Film Review Catch Up 2

More films I watched earlier this year.

****

1. How To Undress In Public Without Undue Embarrassment

“Is this an outdated piece of non-PC junk or a light-hearted comedy romp?” asked Caroline Munro in the introduction of this smutty comedy faux-documentary. Why not both?

It pretends to be an investigation into how people got undressed, starting with connoisseurs in a Soho strip club. After watching a woman do a striptease one of the gentlemen asserts that he is an expert who could do it better himself, and the documentary makers convince him to do so. We then go and have an historical overview, starting in the Garden of Eden with Bill Pertwee as Adam, and taking in various more-or-less amusing and embarrassing skits.

The historical details, sometimes exaggerated for comic effect, aren’t bad. The time and effort in taking off the many layers of a 19^th century gentlewoman’s outfit for example. There’s quite a few old illustrations, and even some informed discussion of censorship.

Light-hearted comedy romp? There’s a certain archness that suggests that men want to see women undress and women want to be seen, and objecting to this is hypocritical prudery, but also isn’t nakedness naughty and we shouldn’t want this really. Outdated piece of non-PC junk? You wouldn’t make it today, in part because if you want to see people undressing you can log on to your computer and search, or even commission it for yourself. Dressing up a bit of smut as a documentary would seem unnecessary, perhaps a little immature, if we want comedy can we have a comedy, and if we want some good honest lust, let’s have it.

Watch This: For a light-hearted comedy romp like they don’t make any more
Don’t Watch This: It’s an outdated piece of non-PC junk like they don’t make any more

2. Peeping Tom

(In a fit of inspiration, Talking Pictures TV followed the comedy undressing film with a voyeuristic thriller.)

Mark is an amateur film maker, works at a film studio and also takes naughty pictures. He lives upstairs in a big house, which it turns out he owns but can’t afford to keep up so rents out the downstairs. He meets Helen, who lives downstairs with her blind mother, when she has her 21^st Birthday party.

But that’s not how we meet him. We meet him at the backend of a camera as he goes to a sex worker, films her, then when she panics, he kills her. Later he goes to film the scene as the police investigate and they take out the body. (In a good joke, when asked who he’s filming for he names the newspaper the Observer).

The murders, of course, are disturbing, and Mark’s background and childhood – seen through film and heard through tapes – even more so. The most troubling aspect to audiences of the time though was the voyeurism, which the film classification people came down hard on. All of these would come up again in slasher films; childhood, stabbing and watching all coming together in Halloween for example.

Watch This: A cult classic horror thriller with something to say about fear, hate and voyeurism
Don’t Watch This: Sex workers and shallow women get murdered out of hand while we watch with the killer

3. The Horror Of Dracula (released as Dracula in the UK in 1958)

Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen) goes to castle Dracula, ostensibly to work as librarian for the Count (Christopher Lee). There he meets a woman (Valerie Gaunt) who asks him to help her escape before attacking him. He is rescued by the count.

Harker, it turns out, is actually there on a vampire hunting mission. Finding bite marks on his neck he makes a final entry in his journal, hides it and then enters the crypt. He stakes the woman but is overpowered by the Count.

Dr Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) comes looking for Harker, gets hold of the journal, discovers Harker has turned vampire and stakes him. Returning to Harker’s home he informs the family (fiancée Lucy, her brother Arthur and sister-in-law Mina) of his death in vague terms. However Lucy is ill; Van Helsing diagnoses vampirism and fills the place with garlic flowers and locks the window. Of course her maid opens it up and gets rid of the flowers.

After some chasing and fighting we end with famous final scene, the fight between Dracula and Van Helsing that ends with drapes being torn down and two candlesticks making a cross (previously seen in the prologue of this sequel).

Watch This: For a classic Hammer adaption of Dracula
Don’t Watch This: There are many pointless and peculiar changes from the novel while leaving out many of the more interesting parts

4. The Severed Arm

A man receives a severed arm in the post. We then flashback to six men going down to inspect an abandoned mine, but they’re trapped by a cave in. After two weeks they discuss cannibalism in the context of lifeboats. They decide not to kill one their number – that would be murder – but they will cut off an arm. This is clearly impractical (surviving an amputation in a mining tunnel with not support or nutrition (other than raw meat from the arm) seems a poor chance) but on the other hand they’re also clearly breaking under the strain. They draw lots and the loser* objects so they hold him down and cut his arm off. At that moment they are rescued, and all agree to lie and claim he lost his arm in the cave in.

