an adaptation of the life of Jesus Christ monolithically titled The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Yet the film turned out to be the furthest thing possible from an anti-religious screed; in its perfectly unassuming way, it might even be the most devout of all filmic depictions of Christ's gospel, doubly surprising given that Pasolini was a non-believer (though one who described himself as a non-believer with a nostalgia for belief). Which is not to say that it isn't also a perfect vehicle for the director's political beliefs.

There is one single choice that Pasolini made that sets his film apart from every other biblical epic I can name: he elected to present the material precisely as it appears in the Bible, adding nothing and taking nothing away, and filming in the least-intrusive way he could manage. His launching point was the second Gospel of the New Testament, selected because he found Mark too vulgar, Luke too sentimental, and John too mystic (a polite way of saying "weird and problematic", maybe). And in Mark's Jesus, Pasolini found a man of action and impatience, inclined to force his message rather than too subtly hint at it until people figured out what he meant. (Cf, note 5)

In essence, Pasolini found in the biblical Christ history's very first socialist revolutionary, a man who preached the renunciation of worldly things and the love of all mankind at the expense of the personal good. I do not know if this was his motivation in first making the film; by some accounts, he discovered to his surprise that the finished project reflected his own views more than the views he thought he was reading in the biblical text. Either way, the idea of a proto-Marxist Christ means that no matter how strange Matthew may seem in relationship to the rest of Pasolini's early work - a period piece rather than a story of contemporary Italy, a work proclaiming God's triumph instead of cynical materialism - it still fits quite comfortably into Pasolini's career, and the overarching narrative of Italian cinema in the decades after World War II.

I would not take this line of thinking any further; that Matthew is patently sympathetic to Pasolini's Marxism is widely understood. Besides, if that were all the film had to offer, it would be nothing but a polemic, and I can't stand polemics. What rather amazes me about Matthew is how beautifully it retells a spiritual story - which, bear in mind, is a story I have absolutely no personal stake in - using a fairly simple visual language, and without resorting to the diffused lighting and overbearing piousness that makes most American Bible films such well-intentioned slogs.

When I call the film simple, I don't mean to imply anything bad about Pasolini's skill, nor the skill of his cinematographer, Tonino Delli Colli, and even less so his editor, Nino Baragli. In fact, Matthew is a tremendously strong visual work, and it continues to impress me about Pasolini that, even if his themes were more important to him than his craft (and I've always gotten that impression from everything he said about filmmaking during his life), he is an extremely gifted visual storyteller. Pasolini's filmmaking style is marked by an exceptionally fluid roving camera, with long tracking shots through space and across groups of people punctuated by just-as-long still images of a person or object. In Matthew, the still shots tend to be focused on Jesus's own face, wonderfully embodied by a Spanish economics student named Enrique Irazoqui, who in the finest Neo-Realist tradition was cast when Pasolini realised that the young man looked exactly like his own mind's-eye version of Christ.

The visual aspect of Matthew focuses above all things on the presence of Christ, his physicality and his actions; this is why it is so very unlike most other movies of this type. When it is possible to keep something simple and direct, Pasolini will make that choice, and it is always in the best interest both of his own ideological aim, and the theological import of his film. Unlike so many filmmakers driven by religious fervor, Pasolini is not interested in the mysteries of faith; to him, there isn't a mystery, if we accept that Jesus Christ existed, and performed the miracles ascribed to him. When he shows Christ walking on the water, that's all it is: not a tremendous moment of exultation, but a man who is the embodiment of God's power doing something that only God could do. The film is altogether straightforward about these things, and by taking the strange majesty out of Christ, Pasolini stresses the human element in Christ's work and teachings, a human element that is perhaps forgotten sometimes.

