Films Catch Up 6

I've watched a lot of films this year. Here's ten more.

1. Doctor Blood’s Coffin

Dr Peter Blood returns home to Cornwall after studying biochemistry in Vienna, staying with his father Dr Robert Blood. However someone has been stealing medical supplies from the surgery and people have been going missing. The local police decide to search the abandoned tin mines, and Peter volunteers, it used to be his playground as a child.

Obviously he’s doing experiments down there. He’s also flirting with his father’s assistant, a widowed nurse. It’s she who he gets close to confiding in, how he and the professor in Vienna quarreled over a breakthrough, and she sees the odd box a South American colleague gave him – a box for tipping needles with the paralytic curare.

There’s a bunch of odd Cornish characters, the glorious Cornish countryside, and beneath it dark caverns where terrible things happen. Blood (junior) has gone Too Far in his pursuit of knowledge. SPOILERS he’s trying to bring people back to life with heart transplants; an interesting and outlandish conceit in 1961, before the breakthroughs of 1967-8 when more-or-less successful heart transplants were performed.

Watch This: A horror film rooted strongly in time and place
Don’t Watch This: It’s just a guy with bad medical ethics

2. The Bloody Judge

Christopher Lee plays the historical Judge Jeffries (known as “The Hanging Judge”) and is discovered condemning a young woman to death for witchcraft. Her sister is in love with the son of a prominent aristocrat. This is a problem as politics, crime, witchcraft and rebellion are rife, and being linked to a witch might bring down the whole family.

The film is fairly well grounded in the particular time and place; England during the reign of James II. The unpopular Catholic brother of Charles II, there were many plots against him, including the unsuccessful Monmouth rebellion, led by the Duke of Monmouth, James’s nephew (the illegitimate son of Charles II). Both the historical and this fictional version of Jeffries are indiscriminately harsh on those accused of rebellion in the aftermath; an event known as “the bloody assizes”.

The historical Jeffries was very interested in law, loyalty and justice; this fictional one is also very interested in the torture, sexual abuse and execution of women. And this is at the heart of the film, Jeffries taking a delight in the abuse of the women who come before him. Though to be fair, they are also guilty of consorting with witches and rebels. A multi-national production, several sex scenes and a couple of torture scenes were dubbed in German with subtitles, suggesting they were not in the original UK edit.

Watch This: A horror film with a solid grounding in historical events (and also costumes)
Don’t Watch This: A lot of torture and sexual abuse

3. The Strange Woman (1946)

In Bangor, Maine in the 1830s Jenny (Hedy Lamar) is beaten by her father for flirting with a sailor. The local dignitaries get together and decide she must be removed from him. Isiah Poster takes her in, marrying her for decency’s sake.

But Jenny is a beautiful young woman and Poster a very rich older man. His son, Ephraim, was a childhood playmate who she cruelly teased, and he is away studying to be an architect in Massachusetts.

Bangor is a boom town, logging the industry. But with this comes trouble; lumberjacks after weeks and months up in their camps coming into town, drinking and causing trouble. This weaves in and out of the story, with various attempts to deal with this, perhaps by forming a police force, being a subplot.

Ephraim returns home. Jenny convinces him that they should be together so he and his father go on a trip upriver to the logging camps, and his father is killed. Everyone blames Ephraim, Jenny turns him out of the house, he’s disinherited and becomes a drunk. Jenny promotes John Evered, a logging superintendent and beau of her friend Meg, to manager, and keeps him working with her night and day. She seduces him, and they marry.

Then Jenny discovers she can’t have children. She goes to a revival meeting hoping for a miracle, only for the fiery sermon to reflect on her misdeeds. She confesses, Evered goes to a cabin to think, where Meg urges him to return to her. Jenny arrives, crashes her carriage and dies.

The film is explicitly moral and Christian, making the case that avarice and mortal goods are bad, also lust. It’s an interesting historical drama, almost a thriller, with Hedy Lamar as femme fatale.