We return to the present and someone is persecuting the survivors. Rogers, previously committed, is now out. The film follows approximately the path you might expect from here on out (including a final twist). The setpiece of the late night radio DJ going through his job insulting the records is a highlight, though even that requires you to be entertained by bad jokes.

Not especially well acted, plotted or filmed, something of a low budget curiosity. The scene in the mine nearly reaches the heights to redeem it but frankly this is quite missable.

Watch This: A horror film in which men are hunted for a weirdly specific and horrible crime
Don’t Watch This: Over-long dark scenes of characters talking nonsense

* A character called Ted Rogers who shares a name with the 3-2-1 host to my continuing amusement

5. A Bucket Of Blood

Walter, the busboy at a bohemian café, wants to be an artist. He accidentally kills his landlady’s cat and afterwards covers it in clay. All the artists and beatniks think his sculpture “Dead Cat” is great. Under pressure to make more, he finds himself being targeted by an undercover cop who thinks he’s involved with dope, and kills him, creating his second sculpture “Murdered Man”.

Inevitably things get out of hand.

This is a low budget black and white comic horror, poking fun at thrillers and also the art scene. Although a little dated one can still find pretentious art critics suddenly discovering something unexceptional is marvelous (good on them) and so the satire still has a little bite.

The saxophone solo is credited to the excellently named Paul Horn.

Watch This: A fun and short murderous satire on art
Don’t Watch This: If jarring changes from straight-faced skewering of beat poets to murder puts you off

6. Gunpowder Milkshake

Kieron Gillian is a hitman (hitwoman?). Her mother (Lena Headey) was a hitwoman (hitman?). She’s given the job of retrieving some stolen money. The money is stolen to pay a ransom for a young girl, the man’s daughter. She rescues the girl but manages to destroy the money, kill the father and annoy her employer.

This is a John Wick-a-like so we have a set of shadowy and stylish organisations with cool buildings. There’s the diner, which is an old school American diner where people do business and you aren’t allowed guns (this gets broken in almost very scene in the diner), the library where the mother used to be a member (all the books have something hidden inside), the clinic where people go to get patched up (a bit Hotel Artemis, which in turn is another John Wick-a-like). Between those they have fights and chases in other stylish locations, a neon-lit bowling alley, a dim-green abandoned apartment complex.

Are there good fights, cool characters and well-composed shots of fun-looking locations? Yes there are. Is there any substance beyond that? No, not really. Will the next time I remember this film be when they release a trailer for the sequel? Probably.

Watch This: Gun fights that inevitably turn into brawls, one night of violence and the odd understated plot twist
Don’t Watch This: No matter how stylish it’s just people shooting each other

7. A Study In Scarlet (1933)

Although this Sherlock Holmes film takes the name of the first of the novels, the plot is unrelated, so we do not, for example, have half an hour on the history of Mormonism in the middle or the origin story of Holmes and Watson teaming up. Instead there are mysterious codes in classified ads, murders, and the “Scarlet Society” refusing to acknowledge the claim of a widow to the money kept in trust.

It becomes clear that this is a form of tontine, in which the surviving members will divide up the proceeds at the end of the period. However this is complicated by a daughter inheriting (because she’s young and pretty?) but a widow does not (because she’s annoying and loud?). In any case someone is trying to kill members to increase their share, and they aren’t going to report it because the money’s from a crime.

There’s a bit of casual racism (with Ann May Wong excellent as the wife of one of the members), and Holmes has a distinct antipathy for one character, a lawyer who he says is a blackmailer (though he’s not doing it here, it’s a Holmes trait to dislike blackmailers they've shoved in). For some reason the establishing shots of Holmes and Watson’s flat shows it is at 221A? Very peculiar; a Sherlock Holmes film from before they’d quite decided what Sherlock Holmes films were.

At the end the romantic couple ask Holmes to walk the bride up the aisle and he replies. "I appreciate the compliment but I never give a lady away. Except sometimes professionally.”