As an example, let us compare how Pasolini films the crucifixion with the same event as presented in the most important modern religious film, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. In Gibson's hands, this event is huge and noisy, full of CGI and slow-motion, dramatic shots of raindrops, weirdly esoteric angles, and in general a sense of ultimate Bigness. In Pasolini's film, a man is hanging on a cross, he dies, the camera shakes to signify the earthquake, and the man's body is taken down, in a mere fraction of the shots Gibson used. And yet, the moment is more powerful in Pasolini's work. Now, a part of this is certainly because Pasolini's film has been about human characters, while Gibson's is flat-out torture porn (though, to be fair, the most technically accomplished torture porn ever made). But the directness and simplicity of Pasolini's approach speaks to what I think is his trust in the material; whereas Gibson wants to stress that something very important is happening, Pasolini allows the story to speak for itself. And given that everyone seeing either of those films doubtlessly knows about the importance of the crucifixion going into it, Pasolini's seems ultimately much less heavy-handed and much simpler and truer.

Of course, I'm just an atheist, talking out of my ass. All I know is this: when I watch The Gospel According to St. Matthew, I am moved and inspired in a way that no other religious drama has done. And I think this is because Pasolini grasps an important truth that, for whatever reason, seems to elude other filmmakers: Christ was the Son of Man, God made flesh in the world so that he could relate to humanity on our own level. His story is an essentially human one, concerned with matters of the spirit but grounded in matters of earth. By presenting that story without editorialising, and stressing the human scale of the thing rather than its bombastic religious import, Pasolini (nostalgic unbeliever that he is) managed to make a nearly-perfect cinematic summary of why Christ's words are important to we who live in the world.

LEGEND OF THE ZOMBIE CRUSADERS

Let's briefly review the history of the zombie film, shall we?

Sometime in the early 1930s, during the period when American studios were first really playing around in the horror movie sandbox, some smart person stumbled across the Haitian Vodou religion, and particularly a fairly minor component of that tradition, the idea of a sorcerer using his powers to reanimate dead bodies - zombies, though that phrase is at best an Anglicisation - and use them as his personal army or slaves, or what have you. By the standards of 1930s horror cinema, the idea of living corpses was a pretty creepy thing to consider, and in 1932, the world witnessed the release of what is typically considered the first zombie movie: the Halperin brothers' White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi.

For many years, all zombie movies hewed to broadly the same idea: the zombies themselves are frightening only because they are animate corpses, and the danger in the film is due solely to the malevolent sorcerer controlling them. These films were almost exclusively set in the Caribbean, invariably centering on incredulous white people fighting off the wicked brown people who wanted them dead. All this changed violently - literally and figuratively - in 1968, when another smart person named George A. Romero made a low-budget independent horror movie titled Night of the Living Dead. Although the word "zombie" never once appear in Romero's screenplay, a reanimated corpse is a reanimated corpse, and the Vodou connection disappeared instantly, replaced by the modern conception of a zombie as a mysteriously undead being whose driving purpose is to consume human flesh.

Romero's film inspired nearly uncountable imitators (it is said that zombie films are the most common kind of micro-budget, home brew horror movie), particular his 1978 Dawn of the Dead, which single-handedly launched a torrent of knock-offs produced by European genre hacks in Italy, Spain and France. Tradition holds that the contemporary zombie movie is thus entirely a post-'79 beast, but in this way, as is often the case, tradition is wrong. Though it is true that the massive wave of zombie films following Dawn's European release under the title Zombi was a watershed moment for the subgenre, the preceding ten years did have their fair share of American, Canadian, and European films about gutmunching revenants. One of the first of these - in fact, as far as I have been able to determine, the very first cannibal zombie movie released after Romero - was a 1971 Spanish-Portuguese co-production, a strange thing indeed given the reputation of Spain's horror cinema as being almost completely reactive to Italy's. That film is best-known in English as Tombs of the Blind Dead, though its list of alternate titles is quite staggering; its first American release, in a significantly reduced cut, was as The Blind Dead. Happily for those of us in the DVD Age, the film is quite easy to find in its untouched Spanish version, La noche del terror ciego [The Night of the Blind Terror], and this uncut edit is without question the best way to see it.