Watch This: Cool historical drama with some clever plotting and well-acted confrontations
Don’t Watch This: Explicitly linking sin to childlessness is a bit much and Jenny's character is opaque

4. Austin Powers In Goldmember

The third and last Austin Powers film from 2002. And perhaps surprising that it’s the last. The film is bookended by a film being made of Austin Powers called Austinpussy, with cameos from Tom Cruise playing Tom Cruise playing Austin Powers; similarly Kevin Spacey (!) is Dr Evil, Danny Devito is Mini-Me and Austin’s glamorous assistant is Gwyneth Paltrow playing Dixie Normous*. The film is being directed by Steven Spielberg (played by Steven Spielberg). With this amount of money and/or being such a cultural juggernaut, the series just… stopped.

Anyway Dr Evil has a plan to once again go back in time, and team up with Johann Van Der Smut, who is Dutch, has a roller-disco (?), picks his skin off and is obsessed with gold. He burned himself in smelting accident and so replaced his genitals with gold, hence his name Goldmember**. Goldmember intends to use a tractor beam to bring a gold asteroid to crash on the Earth.

In a fun reversal of “why don’t you just shoot the hero,” Austin turns up and arrests Dr Evil in his headquarters. The queen knights him, but his father doesn’t turn up, leaving him sad. It turns out that arresting Dr Evil does not stop Goldmember’s plan; Austin meets him in prison, then goes back to 1975 to stop Goldmember.

As ever he meets up with a sexy female agent, in this case Foxxy Cleopatra (Beyoncé) a 70s blaxploitation pastiche and former lover of Austin. They go to Goldmember’s roller disco. After this the film meanders a bit through various setpieces. Dr Evil’s son Scott Evil becomes balder and more evil, leading to Dr Evil preferring him to Mini-Me who defects. Changing sides, Mini-Me dresses up as Austin Powers. This is sort of fun, as both Evil and Powers are played by Mike Myers, as is Goldmember, and there’s a return of Fat Bastard, also played by Myers, from the previous film.

SPOILERS: This fatherhood, choosing between two offspring theme is reiterated when Nigel Powers actually turns up and makes the big reveal. There’s a confused ending with Goldmember’s member being the key to the tractor beam in a sort of Goldeneye homage, and various people changing sides.

Watch This: Some new bits and some fun bits in a spy spoof
Don’t Watch This: The fun bits are mostly when characters introduce themselves, and the titular Goldmember is just odd rather than funny

* Playing off Plenty O’Toole from the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever presumably.

** Ian Fleming was sued by architect Ernő Goldfinger*** for naming his novel Goldfinger; the book printed but not yet distributed Fleming suggested that they add an errata slip renaming the character Goldprick. This didn’t happen.

*** Pronounced “Gold-Fing-Er”

5. Roman Holiday

Princess Ann (occasionally Anya) (Audrey Hepburn), the heir to the throne of [Country Never Named] is on a goodwill tour of Western Europe, calling in at London, Paris, Amsterdam, and now Rome. She breaks down under all the stress, and the doctor gives her a shot, suggests she does something she wants to do. (Perhaps notably her entourage in the embassy is entirely of people a generation older than her, I can’t help thinking she should have brought a companion or two of her own age). She sneaks out of the embassy to see something of Rome, falls asleep on a bench. American reporter Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck) finds her and takes her home rather than leave her there. She steals his bed and he sleeps on the sofa.

Bradley oversleeps and misses his assignment; the press conference with the Princess at the embassy. He lies to his boss, making up some answers before the boss reveals that it has been cancelled, the embassy claiming illness. Bradley recognises the woman he met in the photos on the front page. He makes a bet with his editor he can get an exclusive, and calls in his photographer friend Irving.

Ann has bought some shoes and got a haircut. Bradley convinces her to spend the day with him and he, Irving and Anna see sights and have funny adventures. But this holiday will have to come to an end. And they’re both lying to each other.