Watch This: It’s a short, brisk and very old-fashioned detective film, with some early Sherlock Holmes action, including disguises, codes and crime scene investigation
Don’t Watch This: The actual action is terrible, the acting very mixed and the extended comedy disguise sequence excruciating
On The Other Hand: Out of copyright and available on the Youtube

 

8. Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell

Peter Cushing’s last appearance as Baron Frankenstein (living under the threadbare alias Dr Carl Victor) for Hammer Films. (For first appearance see here). Dr Simon Helder, who has studied Frankenstein’s work, is convicted of sorcery after being caught buying a body from a graverobber. Confined in an asylum he swiftly recognises the staff doctor as Frankenstein and becomes his assistant.

Frankenstein has as his current project Herr Schneider (Dave Prowse) that they bafflingly refer to as “Neolithic”*. He attempted to commit suicide but Frankenstein restored him to a half life. However his surgery is crude as the Doctor burned his hands in a previous escapade, and his assistant is the untrained and speechless Sarah Klauss (Madeline Smith) known to the other inmates as The Angel.

There follow two mysterious deaths of very dangerous inmates, one an excellent woodcarver and one a professor of mathematics who plays exquisite violin. This is good news for Frankenstein and Helder who graft the hands and brain onto Schneider’s body. This inevitably goes wrong, revealing the secrets behind the director, the Angel, Frankenstein and the professor and then lead to a violent denouement.

The true horror may be in the cold scientific gaze and actions of the surgeons, or it may be in the treatment of the inmates. Or maybe the actions of the inmates themselves, or, in the end, those of the Asylum Director that the film will not show us, only tell. Who, in the end, is the monster from hell?**

Watch This: Cushing’s cold and hard final Frankenstein, yet chillingly closer to the moral centre of the film than those set over society
Don’t Watch This: Monsters in an asylum is a bit blatant

* Presumably they mean "Neanderthal", though this might be anachronistic as the remains from the Neander valley were only recognised in the 1850s and presumably this film takes place earlier than that. On researching this point I then discovered that the word Neolithic (the most recent stage of the stone age, with modern humans, farming and even some early states) was coined in 1865. For all the problems involved with suggesting that Schneider, a 19^th century modern human, is a “throwback”, the term caveman or apeman would have fitted better, and I have spent too much time on this point.
** It’s the Director.

9. Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter

Captain Kronos, late of the Imperial Guard, and his associate the hunchbacked Professor Grost, are called in by an old army friend Doctor Marcus to investigate deaths by accelerated aging. Along the way Kronos releases Carla from the stocks she’s been imprisoned in for dancing on a Sunday and she joins them.

Kronos and Grost explain that every vampire has its own method of feeding and killing, and also of being killed. Although dubious, an occult test reveals there are vampires present. Marcus visits the local nobles, the Durwoods.

Kronos gets involved in several fights, the film being something of a swashbuckler. They spend some time in the woods setting traps. A character is attacked and discovers they have become a vampire and in a harrowing sequence volunteers to be experimented on to discover how they can be killed.

In an interesting comment the Durwoods are supposed to be related to the Karnsteins of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla and also more than one other Hammer film. The film turns up the action from the usual Hammer horror films, while maintaining the tense edge and just a touch of weirdness.

Watch This: A fun horror film with extra adventure in the form of swordfighting and galloping horses
Don’t Watch This: Swords and vampires and detective work and magic, too much in one

10. He Walked By Night

“The work of the police, like that of woman, is never done.”

A 1940s police procedural* noir based loosely on real events. A thief who specialises in electronic equipment is caught by a policeman trying the door of an electronics shop and shoots him. The Los Angeles police mobilise, setting out a dragnet and bring in the usual suspects but don’t catch him. He changes tactics, holding up liquor stores, and they eventually catch on to it being the same guy. They try a variety of methods to identify him, most of which are now familiar to viewers of police fiction, eventually putting two and two together to realise that as someone who specialises in electronics, he’s listening in to police radio. When they figure out who he is his last trick – escaping into the storm drains under LA – leads to some underground chase sequences.

The policemen are not especially interesting but the villain played by Richard Basehart is pretty chilling. Presented sometimes in a mock-documentary style, sometimes as straight drama, an influential film with some bits and pieces of interest.

Watch This: For an influential police procedural detective film
Don’t Watch This: The police procedural is of no interest to you and besides, it was done better after film-makers mastered the basics
Based Loosely On Real Events: The crimes of Erwin "Machine Gun" Walker.

* The meeting on set of actor Jack Webb and technical advisor (and former police detective) Martin Wynn was to lead to the creation of the radio and TV shows Dragnet, one of the most influential police procedurals.