It bears mentioning that the film's writer-director, Amando de Ossorio, took great pains to explain that Tombs was not a "zombie" film; it was a film about supernatural mummies, or some such. Like I said, a reanimated corpse is a reanimated corpse, and history has failed to take Ossorio at his word. I imagine that his chief reluctance to use the Z-word wasn't because of his commitment to semantics, though, but to resist the tendency to lump his movie in with the constant stream of unabashed zombie films that were vomited forth a mere decade later. And in this respect, I am willing to agree with Ossorio, for while nearly all of the Italian zombie films were one shade of awful or another, Tombs is a good film, even a great one: one of the highlights of 1970s Spanish cinema and among the very best examples of its oft-indefensible genre.

Tombs is set in Portugal, where people who are probably American, to judge by their names, meet by chance one day: Elizabeth "Bet" Turner (Lone Fleming), who owns a mannequin shop in Lisbon, her college roommate Virginia White (María Elena Arpón), and Virginia's brand-new boyfriend Roger Whelan (César Burner). Roger instantly takes a shine to Bet, and insists she join him and Virginia on their trip to the countryside, and while neither woman is terribly keen on this idea, he eventually gets her way. On the trip, Roger's advances become quite rude enough to send Virginia running, and when Bet tries to comfort her, we learn in a flashback that the girls had a romantic fling of their own back in college; indeed, Viriginia seems a sight more upset to lose Bet than to lose Roger, and Bet herself is plainly comfortable enough in her own sexuality to view Roger as a pest and a lout. Her assurances do no good, and Virginia jumps off the train and runs off into the countryside; when Roger and Bet try to stop the train, the aged conductor and his son refuse to so much as slow down. It seems there's something terrifying in those hills.

It is to be found, Virginia soon learns, in the ruined medieval town of Berzano. This is one of those extremely special places in the world that looks just fucking evil, no matter how much sunshine you through at it. And when Virginia arrives, there's not much daylight left, so even though it's against her better judgment, she decides to find some place to bed down for the evening. Creepy enough, but things get much creepier when, in the dead of night, she starts to hear some kind of chanting, and she notices steam rising out of the small graveyard in the center of town - a graveyard marked not by crosses, but Egyptian ankhs. The steam is followed in short order by skeletal cadavers dressed in tattered garb, who shuffle slowly after Virginia - though not so slowly that she can escape, particularly once she mounts one of their (zombiefied?) horses and proves to be a pretty lousy equestrian.

And this is all the more plot I will recap, although like all reviewers of the film, I'll give away the secret (more or less spoiled by the title) of the undead beings. Back in the 14th Century, there was a group of Templars who brought back certain rite from their time in the Middle East, during the Crusades - rites that would give them eternal life, if they but sacrificed virgins, drank her blood, and performed rituals to an unstated black god. When they were found out (as the wholesale slaughter of a region's virgins will tend to find you out), the local authorities hanged them in the center of Berzano, until their eyes had been plucked out by the crows. Unfortunately, the rites worked, or at least well enough so that the Templars came back to life, albeit without eyes; and thus the Blind Dead we were promised.

Undoubtedly, the single element of Tombs and its sequels that sets them well and truly above their countless cousins is Ossorio's representation of the undead Templars - a vision never copied in all the many films that followed, to my knowledge. Whereas most post-Romero zombies are mouldering bodies with rotten flesh that still look recognisably human (and are played by actors in make-up), the Templars are literally nothing but skin and bones, exactly the kind of dessicated shells that you'd expect a mummified corpse from 650 years ago to resemble. The dummies Ossorio used are convincing enough that I'd be entirely willing to believe that he used honest-to-God cadavers in filming.

It's not just the visuals that set these zombies apart; the forthright supernatural explanation for their existence is fairly unusual, and their obvious intentionality and cunning is even rarer. These aren't just hungry animals, they are hunters, looking for blood to feed their eternal unlife. And the marvelous trick of making them blind, that's just a stroke of genius. When the shambling undead are coming your way, like in most zombie pictures, well, it's not hard to outrun them. That's why Romero and his followers always trotted out the idea that it was the incompetence and venality of the living that doomed them, not the skill of the zombies. But the blind dead, they are crafty bastards, who very much count on their pry trying to evade them. Being sightless, they home in on sound, and they've had plenty of time in the centuries to sharpen their sense of hearing; and you know, you just can't stop yourself from making noise, as is discovered by the only survivor of the climactic attack in one of the film's showstopping moments: the mere sound of a human heartbeat is enough to attract the Templars. And when you're surrounded by murderous ghouls, your heart is likely beating quite fast.