Watch This: Charming comedy, some lovely bits of Rome, with an edge of tension
Don’t Watch This: We’ve seen Rome* and a princess having a nice day off is a very slight story

* There’s a whole cycle of foreign women coming to Rome, and other bits of Europe, and having romantic adventures in the fifties, this being an early one

6. Valley Of The Dragons

An Irishman and a Frenchman are fighting a duel in 19^th century Algeria when a comet comes and sweeps them away. The stars are all wrong and there’s a lot of primitive wildlife. The two men are separated when a mammoth attacks and each falls in with different tribes of cave men. They have adventures that allow each to become a leader, and then for the two tribes to join up to oppose the dinosaurs (dragons).

They rapidly lose their modern clothes and have to dress in skins. They each have a pistol and one shot, which they squander, and then throw the pistols away, which is very silly; they look to be flintlocks so would at the least make them useful as fire starters. The film is very slight, and relies too much on the animals which aren’t good. The best ones turn out to be stock footage from other films. Loosely based on a Jules Verne novel.

Watch This: You can’t get enough of manly men finding their way through a prehistoric landscape (and attracting prehistoric women)
Don’t Watch This: There’s better stabs at this kind of story

7. Creed III

Adonis Creed has retired from boxing, always a fun start to a boxing movie. He’s concentrating on his wife Bianca and child Amara, and on his gym, and on promoting fights. He’s making a deal to have his protégé Felix fight Victor Drago (see Creed II).

Dame, an old friend, gets out of prison. They were together in a children’s home before Adonis was adopted by Mary-Ann, his father’s wife (see Creed). He was a junior Golden Gloves champion, and wants Adonis to give him a shot at a championship before it’s too late.

The backstory comes out over the course of the film; Dame wrote to Adonis but Mary-Ann, now declining in health, hid the letters. After Dame fought an underground boxing match with Adonis as a supporter they spotted the guy who’d abused them in the group home. Adonis attacked him, the guy’s friends had confronted them, Dame drew a gun and the cops arrested him.

At a party for Bianca’s record label, there’s some musing about how she doesn’t perform any more (hearing loss) as another singer does one of her songs. Then a mysterious attacker breaks Drago’s hand, leaving them without a challenger at short notice. Adonis make’s Dame’s dreams come true and he fights Felix at the Crypto.com Arena (real), winning in the most brutal way possible.

Adonis recognises the attacker of Drago from a photo in one of the letters from prison, and confronts Dame who is triumphant and mocks him. Dame continues to publicly insult Adonis, who is unable to respond due to his guilt over Dame going to prison while he got off scot free.

In a boxing film – a sports film – you either resolve your issues in the ring or you have to resolve your issues before you get in the ring in order to win. Creed III has something to say about that. Adonis has left the ring but can’t resolve his issues, his guilt, he can’t talk to his wife about it. He can’t quite rid himself of preconceptions about his daughter (he’s surprised when she, taking after her father, hits a boy who has been hassling her at school, thinking that this wouldn’t happen in the gentle, accepting place). He can’t deal with any of this until Mary-Ann dies, and then with her no longer hanging on as keeper of secrets, he can talk to his wife, and he can confront Dame.

All this requires that you be invested in the struggles of a guy who used to punch people, and where the all consuming desire to be the best puncher is, perhaps dangerously overwhelming, but still an important goal. If so, it’s a pretty good film.

Watch This: Boxing film that tries to engage with family, guilt and what we owe one another
Don’t Watch This: The only thing you can resolve in the ring is who is the better boxer on the day

8. Oldboy (2003)

A loudmouthed drunk, Oh Dae-Su, is kidnapped and imprisoned in what appears to be a hotel room for fifteen years. Eventually he is let out, craving sushi and with fighting skills (from the TV that has been in his room). He goes to a sushi restaurant and falls in, and in love, with a sushi chef Mi-Do.

Dae-Su tries to find out what happened to him, who is behind it and why. Sometimes it gets very violent. Sometimes it gets very weird. His relationship with Mi-Do is strange, even for a man who has been locked up for fifteen years. When he hums a song, she tells him that when she sings it, that’s the cue for them to have sex, even if she seems unwilling. When they do she explains that it hurts but she can endure it.

This is before the big, and frankly ridiculous reveal.

The gritty, almost believable underworld, with the secret prison for vigilante justice slowly becomes more and more complex, building each unlikely layer on top of another. All seen through Dae-Su’s eyes, where everything is new because he’s been locked up for fifteen years. I don’t think the film makes sense but it does work – it takes a couple of leaps that I felt were too far yet I followed them anyway.

Watch This: A noir thriller unafraid to tackle sex, violence, taboo or drift a little into unreality
Don’t Watch This: The sex and violence are too much and that’s before we hit the taboo

9. The Adventurer: Curse Of The Midas Box

The Mundi family are in the museum, in the Victorian period, the father (Ioan Gruffudd) lecturing, when Captain Will Charity (Michael Sheen) interrupts, injured. Later the family are all kidnapped, the only one remaining at large being the elder son Mariah Mundi (Aneurin Barnard). Will Charity lays out the slightly complex backstory; his parents are part of a secret organisation that keeps weird knowledge and dangerous artefacts out of the hands of bad people. Mariah wants his family back; Charity convinces him to go undercover at the Prince Regent hotel on a remote island in the North Sea.

Children on the island have been going missing at night. It’s a spa with healing powers in the baths, though this seems to have only recently been revived under new management. The new management are the sinister Monica (Lena Headey) and even more sinister Otto Luger (Sam Neill). The hotel is a big steam-powered maze with secret rooms and tunnels underneath. Mariah recruits a local girl Sacha to help and they spend their time searching the hotel and having various small adventures.

It's a little bit period but doesn’t dwell on it, and similarly a bit steampunk. The reveal of the Midas Box (extremely powerful and the source of the healing in the waters) feels underpowered. The combination of clues and items even more contrived than normal for these kinds of treasure hunts. The bad guys are always getting one more hostage and there’s always a reason why Mariah can’t just take one more step and stop them. Will Charity’s relentless good humour and outrageous disguises are pretty good.

It's based on a trilogy of books, but they only made the one. An amusing adventure for teenagers I guess.

Watch This: Fun, pacy adventure for kids
Don’t Watch This: It can’t quite commit to its tone, the Steampunk and ancient science don’t seem to work in the way that a posh kid going undercover as a bellhop does

10. The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai In The Eighth Dimension

Buckaroo Banzai is doing neurosurgery when he gets the call from Dr Hikata that the Oscillation Overthruster is ready and uses it to drive his jet car through a mountain. This proves that the eighth dimension is real. Dr Lizardo, Hikata’s former partner, learns this from the mental institution he was committed to after being attacked by aliens from the eighth dimension. He escapes to steal the overthruster.

Later Buckaroo and his band, The Hong Kong Cavaliers, are playing a gig; it looks there’s an assassination attempt. In fact it’s a suicide attempt by Penny, the long lost identical twin of Buckaroo’s deceased wife. He bails her out. Later still he’s electrocuted and Hikata is kidnapped; because of the electric shock he sees through their disguise and learns they are aliens from the eighth dimension.

The whole film is like this, occasionally bringing things together – the aliens arrived in 1938, and are all called John. But more often being one thing after another. Buckaroo has lots of fans/associates/band members who he calls up or volunteer, and they all have their own thing going on. Perfect Tommy is perfect. New Jersey is a cowboy. Rawhide is Buckaroo’s lieutenant. It’s all fun, the pace and entertainment covering for the incoherence and a lot of time spent in cramped hallways and rooms.

Watch This: Eighties weird action science fiction adventure unafraid to be funny or ridiculous
Don’t Watch This: A lot of things happen