It helps matters a great deal that Ossorio is a tremendously gifted visual stylist, and that his cinematographer, Pablo Ripoll, is apparently a genius; Tombs of the Blind Dead boasts some of the most brilliant atmospheric visuals of any '70s horror film I've watched. Whatever ruin the filmmakers picked to portray Berzano, it was worth the effort; this is one of the most menacing sets ever, far more threatening than most conspicuously-designed soundstages. Photographed during the day so as to take advantage of the deep shadows that seem to crop up everywhere, the town is even more moody and terrifying at night, particularly during some flat-out brilliant day-for-night shots that aren't "convincing", necessarily, but are exactly right to make the movie seem that much more creepy and uncanny.

The scenes outside of Berzano aren't too shabby themselves. There's a chase set in Bet's mannequin shop that is quite great, up to anything Dario Argento ever imagined putting into a movie; the morgue we see, with its ubiquitous Creepy Morgue Attendant, looks normal but slightly "off", perhaps because it doesn't have as many props as we'd expect.

It all comes back to the Templars, though, and the stunning visuals that Ossorio ties to them. There is a particular shot (absent in the English re-edit) of a young girl, cradled in her dead mother's arms, covered in her mother's blood, that is tremendously upsetting and powerful, as much as any such moment in any zombie film I can think of (its closest analogue may be the nightmarish scene of the little girl zombie killing her dad in Night of the Living Dead). Really, the whole of the final sequence is both brutal and yet abstracted enough to propel Ossorio to the top tier of European horror directors all by its lonesome.

The film is not, of course, flawless; like just about every other genre film made on that continent in that time period, the plot is too flimsy to withstand even a slight breeze of scrutiny (there's a whole entire subplot involving Virginia's ultimate fate that is of nearly no value to the story whatsoever), and most of the characters are die-cut from cardboard, although Bet is surely a more rounded figure than we often see in these films, and reasonably well performed. But honestly, no sane person goes into a film like this for the story. They go for the atmosphere, the terror, and the zombies, and all three of those things are in peak form here. As the kick-off to the European zombie film, Tombs is just about the finest example of the form that I have ever seen.

Reviews in this series
Tombs of the Blind Dead
Return of the Evil Dead
The Ghost Galleon
Night of the Seagulls

THEY ARE RISEN

If it's the Easter season, that can only mean one thing: time for Antagony & Ecstasy's Third Annual Zombie Movie Festival! This year, we'll be digging a little tiny bit deeper into the annals of European horror cinema, all the way to Amando de Ossorio's Blind Dead series, perhaps the most prominent of all Spanish zombie movies (and made a solid eight years before the boom of George A. Romero knock-offs really got started in Italy). Come back later tonight for the first of four movies: from 1971, Tombs of the Blind Dead.

"BALLS", INDEED

I know nothing about the much-loved manga series Dragon Ball, and my exposure to the two anime series derived from that manga consists of, at best, some three or four episodes. I am, that is to say, no expert in the field of Dragon Ball. However, I like to think that I am, if not expert, at least well-educated in the field of movies, and thus I feel safe in declaring that Dragonball Evolution, the first live-action, English-language film in the franchise, is absolutely insipid.

Given how very little of the story makes sense or seems to matter all that much, there sure is a lot of it. Quickly: there's a young man named Goku (Justin Chatwin), trained in some kind of nondescript martial art by his grandfather Gohan (Randall Duk Kim), and on his eighteenth birthday, Gohan gives him a very special something called a Dragonball, of which only seven exist in all the world. Unite all seven, and you will be granted a single wish. Just exactly as Goku is learning about this wonderful set of objects, the evil King Piccolo (James Marsters), imprisoned for 2000 years, has returned to find the Dragonballs himself, and use them during an eclipse to take over the world. Goku assembles a few hangers-on and helpers in his quest, the only one of which I could keep straight consistently being Roshi, his new teacher after Gohan is killed; and that only because Roshi was played by Chow Yun-Fat, who really ought to be doing better things than this.

There are many, many things in this movie that make no damn sense at all, though I expect that most of them are probably well-explained in the source material. But even though it's probably safe to assume that a healthy chunk of the audience will be made up of people with some attachment to the books/TV shows, that's still unforgivably shoddy storytelling, especially if it is true, as I gather, that the movie plays pretty fast and loose with series canon. At any rate, it's kind of hard to tell where we are, who is who and how exactly they're connected, and the plot is rather posited than shown.

So far, so good. Martial arts films have always suffered from a lot of these exact same problems. Except that most martial arts films can get away with it because they then have thrilling martial arts sequences in between all the weirdness, while Dragonball Evolution suffers from... I certainly hesitate to say "the worst fighting scenes in the last several years", simply because I haven't seen every fighting movie released recently, and I expect that the very worst of them weren't released in the U.S. anyway. This doesn't change the fact that the fighting scenes are extravagant in their badness: heavily reliant on unlovely CGI, edited for minimum coherence - in fact, I cannot say what possibly motivated most of the editing in the film, lest it be the terror that we should forget what the sets looked like if we didn't see random shots of them from numerous angles several times each minute. But where was I, yes, the fighting scenes, which are totally unconvincing and confusing, and almost entirely devoid of "cool" moments. Or indeed, of any other "adjective" moments.

The film's director, James Wong, used to be one-half of a pretty great writing team on The X-Files, but since leaving that show in 1998, he has become completely awful, directing Final Destination and Final Destination 3 (though not, oddly enough, Final Destination 2); and most importantly for our present purposes, The One, a profoundly useless Jet Li vehicle. His ineptitude with the film's action sequences is almost impossible to describe; if I were going to try, I'd probably mention how none of the fights have any clear narrative beyond "two people beating on each other", and how difficult it is to make out who is winning until he or she has won.

Wong also deserves a bit of the blame for not stopping the crazed art direction and costume design, which seem devoted to recreating the look of the manga in live-action, with neither grace nor success. There was quite a lot to dislike about last summer's Speed Racer, I thought, but at least it looked, for the most part, like something otherworldly, and that made its frequent visual nods to anime fit in with the rest of the aesthetic. In Dragonball Evolution, the sets, and even more particularly, the costumes and hairstyles, jar horribly with the pedestrian, real-world look of the people, and the physicality of most of the environments. After struggling to figure out exactly what looked wrong about all of this, the best I can come up with is that the combination of real places and tangible-cartoon characters is like watching really glossy footage from Comic-Con. Which is, incidentally, the only gathering of people in the whole world where you might conceivably find a majority who would get any enjoyment out of Dragonball Evolution whatever.

Stuck in amongst all of this, the cast is mostly content to be swallowed up and ignored, though for most of them, this is their default mode anyway (in the cast: Emmy "Remember how everyone thought I'd be a Big Thing after The Phantom of the Opera?" Rossum. Man, that girl is apocalyptically uncharismatic). Justin Chatwin, an actor who I always recognise for his sleepy-or-stoned look, though I can never think of his name or what other things I've seen him in, manages to give a yet more disengaged performance than when he sleepwalked through The Invisible, a film that I suspect most people, including Justin Chatwin, have long since forgotten about.

As I hope happens, quickly, to Dragonball Evolution, a wholly miserable experience that is far too goofy and incompetent to work on any level, and yet lacks any of the madness that could shuttle it to "so bad it's good" territory. No, it stays firmly in the overcast land of "so bad it's bad", a flawless example of everything that can go hellishly wrong with movies released in the first third of the calendar year.

2/10